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

Birthday Song!

[AntiDragon]

Happy Birthday to you,
Happy Birthday to you!
You like tight black leathers...
And belong in a zoo! .... ... ...OK..I'm really sorry..don't know what came over me..I'll climb back in my box now...

Is it ok

[commodoresloat]

to submit an entry I created with Photoshop?

Thank you for windows port

[CrazyJim1]

The free Gimp port to windows saved me money I would have had to use on a commercial Photoshop. Its nice to have another piece of free software that belongs on every person's computer.

Tigert + Gimp == awesome

[Gopal.V]

tigert.gimp.org was the place to look for the coolest tricks with gimp. I used to just love the splash screen history there. And the Bugs Must Die was my bugzilla image replacing the traditional Ant for a long time.

All in all, without tigert's demos - I'd have relegated gimp to being a glorified paint application instead of the cool tool for web-desginer it has recently become (and I'm not a professional web-dev, but I still like to muck around with gimp). Jimmac is good, but Tigert was and is the gimp wizard I shall worship for ever.

Time flies

[gnarlin]

10 years and still no CMYK support, which incidentally is the key feature which is holding the GIMP back from becoming a serious contender with photoshop. One would think that someone or some group would see the value of such a feature in a free software graphics program and have it implemented. If for nothing else then to save money and have a better bargaining position when dealing with vendors of propriatery notoriety.

Re:Time flies

[FooBarWidget]

Why are everybody so obsessed with CMYK? Face it: most people are not professional graphics designers and don't need CMYK. If I want to touch up some photos for my homepage, I couldn't care less what CMYK is. If Joe Average wants to create a few drop shadows for his photo gallery, he doesn't need CMYK.

Besides, professionals wouldn't use Gimp even if it supports CMYK. They'd still use Photoshop because that's what they were thaught at school. Implementing CMYK wouldn't solve anything at all - the peopel who complain would just move on to new things to complain about.

I would submit for the contest...

[Apostata]

...but the number of steps involved to create a simple drop-shadow would depress anyone who read the tutorial.

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

[slavemowgli]

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.

For me, this is one of the biggest mistakes the GIMP developers ever made, but it also shows a fundamental problem in their attitude: instead of welcoming additions and new users scratching their own itches, they locked them out and told them they weren't welcome. Of course, you do have to focus on what you want to accomplish in a project and avoid feeping creaturism, but rejecting features that are clearly useful and within the scope of a project... that's arrogance.

As someone else said, it actually shows that GIMP is 10 years old by now. It's still a useful tool, and I actually use GIMP 1.2 almost daily (I also have GIMP 2.2 installed, but I always found it slower and more clumsy than the earlier versions), but the idea to produce a free Photoshop replacement... that was missed long ago, and without some radical changes on both the code and the project management level, I doubt it's ever going to happen.

I hate to say it, but GIMP is looking old, and considering that it's still considering a kind of flagship among open source application, it's making us all look bad. Is this really the best we can come up with?

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.