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Photoshop in Linux Thanks to Disney
miladus writes "eWeek
reports that Walt Disney's feature animation unit (along with 2 other
unnamed studios) are using Adobe's Photoshop in Linux. They use the Wine emulator
to run the software and the 3 studios 'not known as team players, all
three agreed that a project that would benefit the entire open-source
community while delivering a technology they needed--was worth their cooperation'."
I just remembered reading this article in Linux Journal about Dreamworks running Photoshop via VMWare.
Unique signatures are rare.
Haha, yes!
I can feel the slashdotters' brains explode with conflict.
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
Why does it takes an EVIL company to do the right thing????
....so how long before we start seeing Tux cameos in Disney toons?
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
It was really hard to do without crashing with all kinds of errors before, yes. I got Photoshop 5 to run for like 10 minutes once.....
What about speed issues? Isn't photoshop+wine a lot slower than running it in native win32? I can hardly run mirc with wine on a 1ghz computer (only a test, I don't really use mirc ;)
has anyone actually tried to run ps on linux? How does the performance measure up to say a mac or windose box? I would also like to see Adobe golive run nicely on linux too. Maybe adobe will notice the need for its apps on linux and start porting them.
_+_+__+_+_+_+_+_+_+++
when i moo u moo - just like that
Photoshop is probably one of the things that kept Apple going in the dark times. With Photoshop working on Linux there is little reason for a lot of people to stay with windows. This won't make anyone suddenly aware of Linux, but that's because most graphic designers are smart enough to be able to weigh their options. This is why Apple has such a large market share in the design world compared to the consumer world. This probably won't be the killer app for Linux, but it's a VERY big step in the right direction.
Help I'm a rock.
But we still hate 'em right?
Everybody has a purpose in life, maybe mine is to lurk in slashdot.
See Crossover Office, which is based on Wine, to run Photoshop, Internet Explorer, MS Office and a number of other big-name Windows applications in Linux.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Why do people keep assuming that running Wine will cause a lot of overhead? And why don't people READ the article, including the part about performance? And what does clustering technologies like OpenMosix have to do with running an application that is intended for usage on workstations, not render farms? And why, oh, why don't people read the article, especially the part of how the real benefit for Disney was that they a) saved money and b) could standarize on Linux instead of having part of their team stuck with Windows?
I find that wine helps me use a lot of Linux applications too. In fact, I have to be flat out drunk before I'll even start Emacs.
[Yikes - who threw that?!]
On a related note, I'm still kind of surprised that Adobe wouldn't port Photoshop over to Linux even for a company with as much clout as Disney. Seriously, I realize it's a LOT of work to port an app that massive, but if basically every animator who runs linux wants it, why not? Catering to your customers is definitely part of a good business model. Since Adobe's management switched over not too far back though, I think some of the crazy innovations might be slower-coming these days. Guess that's what happens when you replace someone with vision (Adobe founder) with a Marketing drone (current CEO, IIRC).
"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned for SEGA. ..."
Disney Is Not an Open Source Advocate Unless Required.
I'm sorry, but Linux needs photoshop. That is one of those programs that some people actually earn their living using. The GIMP is nothing compared to photoshop. It may work for amateurs, but even people who use it as a major hobby could not get the same results with GIMP.
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
I have Photoshop 7 running with CrossOver office on a AthonXP 2800+ and Gentoo, runs like a dream. Its actually never crashed and even the auto online update thingy works. Speed wise, the app feels like your running Redhat. Sometimes things take a second to draw and mouse events are slower than normal. You also cannot resize the toolbar thing, thats ok though.
I'm confused... I thought I was supposed to hate Disney. Have the slashgods turned they back on me, again!?
SCO is still bad right?
Can anyone whose done real work with Photoshop-on-WINE comment on how they deal with display calibration and colorspace issues? How do you make sure what you see on your linux box is what you get from your film printer?
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Are you kidding? I'd pay for Photoshop in Linux. It's a quality tool regardless of how we feel towards Adobe. I'm sure many graphics professionals would pay for it too (Disney is proof). Adobe should really consider porting Photoshop to Linux (no need for it to be open source, closed source works fine).
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
Getting popular applications like this running on Linux is the single most important thing to get Linux on the desktop.
Note that Adobe could probably release a native version of Photoshop to run on Linux fairly easily. They had a Unix version, and also of course it will run on OSX, so going native to Linux can't be that big an issue.
Everyone who wants to see Linux on the desktop should be pestering the companies of the software they use to release a Linux version. For me, the important one is Macromedia Flash, so I've been emailing Macromedia asking when they are going to port it. If you want to see Linux on the desktop, start pestering!
What would be really great news is that there was a native *nix version again. ( there was one for SGI long ago.. so they cant claim it cant be done ).
While using it in wine may be nice, and shows wine is improving, ( hats off to their team ) it really doesn't mean THAT much in the grand scheme of things.... we don't want to be relegated to just be an 'emulator' ( yes i know its not 100% accurate to say emulation, but you get the point so its close enough )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
For one, there's no Windows license cost involved. For two, the animators may already have Linux desktops. It makes a lot of sense to be able to run Photoshop directly rather than having a separate PC, dual booting, or using something like VMWare.
I've been using Photoshop since the 2.5 days (pre layers -- when real men [and women] used alpha channels) on Macs. I then switched over to using pshop on the PC because, well, I couldn't afford a mac!
But then, something strange happened. I had been using Linux (Redhat) as my OS-of-choice at home and would switch to my laptop (running 2k) to do Photoshop work. Out of the desire to use my mouse, I went and sunk a few bucks and bought the crossover application (commercial version of wine) and whalla! Photoshop 6 runs on my linux box, and faster!
So, now I can use Photoshop with my mouse (instead of that annoying touch-pad). The only thing that is a little annoying is that the focus of the tool bar and the other pallets take away from the canvas, so if you click on the marquee tool, you have to "double click" on the canvas to get the focus where you need it. Not a big deal, just a "thing."
sad robot making broken music
I got Photoshop 5 to run for like 10 minutes once.....
What about when you tried it on Linux though?
Give him a fresh juicy apple, and he complains that you should have instead figured out how to make the worm in the last apple tastier.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Also remember that disney is editing 35MM film, 24 frames per second, at ungodly resolution. They probably have this stuff running on a 4 way or 8 way workstations. Multi-head licenses for windows are STEEP. Microsoft also takes you out the ass for large-scale file storage. The cost per workstation probably includes the cost of the server divided over the number of users.
With Linux you are paying for the hardware and the photoshop license.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Added naive RGB CMYK conversion routines [Sven]
This will go nicely with their naive user interface.
CMYK is important yes, but photoshop has numerous features that the gimp doesn't have yet. Image Variations, pantone colors, vectors (yes adobe photoshop has limited vector support) a MUCH better way of handling type (the gimp is truly moronic at handling text) better painting tools (have you seen the entire revamped brush system in photoshop 7, amazing) along with better graphics tablet support. And I have not even come close to covering it all. And even after spending 2 hours trying to get used to gimps interface, it was very counterintuitive. Whoever made all the dialogs is a moron, unless you memorize every keystroke, all actions take 2 to 3 more clicks on average.
Oh yeah, my biggest pet peeve, when you dynamically transform a selected area that stupid grid pops up instead of a more interactive live preview transform. I wish the gimp developers the best, but the gimp is years behind photoshop.
Photos.
An application doesn't bestow one with talent no matter how well it's written.
But it can be a tool that makes a talented person's life a hell of a lot easier.
A talented carpernter may be able to build a house with a Bowie knife and 20 acres of forest, but its not exactly the quickest and easiest way of doing it, especially if there are commercial demands and deadlines to meet. Sure, you're pure "artist" could render Finding Nemo with a #2 pencil, but how long would it take him.
Personally, for the amount of PSing I do (bad Fark contests) the gimp and PS (or PS Elements) is a wash (mainly because I suck eggs). BUT... from the folks who do some sort of graphic design for a living almost all of them swear by PS, and quite a few of them have dicked around with the GIMP as well. To a (wo)man they all say it just isn't as good of a tool to get the type of work done in a timely manner.
Does Gimp support CMYK, like Photoshop? Do you know it is REALLY important if you are doing graphics for a living?
If you're interested in contacting Adobe, here's a direct link to their Feature Request form. I suggest as many of us as possible to visit this page and let Adobe know there certainly is a demand for their product. We're talking 3 studios here, including Disney. Lets make some (positive) noise!
http://www.adobe.com/support/feature.html
To make a pun demonstrates the highest understanding of a language
No, Wine is a Win32 subsystem re-implementation. There is a very important difference. In fact, it was so important to the authors that they put it in the name!
Again, these folks do this for a *living*, have deadlines to meet, etc. Why force them to eat into productive time to learn a new program just to meet someone else's political view of "what's right"?
This is the thrust of the entire article. Disney's (and the two other, unnamed companies') workers use Photoshop. Moving PS from windows to linux obviously saved more money from ditching Windows licenses over time than the investment they put into tweaking WINE. Save $$$ = good. But, as the article stated, GIMP and CinePaint didn't meet their requirements. Thus, there was no saving of $$$ since the time and effort needed to bring GIMP and CinePaint up to the level of PS (not to mention training) would cost more than the savings they would have gotten from tossing the Adobe licenses. One day this *may* happen in the future, but obviously it wasn't a good business decision now.
Just because it doesn't meet some zealot's political muster doesn't mean it was a bad idea.
No, you can write your own CMYK to RGB routines all you want, the problem is that you don't want to. It's a whole lot of really, really messy 3D and 4D vector math that was only figured out through a LOT of research into color perception and reproduction. To rip off the algorithms that these companies came up with is not OK.
This is not the one-click patent. This is a lot of of very smart people spending a lot of time working with spectrophotometers and linear algebra text books.