GIMP's 10th Anniversary Splash Contest

Lalakis writes "Barely in time for GIMP's tenth birthday is the 10th Anniversary GIMP Splash Contest. This new contest requires a tutorial with the submissions, so get out your favorite text editor and show us all of the beautiful things you can make your GIMP do. Submit those entries and wait to see if there is a gimp-2.2.10 with your entry as the very special release splash. Here are all the current submissions. The contest will be open until Sunday the 27th of November, at which point the winner will be announced and committed to CVS. Happy Birthday GIMP!"

Comments

Needed features

[Orrin Bloquy]

1. CMYK support. RGB is for screen, CMYK is for print, and Aldus/Adobe never had trouble with this concept.
2. Contiguous fill. When pestered about this the answer from GIMP developers was that the paintbucket code was "too optimized" (i.e. obfuscated, undocumented) to modify. If I select a region and pour paint inside it, the paint shouldn't leave the margins of the selection.
3. Less crappy documentation on creating plugins.
4. For shits&giggles, an LSS import/export filter for those of us who like to make our own ISOLINUX splash screens (the converter's in Perl, how tough could it be)?

I know webcomic artists whose refusal to use the GIMP is completely based on #2. In Photoshop, it's a checkable option. In Fireworks, it isn't.

5. At least one major feature that is missing from Photoshop (like, say, selective region compression in JPEG, which has been part of the spec from the beginning and would allow you to set a different lossy for a region containing text).

Re:Needed features

[BigSven]

Actually, it wasn't quite like you put it. The FilmGimp developers told the GIMP developers that they don't think their code should be merged into the main trunk. It wasn't ready for it and would have broken things all over the place. FilmGimp was after all a very reduced version of GIMP. Noone has ever been locked out of GIMP development. I wonder where you picked that up.

And no, neither FilmGimp nor CinePaint have CMYK support. That has never been the intention behind this project. Instead it was about adding support for 16bit color depth. That is of course an important feature and at some point it is going to be added to GIMP as well. I can't tell you when because it simply depends on when someone will finish the remaining bits that are needed to bring GEGL into shape so that GIMP can start to use it.

If you think that GIMP is looking old, perhaps you should really consider to replace that old copy of GIMP 1.2 you are using.

Re:Needed features

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a GIMP fork called CinePaint (formerly known as Film Gimp, as it focused on features needed by the movie/special effects industry) that has CMYK support, IIRC. The features it adds were originally supposed to get merged into GIMP 2.0, but the GIMP developers later told the Film Gimp guys that they didn't want these things in the main branch after all.

That's a rather biased view of how things happened. I suppose that some CinePaint developers would like to describe the history like that. But looking at the archives of the GIMP mailing lists reveals a different story: Film Gimp started from a fork of an old version of the GIMP 1.x (based on GTK1), while the main development was taking place on what would eventually become GIMP 2.x (based on GTK2). Film Gimp development stagnated for a couple of years, until a new guy (Robin Rowe) appeared and decided to revive it.

When he brought this up on the developer's list, the consensus was that it would be much better to take the best bits of the old Film Gimp codebase and merge them into the new architecture that was developed for GIMP 2.x instead of continuing to work on the old Film Gimp and making the fork diverge even further from the GIMP. There were also some arguments why the design of the old Film Gimp and the way it was storing image data was not appropriate for the GIMP and would have to be adapted instead of being merged directly, but I'm not sure that I understand the details of that. Anyway, it looks like he decided to go ahead and work on the old fork despite the suggestion from the GIMP developers. Later, that code was renamed CinePaint. Also, CinePaint distanced itself from the GIMP in very obvious ways (check some old versions of the CinePaint home pages in the web archive). So although the GIMP developers could have handled this in a better way, a lot of issues could have been solved if the features needed for the movie industry had been integrated in the then-current GIMP instead of reviving an old fork like Robin did.

Just check the archives of the GIMP mailing lists and you will see a different story than the simplistic view that you just described. Also, this statement on the CinePaint home page is just a (bad) joke: "Later the film industry was told no, that GIMP wasn't interested in meeting the film industry's requirements because it wasn't what existing GIMP users cared about." This is very different from what I understand after browsing the archives of the mailing lists (although I can never know if some other discussions took place behind the scenes). Anyway, if you are interested in checking this for yourself, the GIMP list archives are linked from http://www.gimp.org/mail_lists.html and you can just browse through the discussions around the times when Robin posted something on the developers lists (check mail-archive for search, or manual browse through the old XCF lists). There were a few personal attacks from both sides, though. So these guys should learn to get together in a better way. But still, it looks like Robin is as much (if not more) to blame as the GIMP developers.

Re:Needed features

[Raphael]

you can just browse through the discussions around the times when Robin posted something on the developers lists (check mail-archive for search, or manual browse through the old XCF lists).

Browsing through these archives is not so easy, given their limited search features. But anyway, as I was (unfortunately) involved in some of these discussions, I can confirm that the story is very different from what is presented on the CinePaint home page. My opinion may be biased in this case, but I think that it is unfair to blame the GIMP developers for the CinePaint fork (or more exactly, for the lack of a merge between Film Gimp and GIMP).