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GIMP Not Enough for Linux Users?
nursegirl writes "Novell has been running a survey about apps that people need in order to convert their data centers or desktops to Linux. The online survey has been running since Jan 13, and Adobe Photoshop was at the top of the list as of February 1. Desktoplinux.com has an interesting article about why the existence of the GIMP isn't enough for many professionals."
...when the author suggests that Linux using webdevelopers need Dreamweaver to create sites?
As powerful as GIMP is, I find myself struggling to complete tasks that would be easier in Photoshop. More frustrating, however, is having to compile my own plugins. I still have not managed to compile one successfully (and I've been working with Linux since Red Hat 7.3).
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
(dons flame resistant suit of anonymity)
Maybe this is because GIMP has one of the most god-awful GUIs known to man. I mean seriously, it seems to be designed to hide functions and impede work, not t'other way round.
Gimp isnt enough. PERIOD. No matter how much people want to think it is, it's no where near Photoshop. Just because you can reorganize its menu options to look like photoshop its not photoshop!
Gimp is NOT for professionals.
I think there is demand for many other programs for linux that have no real FOSS alternative....
Autocad, Exchange, etc... the difference here is that the people who need it don't generally go whining and losing their time on surveys... they are serious workers who have a tool that has no subtitute and get on with the work and off with the whining.
Then...Photoshop is a SDI application on the Mac. SDI vs MDI is hardly the reason professionals will not switch to The GIMP.
Like the article mentions, it's all about colour management and plugins. The former could be solved with code, but the latter is very much chicken/egg; third-parties won't write GIMP plugins until companies start using it, and companies won't start using it until their plugins are available.
Not to mention all the licensing fun of releasing closed plugins for a GPL application. That'd be fun...
That's the biggest one for me. Though I'm consistently learning new things about Photoshop despite learning quite a bit about it, and am consistently running into roadblocks with GIMP. As far as I can tell , GIMP isn't actively catching up, it's still got a long ways to go.
I work for a photography studio and considered switching to Linux and GIMP to save some $6,000 /year on software bills, but it is definately lacking essencials,
I want to work in my RAW photos in 16-bit as much as possible before converting to 8bpp at the final step. GIMP doesn't do that, so I am forced to use photoshop.
The one thing that stopped me from even considering GIMP was the UI. I shouldn't have to spend more than 20 minutes learning a new interface. To those die-hard Linux fans out there - I know gimp doesn't claim to be a photoshop replacement, but sometimes I think that is just an excuse for its various shortcomings.
People want real AAA products instead of crappy knock offs? Amazing!
Adobe photoshop is the standard. Every graphic artist learns on photoshop. Every little quirk or oddity of gimp makes life that much harder. No matter how great the image manipulation code is. The gimp interface is just not the standard and that loss of productivity means gimp is at a serious disatvantage.
It's not there yet, but look out for Krita. It has great ICCM colour support, but it's kind of slow.
GIMP is cool, a bit unixy but for a novice it accomplishes much the same as more expensive programs. The thing I'm most missing on my desktop is Irfanview. How to move hundreds of pics from digicam to the computer, crop and rename? GIMP is very unsuitable for this task. Heard it's possible to get Irfanview to run on WINE, though, but a native solution would always be nicer.
Is that it's easy to use. PERIOD.
GIMP might come close to the level of features of Photoshop (note: close), but nowhere near the usability & speed of production.
If you want PROs to use your software it needs to be FAST, EASY & POWERFULL.
As it currently is, Photoshop is faster, easier & more powerfull. So what's there to wonder?
It's not like news that Photoshop is more wanted than GIMP, duh..
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
One Word GimpShop
http://plasticbugs.com/index.php?p=241
I can easily say that the newer versions of Photoshop dwarf the competition. I specifically focus on restoration and cleanup of old photographs, and this is where Photoshop excels. Photoshop's layout seems much more straightforward, and its utilities more accessible and versatile than those in GIMP.
After version 4.0, Photoshop became way too much for non-professional users, prompting for additional "scratch disks" during the install and requiring gig after gig of memory to run (even then) slow as molasses. Gimp is a welcome relief to both casual and advanced graphic designers, with just the right amount of power to keep us happy. Gimp's feature set shouldn't be driven by psycho "power users" anyway. It's fine the way it is.
The Death Penalty: Killing people to show others that killing people is wrong.
The Gimp doesn't support 16bpp (and CinePaint has a different focus now) and also it doesn't have cool features like the shortcut for the crop-and-resize feature (in one press of a button) that Photoshop has.
Additionally, Gimp is extremely slow (try to read a 100 MB TIFF file and then do the same on Photoshop to see what I am talking about) and its UI is just pretty bad.
Sure, non-professionals will be right at home with Gimp, but real PRO DSLR photographers need the above features, and much more.
>99% of business desktops don't have Photoshop, let alone whatever a "datacenter" involves. If Photoshop is at the top of Novell's list, all it shows is that if you have an open web survey and ask Teh Community for responses, you get replies from 15-year-olds.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I've been using Photoshop for editing my photos (shot in RAW) for a few years now, and the greatest obstacle the prevents conversion to Gimp is lack of 16bit support. While 8bit certainly has enough depth for the final output, either for printing or the web, it is woefully insufficient for anything other than the slightest color or contrast manipulations; do a little levels or curves and the shadows get posterized.
Besides that, advanced noise reduction (comparable to Noise Ninja or NeatImage), and sharpening (I currently use PhotoKit Sharpener) would be nice. However, I can live without these, so the deal breaker is 16bit support.
lhk
It's not Linux users that want Photoshop for the most part. It's some Windows users who want it to ever even consider Linux, mainly because they don't know any better.
I'll offer a different reason that the GIMP sucking for real art tasks (It does.)
Many college-degree artists can barely install Photoshop for themselves under OSX or WinXP. Installing any given Linux distro and then Installing the GIMP may be beyond them in the MAJORITY of cases.
Without belittling anyone, their field of expertise is in Art and the creative process, not computer administration. They're *not* going to install GIMP on their home PCs and figure it out they way they may have been able to do with Photoshop or even Corel Paint.
Usability issues aside, until a Linux/GIMP install is easy enough for the average artist to complete in about the same time they'd do a OSX/Photoshop install, GIMP isn't going to gain any real acceptance or artist input.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
From TFA: "After all, Adobe didn't even release Version 6 (acrobat) for Linux."
That's about as dissapointing as M$ not porting BOB to Linux.
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People (like me!) complained for years that Photoshop only existed on the Mac and PC, and so, finally, Adobe ported version 3.0 (at apparently great expense) to the SGI. Unfortunately, it was a monumental failure -- Adobe sold perhaps hundreds of copies.
The sad thing about this is that now there is almost no way that Adobe would consider doing anything like that again, with Linux. They've been burned before.
It's a shame. I'm sure that they'd sell many more than a few hundred copies to the Linux market. Maybe even a thousand.
Hardware is so cheap these days, though, that you might as well have a Mac or Windows PC around to run Photoshop when you need it. After all, the software is going to cost you $1,000 or so, you can spring for another kilobuck on some hardware -- or you can dual-boot your Linux box under Windows.
As much as I'd like Photoshop to run under Linux for my visual effects company, in the end I would prefer that Adobe just make better versions that run under the toy operating systems. My painters will be happier that way, anyway.
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
So graphics professionals still aren't using GIMP because the interface blows and it doesn't support formats that have long been important in the professional world? Wow, I've never heard that before! Gee, next you'll be telling me that people don't use Blender because the UI is deplorably bad! Oh wait, I just realized that these topics have been getting regular coverage in the OSS communinity for years and it's not getting any better!
People not using OSS because the UI sucks or because it's crammed full of useless widgets and oddball features nobody but the original programmers needed isn't a new phenomenon. It certainly isn't one that deserves continued discussion. We all know that the GIMP isn't really useful for anything other than simple image manipulation for the web (or creating tacky web graphics circa 1999.), we all know that Blender is only good for crazy people with limitless free time to spend trying to make the interface not suck, and that OpenOffice is more bloated than Oprah Winfrey. Why not just stop covering these crappy old products and start giving some attention to newer, better alternatives?
Cinepaint?
Who gives a shit about the interface? You can always change it, or find someone who already did.
Silence is golden... and duct tape is silver.
Yes, there are some missing dead-tree output features. But honestly, you know why Photoshop gurus don't like the GIMP?
It's the same reason I'd be pissed if you took all my POSIX utilities away. Or replaced emacs with Visual Slickedit.
The user has spent a very large amount of time learning to use the incumbent software package very, very well. *Any* deviation in UI or featureset means that (a) he has to blow a lot of time relearning a tool and (b) he immediately notices missing features that he depends on, but it takes him a while to discover the things that the challenger can do, but the incumbent can't.
The article mentions the relearning time, but I'd say that 90% of the problem has to be right there.
User knowledge is the nicest of the forms of lock-in that I can think of (from a user standpoint). It's straightforward, it's comparatively easy to assess (the user knows how long it took him to learn a tool), you can't really hide it from a customer, and it never *can't* be overcome if absolutely necessary.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Right. Cause industrial-strength photo manipulation is at the core of every job, and we should all blow $1600 on Photoshop. While we're at it, everyone needs the full Adobe (and former Macromedia) suites too.
The only thing this sort of survey shows is how much piracy goes on. There's no way in hell every kid under 20 has paid for PhotoShop, or Dreamweaver, or Flash, or all the other "must have" crap.
Excuse me, but I nowhere read that. Just because dreamweaver was included in the list of possible ports, it doesn't mean that Linux users need it.
Also, you took the tangent, instead of reviewing his points, you simply dismiss the whole argument because of something else he said.
Let's analyse his points, ok?
a) The menus - this may be fixed in 2.4, but it took a long time.
b) The color space (CMYK) and depth (16-bit)
c) The plugins
To make GIMP plugins, you need to compile them. He says Photoshop isn't an application, but a platform. And I think he's right. The GIMP, as good as it is^H^Hwas, has stalled in the stoneage, while Photoshop has evolved.
In my opinion, rewriting GIMP from scratch and making it extensible would be the best choice.
I make magazines for a living and I find that Gimp is fine for your average web graphics but lack of CYMK support and an inability to manage and convert color profiles for print makes it pointless to use in my line of work. Also, PS has a much more powerful set of tools for image retouching. Honestly though... it's free. For what it is, the guys who made did a great job. I use it at home and would love to bring my office over to it, but since I don't pay for PS personally, I'm not too upset when the bill for 30+ licenses comes in.
Gimp is only a semi-decent replacement for the home consumer Photoshop CS series.
You also have to admit that the name "The Gimp" is somewhat risque as well, considering most people know what a gimp actually is.
To a novice, Photoshop obviously must be a photo application. An application called "The gimp" does what exactly?
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
There are people who call themselves professionals. And there are real professionals. Like all generalities, the following truism should be taken with a grain of salt; but one good way to separate the wheat from the chaff is automatically disregard anyone who constantly whines about the fidelity of their tools. Real artists aren't constantly looking for scapegoats.
How long before we see a photoshop killer?
Personally, I think that PS is beginning to show its age, and that something with a more elegant UI and a lightweight codebase will take off and surpass photoshop in the next few years. For a start, Adobe could start using newer versions of the OS toolkits on Windows and Mac. Photoshop is one of the only remaining Carbon applications out there.
After 10-15 years of existance, most programs begin to show their age. Although Photoshop has come a long way, I still feel like I'm using the same program that was out there 10 years ago with a few (okay, a lot) extras tacked on to it. It's a very bittersweet feeling that "This is great, but it could also be a lot better"
Apple's aperture is a step in the right direction except for the fact that it's slow as hell and not cross-platform.
The Gimp isn't great. A lot of it's held back by GTK which doesn't really seem well-supported on any platform (partly because it was written for X windows. eck.) I say that the developers cut their losses, and start over rewriting it with using the lessons learned while writing the old codebase. They can crossport the tricky image processing stuff, but everything else needs to go. If it hasn't gained acceptance by now, I think the problems are a lot deeper than surface-level.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
"GIMP should be enough for anybody."
::ducks::
You know any idiot can get GIMP on Windows by running two .exe's...
He was suggesting that we use OpenOffice instead of MS-Office, but one of the biggest problems is that OOo-Writer simply isn't MS-Word, and OOo-Impress isn't PowerPoint. Even if they were feature-compatible (which they're not quite), they still wouldn't be identical, and a substantial percentage of users (faculty and students) can't deal with having Feature X on a different menu than it is in Word. Me... I can deal with WordPerfect and MS-Word and OOo-Writer each doing things differently from the others. And I can manage moving from the GIMP to Photoshop to Fireworks, much like I can move from OS X to Windows to Linux. But I gain that flexibility at the expense of efficiency and proficiency. For a professional for whom the latter two factors are of greater importance, the "just as good as" argument isn't going to be very persuasive.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I get people asking me how I do a certain effect or edit all the time, and I love to watch their face when I start telling them about Linux and the software I use. These are professionals who spend 5000+ on their kit and I do much MUCH better
using free software tools. The reason (without wanting to sound arrogant) is simply that I know what I am doing. All the money these guys spend on expensive windows and mac software is fine, but the tools don't make the artist. Things like
photoshop get labled as 'professional' tools because they make difficult things easy to do, too easy maybe. I have to sit down and work out what I am going to do with more care, but then I seem to get a vastly superior product at the end of the day, maybe because I am not relying on fancy software to do things for me but actually understanding what I am doing and why. Free software still requires that you think, it gives you access to unimaginable power if you understand the problem domain and the interface, but it's not for lazy 'professionals' who just want quick impressive results with lots of 'wow factor'. A real artist needs serious tools.
Would I be happy to see Adobe bring all their toys to the GNU/Linux party? Sure. Does more than 1% of the population need it? No.
GNU/Linux desktops have what users want and more. People who don't think so have not tried to use it in the last six years.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
.. is the stupid name and godawful logo.
Lets face it. Graphics is about art, not software. Artists use the techniques and software that they have been taught to use. I use Gimp because the artist part of my software experience came after my debut in linux. Had I gone through any graphics program, I would undoubtedly be using Photoshop. Why?
Because that's what they teach. Why would I want to relearn another peice of software??
If you want people to use your software, you have got to get it used in schools. Just my two cents.
once more into the breach
The Gimp is good enough for most of us. It is different than Photoshop so people need to relearn how to do some basic things which can painful for the easily frustrated. A better GUI for Gimp wouldn't hurt and I think they addressing some of the issues in 2.4. Also others have mentioned GimpShop, I'm not sure how mature that is though. But yes Gimp as it stands is not good enough for photo professionals because it lacks color management and built in CMYK support, even though a plugin exists. But then again how many photo professionals use Linux in the first place?
On a side note I'm really impressed with how much work/research Novell is putting into the Linux desktop. Instead the gradual long-term effort Red Hat has invested, Novell seems to be thinking short-term. Novell desktop 10 looks really interesting and their sponsorship of XGL is also really great. I'm glad someone is stepping it up.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
If Adobe figured out some way to lock down Photoshop so that it couldn't be pirated as commonly as it is currently. I know tons of people who use Photoshop and praise it to the heavens, but not a single one of them actually put the money down on it. I work in a university environment, so there're lots of legal copies of Photoshop around, but a lot of people work with their own hardware, so many copies that get used for preparing images for publication aren't legitimate.
I use the GIMP for the same tasks, and get results that are just as good, though. I think that for most image processing, the GIMP does everything the average user needs it to do, and more. I'm not denying that it doesn't meet the needs of certain professionals. However, if people weren't able to get pirated copies of Photoshop readily, they'd find that the GIMP does the job they need it to do.
Today our lesson will be Chapter 1 of Elementary Necromancy: Proper Use of a Shovel.
The bottom line is that GIMP is different; it's not comfortable. YES, you can do almost everything in GIMP that you could do in Photoshop. YES, you can make it look like Photoshop. The largest problem with all of this is that you must WORK and you must CHANGE to do these things.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't comfort "comfortable" for a reason? People don't WANT to work. People don't WANT to change. It's not comfortable to do so.
The very fact that this question has to be asked says a lot about why Linux (and other OSS) has trouble making it in fields with established software. I presume that the people who wrote GIMP wrote it to meet their own needs, because they certainly haven't taken the time and effort to meet the needs of print graphics professionals. Even if you ignore the interface and a number of other shortcomings, the lack of CMYK support makes it IMPOSSIBLE for it to be used in a graphic arts environment for printed products.
The primary colors of light (and therefore monitors) are red, green and blue (RGB). The primary colors of printing are cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK). A digital image starts out as an RGB and is edited that way, but it must be converted to CMYK before it can be sent to an imagesetter for four-color printing. This isn't a "good thing to have." This is a showstopper not to have. It's like having a car without wheels.
I keep hearing OSS people breezily dismiss criticisms of software such as GIMP or just insist that it IS good enough for professionals. The very fact that some people are arogant enough to try to shove tools onto people that WILL NOT DO THE JOB shows why it's hard to adopt Linux on the desktop. Linux has done well in areas where geeks have written software for other people like themselves. It has not done well in areas where the geeks don't "get" what professionals in other areas must have. A commercial company has a serious incentive to make software that fits the needs of those other people. The people who write OSS tend to just want to write things that are fun and useful to them -- and that severly limits adoption of Linux in non-technical areas. Of course, it also doesn't help that so many Linux people seem to take the attitude that the Linux desktop is fine, but artists and other non-technical types are just too stupid to use it.
David
This really is the key. GIMP will never have more than a marginal user base because they don't understand their users. Their users--nearly all of them--are Photoshop users (or potentially ex-Photoshop users).
Good user interface design means not just creating an inteface that "makes sense," it's also creating an interface that works the way the user expects it to work. If over 90% of your users are used to the way Photoshop does function X, then you sure as hell better implement function X the way Photoshop does. Not because that way is better or makes more sense, but because that's what the user expects you to do, and any deviation from those expections means your app is "broken" in their eyes.
Competing on features in this sort of market is futile. Your program may be able to give me the moon on a stick; but if I can't easily make it work, it might as well do nothing at all. The success stories--those projects that have managed to supplant a deeply-entrenched competitive offering--have always acknowledged this fact and have modified the behavior of their own product to compensate. The failures in this arena (GIMP being the most famous) always refuse to acknowledge the effect on their users' expectations caused by their competitor's dominance. For projects like the GIMP, it seems a matter of pride to not be influenced by such an unworthy competitor.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925
Does gimp have any major corporate backers? I think part of the problem is that open source developers tend to scratch an itch, i.e. solve a problem that they want to solve, not write code for a feature that they have no intention of using. The interface could also use a major reworking. It should really be written with photoshop users in mind.
I know people like to do their own thing, and oh how much did the earily open source desktop enviroments get blasted for looking like windows, but Photoshop has over a 90% market share. If gimp is to become a serious photoshop alternative, it would need usable by photoshop users right off the bat, without retraining or documentation.
Adobe offers these kits called Classroom in a Book and they are wonderful. Geeks might actually not like them, but they speak the language that artsy types understand. My mom had great success with a Photoshop class, and she says that is one of the biggest reasons. She's not a computer person, she finds them difficult to learn and needs precise instructions, with visuals preferably. These books provide that and using them, she's now gotten far better at Photoshop than I am.
This is extremely important, given that non-computer people are a major market for Photoshop and such. Sure geeks need to use photo editors, but let's be real here, we aren't the core market. The art people, be they prepress, photographers, designers, whatever, they are the ones that really make use of these products. However their computer skills are generally minimal, limited only to knowing what they need to work their tools. Thus having good training material is essential.
The Gimpshop page clearly shows that most people seem to want a familiar interface when having used photoshop earlier. The other reason maybe the host of available plugins to photoshop (Kai's powertools and a few others that they already own) for the digital image manipulation business. But as Gimpshop clearly shows, Gimp can be hacked and made to look like photoshop for the average photoshop user. I am not sure this is possible with Adobe's photoshop itself. So Opensource and its flexibility from which GIMP is born far outweighs photoshop. IMO, GIMP is already better than photoshop thanks to flexibility. For those who haven't been able to hack it themselves, they just need to ask a group of hackers to help them with a Photoshop look and feel, compatibility with photoshop plugins if they are already used to the other application. No need to look for Photoshop killers here, Photoshop has been in use (like MS Windows) and has been quite a well written product. The GIMP has reached a far more flexible state matching features in a shorter period of time due to a large user base. With a few more hacks, usability, look and feel options and plugin support for third party plugins, for the GIMP it is only a matter of time before Adobe will need to rethink their Photoshop strategy.
No Greater Friend, No Greater Enemy! (Lucius Cornelius Sulla)
I am a normal user and not a graphic designer. Thus, I do not use complicated features in Photoshop or GIMP, just the low level features. One of these, however, is crop. And crop sucks on GIMP. With Photoshop it is simple, I put a box around what I want to crop to and I crop. With GIMP there are three crops, none of which are very good. The only one that I can use is "guillotine", which one uses by going to the ruler, dragging a line out to the middle, going back to the ruler, dragging a line to the middle, going to the other ruler, dragging a line to the middle, going to the other ruler, and dragging a line to the middle again. Then I go through the menu to guillotine crop, and 9 images pop up. I close the eight I don't want, so that I now have the original big one, which I don't want any more, and the cropped version. I can just imagine what the more complex features are like. Or what people who aren't like me think, who don't use Debian as their desktop.
This was what Novell was doing in their survey:
Novell, through its CoolSolutions community-relations website, is conducting an online public survey to determine which Windows-only applications are most likely to keep Windows users from migrating to Linux. The company also wants to know which Windows-only apps would be most popular on Linux desktops if they were ported to Linux.
IOW, what keeps a Windows user from migrating, and what do they want to see ported the most? Irregardless of the Open Source versus Closed source battle, the fact is that most of these applications have been around longer than Linux, and have survived this long because they offer better features and ease of use. Right now, that isn't always the case for the Linux apps. It's getting a lot better, but it's uneven.
It's the same problem faced by many different groups. Yes, we'd like to switch, and yes, we can see the benefits. But, the applications we need are either not there, crude, or require programming skills to get them to work.
I'm currently working with a group that would love to start bringing Linux into their industry. Unfortunately, half the applications they need simply don't exist, and no one is even beginning to develop them. There are half-a-dozen or more different programs in Windows and Mac for each of the application functions they need, but not in Linux. Like it or not, and they don't, they're stuck.
Rather than getting defensive, and attacking the messenger, why don't we take it as a challenge? OK, they want this. Our current application sets for that purpose aren't up to their demands, so how do we get better and make it meet their demands? That's what will push Linux, not telling people they're stupid and ignorant for not rushing in!
IIRC, the GIMP is lacking a lot of things because of software patents.
http://outcampaign.org/
My issue with The GIMP is that anytime someone sends me a Photoshop file that uses a filter that was added to Photoshop after around version 6, GIMP ignores it. More often than not, that makes the image look like ass.
.Doc compatibility for OpenOffice, but GIMP's support is WAY behind. I simply can't work with, or create, a reasonably interesting (by even 2004 standards) composite graphic using The GIMP. I could if I had Photoshop, and everyone I work with that uses Photoshop does often. That's the biggest problem for me.
Photoshop is currently on version 9 or so.
It's the same issue as
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
I gotta say, I've used both Gimp and Photoshop, and I actually much prefer Gimp. It seems to me that, while Photoshop has a lot more options for enhanching photos, it doesn't come CLOSE to Gimp for making an image from scratch. Between the masses of Script-Fu and the large amounts of Filters, Gimp's got that covered. I was playing with Photoshop at school the other day, looking for a render lava, or perhaps circuit board, and found that it seems to only have variation of cloud! I mean, it might be nice for refinishing those old pics you found in the attic, but you can't get any cool pictures straight from Photoshop...
And I gotta say, I HATE Photoshop's interface...I HATE it! The Gimp's just seems so much smoother and nicer...I spent, like, 10 minutes looking for a bucket fill on Photoshop, only to just give up and use a brush...And when you select something you have to manually go into the move selection thing...I dunno, I just like Gimp's interface...it's a lot smaller and easier to work with. I don't want all those buttons, I don't NEED all those buttons, and there's absolutely no reason to have the friggin' thing take up the whole screen when I'm only working with a 50x50 image or something. Gimp only takes the space you need...so your AIM and Winamp and whatever isn't blocked out by this massive bloated ugly-ass program window.
One thing I don't like about any existing drawing/CAD package is that virtually everything out there assumes there's only one kind of user in the world only interested in doing one kind of task. (Or very close to that.)
I guess I've become spoiled with the flexibility of Slashboxes - I like being able to pick and choose the sorts of things that are visible, not being stuck with just one or two views. I guess I also run into the limitations of programs a lot - which either means the programs aren't flexible enough, or I'm just too weird for the coders.
Photoshop is standard. Fair enough. But if the menus and key sequences are soft-coded, you can write a skin to reproduce Photoshop's user interface. The same goes for Corel Draw, FontLab Studio, etc. Ultimately, you're manipulating some combination of bitmaps and vector diagrams, with some sort of mechanism for grouping and attaching components, plus a bunch of absolutely bog-standard scripts for defining lines, curves and outlines.
(You wouldn't WANT all of those capabilities in one program, but if the framework is solid and the scripting is powerful, you could plug in whatever combination you wanted with whatever interface you liked.)
People have been able to write modular code to some degree for at least the last 25 years. Computers and Operating Systems have had the power to sport highly sophisticated engines for almost as long. I fully understand that we need specific programs ported to this, that and the other, I just don't see why there's so little sign of moving past that point.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
IMHO, Photoshop is made for and by graphic designer while GIMP is made for and by programmer.
Besides, if GIMP project had half of financial backing as Adobe Photoshop, it could be different picture. I think, it's helpful to take this as a constructive criticism and not as spreading salt on bleeding wound.
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
I downloaded it the other day, all I wanted to do was a crop. I just had reinstalled my comp and I felt downloading Photoshop was wrong especially since there is an open source alternative. I use Open Office and I like it pretty much so I assumed a software that is as popular as Open Office should be at least decent. After 10min. of using it I still couldn't crop my picture, I found a crop menu into which I had to input which part of the picture I wanted to crop numerically (!!??) but I couldn't find a simple tool that would make me select part of the picture and crop it.
Before you go on on how stupid one must be because you actually know how to crop keep in mind that no simple task seemed weird to perform in Photoshop, not even back when I was using version 3.x for the first time, one of the first software I used on a computer. Stuff like select, crop, draw, fill color were pretty intuitive, select the tool and use your mouse to activate it in the most logical way there is. If Gimp can't let me crop, just crop, without me having to search how to, it fails, period. I didn't went any further, it was useless, I downloaded photoshop.
I see the biggest reason for people wanting to use Photoshop instead of GIMP is that people are comfortable with Photoshop.
I used Photoshop for a long time. When I started switching over to Linux as my primary OS (two machines on my desk, one Windows, one Linux), I had problems figuring out GIMP. It took me a while.
Now, I'm great with GIMP. I do things with it, that most Photoshop users can't figure out. As far as I'm concerned, and for what most people do, they're interchangable. BUT, for a user who is only familiar with Photoshop, and uses it daily for work, it's impractical to tell them "Ok, learn GIMP now."
I no longer use Photoshop for my own work, but I do help people with Photoshop on theirs.
Some people are "stuck" with their choice in software. I don't consider Photoshop a real problem, it's a great piece of software. I'd love to see it available for Linux, then I'd have another great choice in what to use on my Linux workstations.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
If you are total novice user of Photoshop, GIMP appears to do exactly the same thing. It can produce the same flaming-text logos, the same lens-flare rollovers, and the same simulated-pencil photo filters.
If you are a middling-to-professional user of Photoshop, they aren't even in the same class of application - the functionality is fundamentally different.
Two applications can have the same exact feature list, but utterly different functionalities. This is certainly the case here.
So the problem may be that the programmers of GIMP are not expert imaging software users.
...integration. Photoshop works well with InDesign, Illustrator, Premiere, After Effects, EncoreDVD, GoLive and soon it will have flawless compatibility Dreamweaver and Flash/LiveMotion. While laying out a document in InDesign I can easily click on teh PSD documetn linked to my page and edit the file in Photoshop, save the changes, and have those changes updated in InDesign. AfterEffects works the same way. In both LiveMotion and EncoreDVD I can use Photoshop to create the base artowrk to add visual effects and inteactivity to, all the while alowing me to easily and conveniently link back the original Photoshop. Premiere picks up on alpha channels embedded in the PSD file (as do AfterEffects and InDesign) making it easy to create masks for layering elements in these apps. It is insanely easy to jump between these apps and be creative without the UI getting in the way.
when engineers design the interface.
when gimp can do CMYK, I'll look at it. But until then - sorry - I have work to do, and I don't get paid to futz around with stuff that doesn't work - I get paid to Make Shit Happen, and if it is in print, it's in CMYK, period - no ifs, no ands or buts.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I have found that the printing functionality of GIMP is pretty sub-par. I had to print a picture and center it on a page. I could not find any centering options in the print options in gimp, so I expanded the image to be as large as the printable area on a piece of paper, and manually centered the content. When I printed that, the white space was ignored and my image was printed in the corner of the paper. Great.
Gimp is a great app, and considering its free, its great, but it doesnt touch photoshop at all. Photoshop is easy for novices, as well as experts
Who are we kidding? This was like throwing raw meat into a lion's den. Linux fan boys will rally to Gimp, and graphic designers will rally to Photoshop. Truthfully I haven't tried to use Gimp in a while but the last time I did I was very unimpressed. But that's just my experience. Just posting this story to Slashdot should get a Troll mod!
Quoth he
"It's all academic anyway..."
Why should the GIMP or any other program be "enough for Linux users"? If Linux users don't think a program is up to snuff, they've a perfect right to say so. Linux is not a soup kitchen.
Every time the subject of GIMP vs Photoshop comes up (which is too often), it ends in a flamefest. All one can say is that the market seems to have voted solidly for Photoshop, but many of the voters may well be individual users who won't ever need Photoshop's wider ecosystem of plugins and who won't ever pony up several hundred bucks for Photoshop anyway. Wishful thinking, perhaps?
For me, the key passage in the article is this: "Photoshop really is a platform, not just an application. When you're buying into an entire system, as the graphics business clearly has, the upfront cost of a single application doesn't amount to a hill of beans in the buying decision." The same applies to dtp of the Quark/InDesign kind and no doubt plenty of other things. Porting a single program to Linux won't on its own bring in the pros, I guess, and you can't port an ecosystem come platform. That needs a real commitment and organic growth over many years. Way to go.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
There are just too many Linux people who feel that because you can accomplish this task or that with an application that it is somehow 'just as good' as another application. They refuse to accept the fact that the Human Interface Design, professional documentation, and seemingly 'minor' features the Linux application lacks are User interface, designed workflow control, and substantially deep and broad documentation options and third-party support are HUGE, not marginal, elements of an application like Photoshop. ITS NOT JUST A BUNCH OF FILTERS. Also, most if not all GIMP features *follow*, not *lead*, photoshop implementations. Like most Linux desktop applications, it seeks to duplicate the features and usability of the gold standard commercial app, not lead it. Someone else mentioned that you dont need Dreamweaver to develop webpages - entirely true - but if you are a professional website designer 90% of your workflow revolves around constant mockup revision negotiation between client and designer, following by a final code implementation. Using Photoshop and/or Dreamweaver to revise mockups moves MUCH faster than hand-coding, and as such saves time and money. Also, it is advantageous to design in PS and/or DW because you focus on what the final page needs to look like, and not worry about how it needs to be coded, which is huge.
They give quite a few points to consider, and I'm sure they all factor in. But most of them are just "I don't want to change" - while that is a valid idea (for a busness you need to justify the cost in retraining - just doing it for political reasons rarely works), but cost may eventaully be a factor. Especially if Photoshop tends to become the only platform stopping the migration.
However, those are just essentially icing on the cake with the other main problem (and I focus on it more because it's a universal problem):
"Another problem, according to my buddies, is that besides Photoshop itself, there are hundreds of Photoshop plug-in programs. Of those, everyone has their handful of favorites that they use on most of their projects. GIMP simply doesn't have anything close to this sort of third-party add-on software community."
With something like that, it's not a "I do not want too" but a "I can not". The 8bit problem would be in the same class.
There are many GPL software platforms out there that compete well in functionality with their commercial counterparts. I know my parents would love switching to Linux if they could (based on cost) but even if there is a comparable program to Autocad there isn't a land surveying plugin comparable to Eaglepoint and most likely never will be (unless Autocad is ever ported to Linux and enough land surveyors switch). It's not a matter of want or ease of use - they can not get thier work done under Linux.
There is something of wondering why the smaller companies will not port, after all many of them support different Unix variants. Ultimatly when I've asked with the few tertiary software producers I use it's generally the same problem - the political end of Linux is a big turnoff.
It's something I've felt strongly about for quite a while (but can't make up my mind which path to follow). Linux - and it's community of people and projects - is at or nearing a point where it is going to have to decide if they want to be commercial or play second fiddle. Rightly or wrongly, too many people are turned off by the strong political movement. Commercial software is not going to be political - that eats into profits. Even the companies like IBM that have been pretty strong in OpenSource work tend to use it because it benefits thier bottom line. People may want both, and some people may be happy with both, but the general business community is not going to accept it (again, rightly or wrongly it doesn't matter - there are times I don't like gravity and wish it were not so but it doesn't change anything).
I'm not saying the political end is bad or inferior (this particular post is biased towards commercial acceptance because of the parent article) - I really like the GPL and the OpenSource philosophy. If that is the direction the community chooses fine by me, I like it. But I don't think it's possible to do both, too many smaller companies that can not make money from service - only from selling - are not going to embrace Linux. Yes I know they do not have too, but the community is still bent towards it to the point that most are not going to enter into it - can you imagine if ALS or OLS were flooded with smaller companies selling software (such as major Windows conferences are)? It's what is going to have to happen for general Linux acceptance (either it happens first, as a consequence of acceptance, or conferences like ALS and OLS become small irrelevant conferances and the ones that embrace it are the big ones - thus you must choose one over the other). Not to mention smaller companies noticing how the community reacts to places like Nvidia giving binary only drivers (again, if you want to focus on the political espects perfectly fine, if you want general commercial acceptance it really hurts to do it). It's not the big companies blocking it - they go where the money is and have plenty of money to shift if they need too, it's the myriad small, specialised, and essential tools that are stopping it. There is little talk or focus on these types of applications but they probably make up a larger percentage of make or break software for many companies.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
I'll reply to you. Here's the reasons why I prefer to use Photoshop, ordered by importance:
1. Where are my blending options? I want to be able to bevel, emboss, texture, etc. on each layer with an easy to use dialog. I don't want to fiddle with 5 layers, each filtered their own way just to achieve a button. And I want immediate feedback.
2. The GIMP's GUI has gone down hill and there's no sign of returning. The selection tool has been screwed up since I can remember (shift to add AND to make regular shapes like squares), and then they screwed up the file dialogs by listening to Gnome.
3. And yes, color support. I've only been able to achieve some effects with CMYK.
It has nothing to do with learning time. It's all about usage time and design. Photoshop clearly wins because Adobe has listened to their customers. The developers of the GIMP have not.
I would like to remind you of LINUX leap into holly wood and how MANY of the newer breed of Visual Effects artist . need new tools i for one use MAYA, Houdini and SHAKE on a linux platform and a good stable port of phototshop would do wonders when i need to texture something remeber not all of us are programers first . i'm a visual artist first and programer when i need to be . i cna peck out code .but dreamweaver would be a nice port for doing Daily pages . for production .
i've been asking adobe for 3 years now WHEN???
becuse i do OWN my licenses .
i'd also like to see a few other things .
for one google Earth .. shame on you google for not porting that yet .. it's to much fun...
but that is my 2 cents ,from an Artists perspective .if we had a few more tools i'm fairly certain i'd beable ot move my last 2 pecies of software over and be done with ti .
right now i need mainly photoshop, then the rest of th eadobe editing line ..
aftereffects i can do without as long as i have SHAKE, which by the way works better on a LINUX platform then it does in it's native MAC OS ..sad actully considering ther cousins .
i'd like ot see AVID/ AVID exspress on linux .again a cousin as it already runs on BSD based OSX...
also protools .
industry stadard things make life easier.
another reason VSFX artist ,would benifit is a LOT of our software we use now .(SHAKE and HOUDINI inperticualar) use UNIX file structure, and will intigrate easily with tereminal .
it's asier batch rendering from terminal , when you don't want to waste percious system resources .. but i degress.
give me photoshop so i can burry my windows box . i need ot free up some harddrive. i found a good emulator for the few games i play so give me photoshop so i can dump M$. /rant
Mary- Hill
VSFX student at SCAD.
I use Linux as my primary desktop OS. I have to say that I agree that Photoshop would definitely be a huge boon to be able to run on my desktop. Right now I have a mac that I use for photoshop and although I really like it, it would be very nice to be able to not have to get up and move to a different machine to be able to mess with some textures. While GIMP works for some things (and it actually feels faster working with some larger files than photoshop on similar machines)- the lack of certain plugins (generating normal and image maps, working with .iff files, nVidias photoshop plugins) means that gimp isn't exactly practical.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
Let's see: as a photographer, the GIMP is missing 16 bit support (showstopper), the healing brush (saves me hours of time doing dust removal and the like), adjustment layers, speed (I work with 300-500MB large format scans), proper color management, etc. Someone tell me - why _should_ I use The GIMP? To save a few hundred dollars - a small fraction of my total equipment cost? Being the dominant player, it's not for Photoshop to justify its existence - the GIMP needs to provide a compelling reason for people to use it, and I see absolutely none for serious users.
The annoying thing about the colour depth issues is that there IS a version of GIMP that supports large colour depths - there is an entire fork of the GIMP tree called 'FilmGIMP' - and then, later: 'CinePaint' that's been developed with really comprehensive deep colour support.
The problem is at the core of the GIMP developer team's culture. If you hang out on the GIMP mailing list for any amount of time, you'll find it's an unbelievably hostile list. The members of the team seem to hate each other with a passion! There is constant bickering and any questions that are even a shade off-topic (or even on-topic but in the mailing list archives) will be flamed mercilessly.
It is that innate hostility that drove a wedge between the GIMP team and the consortium of movie art teams that put together FilmGIMP/CinePaint. That the project had to be forked in order to get such a basic feature done is just criminal.
GIMP is great - yes - but it could have been so much greater. It's amazing that it's done as well as it has.
www.sjbaker.org
If you add in support for tetrachromats (hey, why should we encourage discrimination?) and IBM's polarized monitor, we can get to 96bpp without much trouble. I'm sure, with some inventiveness, we can round it up to 128bpp quite easily.
Now, doesn't a 128bpp image editor sound sooo much cooler and geekier than a paltry 16bpp? Besides, with broadband taking off, we've got to soak up the excess bandwidth somehow.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
For my job, I've never needed a graphic program other than the GIMP. IMO, it works just as well as photoshop.
I've used Photoshop for around 10 years now. My last two jobs were jobs were I used Photoshop full-time. Needless to say I use it a lot and feel like I'm qualified to express my opinion about it. You should also know I have never used Gimp. I'm running on OS X, and I know I could install it if I wanted, but I don't see a point. Photoshop is the industry standard in graphics, and no one will care if I'm fluent with the Gimp on a resume (that sounds odd in any case). I've also spent countless hours on figuring out how to do what I need in Photoshop, and I'm not going to throw that away by saving a few bucks ($150 for upgrade, or $500 for full version) by using Gimp instead of Photoshop. The time I would lose figuring out the "quirks" in Gimp wouldn't even justify me thinking about it. OSS is great, I use a lot of little utilities on my mac that come from those efforts. I don't make a profession by using any of them, but they enhance my experience and make my life easier. I really don't see OSS making inroads in the graphics industry though. It's a cycle because Photoshop is the standard, companies hire those that know how to use the standard, schools teach students how to use the standard so they can be hired, and Photoshop continues to be the standard because it is used and taught everywhere. How do you combat that? I applaud the efforts of the OSS community creating Gimp but I think it will always stay in a niche outside the limelight.
Right-click on a layer in Photoshop, select Blending Options. An assortment of layer filters that can be reversed at any time.
It's been in Photoshop since forever, and Gimp still doesn't support it, or have anything like it.
While I don't think GIMP is a complete Photoshop replacement, I gotta call bullshit on one of the article's reasons.
Saying that one of the reasons GIMP isn't a [Photoshop] replacement is because Photoshop is a single-document interface completely ignores the fact that the Mac OS X version of Photoshop is a multiple-document interface, just like GIMP.
Another hastily written article posted to Slashdot. Nothing to see here, move along.
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
Sure it's a fun name and all but when you're asked what software you use gimp sure as hell better be second or third on the list right below photoshop/illustrator.
Lets play a game, pick the one that doesnt fit
1)Photoshop
2)Aperture
3)Gimp
4)Paintshop Pro
5)Cripple
The issue is now directly working in RAW, I didn't state that very well. I want to import from RAW (which is possible) and keep it in the native 16bpp.
The reason ? Because a workflow for processing digital photos can involve applying quite a few filters and transformations. Doing as much as possible in 16bpp is more likely to prevent visible artifacts from occuring. Then, when one is all finished, the final product can be converted to 8bpp for either printing or web posting.
If one goes straight to 8bpp and then applies all of the filters and transformations, artifacts are more likely to creep into the image along the way, and those can be annoying to deal with.
Here is the deal. If you love computers you end up enjoying "hacking the hardware". It is really the bottom line, getting the hardware to do what you want it to do. So really ... who cares with a printing app. It's not like it's all that hard to do, getting a printer to print. Although that is the reason RMS lost it and created Free Software.
... Standards and Practices !
It is an experience windose users will never know. It is not trivial to get hardware you have no handle on to do what you want.
The photoshop - gimp thing is kinda dumb. You need 4 color printing and Pantone complient colors you pay for the Pantone license. If not you are probably a fool to pay for something you don't need.
PenGun '
Do What Now ???
To adopt this kind of design policy we should dump KDE and GNOME right this second so we can focus on making an exact clone of the windows interface for unixes. After all, the people who already use the alternatives are only in the minority. It doesn't matter in the least if those users are forced to relearn everything at the expense of people who find it hard to learn how to use differing interfaces.
We must only accommodate the majority.
% mkdir
% ls -dF
"gimp" is also slang for someone who is crippled or handicapped.
http://www.answers.com/gimp&r=67
The noun gimp has one meaning:
Meaning #1: disability of walking due to crippling of the legs or feet
Synonyms: lameness, limping, gimpiness, gameness, claudication
Could it be??
Personally, I've found gimp to be pretty limited. Sure, it can do a few neat things but for the largest part, it's pretty darn limited.
Way back when when I was using M$ winders I had taken a liking to Paintshop Pro.
As they upgraded through numerous revisions I found that out of all of them, I liked the 6.x version the best. I don't know what version they are up to now but sometime back I tried to get 8.x (I think) working under WINE and had no luck.
I then played with it on a winders box and decided that I didn't like the newer version.
I tried to find the 6.x on http://www.oldversion.com but no luck.
As for photoshop, I never cared too much for it, the price is insanely high and it's massive overkill and overly complicated for the basic stuff I play with on occassion.
I tried to use Gimp on Linux, but the color management story was pathetic. There are bits and pieces, but you can't calibrate a monitor and you can only calibrate some printers.
You can't do serious photography without color management. Gimp users may live with this, but Photoshop users expect this to work right.
-Dan
Bash MS-Access all you want, but there is very little in the OSS GUI world that comes reasonably close to replacing it. This is a shame since it has a lot of ways it can be bettered because it has more holes and oddities than Martian swiss cheese.
And it is a common tool. It is found almost anywhere that ad-hoc data manipulation or quicky single-user forms are needed. There may be better commercial products for a company to purchase, but since it is bundled with "advanced" MS-Office, they use it instead because it is there and "good enough".
Table-ized A.I.
Likes:
-Supports a wide range of file formats
-Tons of image editing and processing options
-Understands the concept of an alpha channel
-Free!
Dislikes:
-Alpha channel support is "inadequate" (to be kind)
-8 bits per channel max
-Starts up very slowly
I don't hate the interface as much as some people, but then I don't work with it all day either. I imagine the bits-per-channel thing could be a pain to fix, depending on how things have been designed. It seems that most problems with it are known and fixable, why is it exactly that they aren't?
sig fault
Does Adobe have some conflicting interests here that I've missed?
Okay, so PhotoShop is #1 on the list. But what about #2 thru #9? (I guessed in another message that MS-Access is on it.)
Table-ized A.I.
My two main gripes,
* GIMP worst file open/save dialog box ever
* Text tool is nearly useless
correction: I meant 2 thru 10, not 9.
Table-ized A.I.
Cause GIMP fucking blows? I may be biased, as I've been using Photoshop for 6+ years, but Photoshop has one of the most intuitive tool sets I've ever used (and I've used an awful lot of software), and GIMP has one of the most unintuitive. I found it far too difficult to perform even simple operations in GIMP, knowing exactly what I wanted to do. Obviously, most people are going to have to switch over from PS to GIMP if it is a big deal, so they should make the transition much easier.
I have watched the GIMP get better and better. I like the GUI which is flexible once one gets the hang of it.
I cannot afford Photoshop.
I believe many people don't like GIMP because they have not spent enough time with it to get the hang of it.
More people I think would like it if they knew how easy it is to get.
Is it just me or does that prospect make anyone else feel like blowing chunks?
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
1. 48 bit color.
2. Full color management, including soft-proofing and conversion into profiles.
That's about it for me. If it had just these two things, I'd put my copy of Photoshop CS2 on ebay.
...other linux using people bothered to fill out the form at Novell and indicate what they want. The results and list speak for themselves. It's about as democratic as you can get. Who are you to maintain someone doesn't need or want some software on linux? If you don't want it or need it, that's fine, this effort to identify apps that currently don't run on linux is not your cup of tea, so why bother with the not very well hidden insults?
;)
Now, me, in my not even close to humble opinion, I'd like to see a list of apps that were made IMPOSSIBLE to run on linux! Or ANY platform! Starting with FLASH, which has to be hands down the most abused and annoying thing on the intarweb today. I don't want to block it, I want it GONE, I don't want one more poor human to have to suffer a single flash based anything, it's like animated GIF meets and breeds with The Terminator, it just keeps coming and it HAS NO PITY.
---------
File upload and sharing
Interesting that so many people complain about Gimp's interface compared to Photoshop's. I use Photoshop professionally, and have it set up with two monitors; the toolbox and images go on the primary monitor while the rest of the palettes go on the second monitor (I use this setup on Windows and Mac machines). I use Gimp at home, and have the same setup.
So what's all this about Gimp's interface being inferior to Photoshop's? In both cases, the default interface configuration is about the same, and I do about the same amount of work to get my personalized interface. I also change hotkeys for both applications to my own preferences. It's easy to do on both applications.
Best not complain about something until you try it--really try it, don't just load it once and then bitch about it.
When it comes to working with digital photos, I can go with either program. I've made professional-quality prints with both programs, and for the most part, Gimp's 8-bit limitation isn't really a hindrance if I get my raw settings right with my raw converter. Color management? It's coming along nicely in the development version. No worries here.
For everyone who wants high-bit depth and other color spaces (this includes me): if you know how to code, get in there and submit patches to the various programs that will eventually perform all of this number crunching for Gimp. If anything, I'd like to see an updated roadmap for GEGL and GGGL and all the other programs that are being worked on right now. Hopefully someone will have time to write up such an overview so the rest of us will have a better idea what's going on.
All that aside, Photoshop or Gimp can be used professionally, and both are just about completely interchangeable. Give Gimp some time! Its developers aren't full-time paid programmers. They're volunteers, and they're doing a damn fine job.
(I'd also incorrectly guessed that RAW processing wasn't available at all.)
My understanding is that none of those features is yet addressed, although CMS is due in GIMP 2.4.
In that same time frame, PS has made advancements itself.
I, for one, welcome our new Adobe..., errr, that is, I remain unsuprised by corporate users wanting PS-on-Linux.
I'm a nature photographer.
See:
File->Batch Conversion/Rename->Set Advanced Options
Wow! I didn't know that RTFA could also stand for "Run the F***ing Application"!!!
I love scripts myself, but don't be a "kneejerk"...
16 bits each for R, G, and B.
First of all, I'm a Linux user, I have a Linux desktop, but I know how difficult it is too talk about the desktop with the Linux crowd. Most of us/them think that Linux is so good, both technically and morally, that it will just make its way to everybody's desktop without the need to adapt to whatever the wannabe Linuxes have to say. Most of the time you would get something like, why would you want that, if you do, stay with your [insert swearing] Windows (funny whan you use Mac OS X). Anyway the point is that a lot of the so called Linux advocate, at least the more vocals, don't want their cherished OS to be tainted by popular commercial apps. Let's face the truth, most of the Linux users use Linux to build a better tool for themselves, their computer, while what the pro users discussed here, creative people, really want is the tool to be ready to work. Today still, the difference between using Linux and Win or OS X, is the same in spirit as using a home built-pc or a mac (or a dell if you wanna strech it) On one hand, you'll have to spend time to get everything working, and the people doing it like it, and on the other you will plug, and play, and that's what people working with computer as a tool and not not an end want. Linux desktop has its place, the geek users, the "poorer users" (Look at the real goal of Ubuntu=>Linux for African users), the corporate write and mail users, but if it wants to get to other places, it will have to listen, and in the Linux world it is very difficult to be listen to if you don't wanna write code or submit bug, that's all.
16 bits per channel is much better. I still think the number of channels is limited, though. When you get right down to it, it would not be hard to have an image editor that supported stretchy integers for however many bits you wanted in the channel, and no hard-coded limit on the number of channels. (Although you'd presumably need a plug-in for channel types that were unknown.)
Well, I guess I'll add this to my long list of "things somebody, somewhere, really should do but it looks like nobody else is going to be bothered for a while". I worked on a very similar problem a long time ago and I vaguely remember the solution I used. At the very least, I should be able to put together something that'll work with images of arbitrary complexity.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Photoshop 9 (CS2) runs just fin on a computer with 256MB of RAM. On a system with a gig, it screams. It does not make you configure scratch disks, and so on. It's easy of use is so far above GIMP's it's not even funny. Had you actually spent any amount of time using Photoshop and looked at it objectively, this would be pretty obvious.
Please, let's cut the crap. This kind of overly optimistic "The opposition sucks, our solution is the best!" is stupid and hurts OSS. The reason it hurts it is because if someone actually listens to you and trys GIMP, expecting it to be better than Photoshop and then find out it's not, they get a very negative impression of OSS. They believe that it's all a bunch of shoddy shit created by amatures, and that the things they hold up as the best products are, in fact, poor quality.
GIMP is fine for people who do non-serious work and are willing to put up with a difficult interface to get what they want. It's not easy for beginners. For that, there's Photoshop Elements.
Photoshop didn't use to have 16 bit/channel images, and apparently it was good enough for "professional" use back then.
There is legitimate usability complaints and then there is whining. There are legitimate usability complaints one can make about both the Gimp and Photoshop. But the dislike of those vocal "professionals" for the Gimp is mostly whining: they aren't willint to learn anything that's different from what they are used to.
Let these people stick with Photoshop on Windows and pay a significant part of their earnings to those copmanies. Sooner or later, a new generation is going to figure it out.
The only people who can possibly do it is Adobe. Adobe is not a Linux hostile company, they have ported things to Linux before, but only when it helps them make money, expected sales are what they care about. What Adobe sees is a platform that no graphics designers use, and only 10 million or so people use at all worldwide. What would be the point of porting photoshop? None at all!
What could make Adobe want to port photoshop to Linux? Artists using Linux; that's what. How can Artists start using Linux? Improving The Gimp and marketing the Gimp, because like it or not, the gimp IS graphics under linux. Get your head out of the fucking clouds for a second and think about what you can do. If you ever want to be free of Gimp under linux, go right home and make a patch making the Gimp better then tell all the creative types you know: "Gimp rocks and you should use it and Linux for the best art experience".
Bitching and moaning about the gimp is pointless because it is all we have and all we can improve. If Gimp developers start getting discoraged by reading about how much photoshop kills gimp in every way then you will NEVER have photoshop under Linux. However it is a lucky fact that no useful developers of any project read slashdot unless they can help it.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
I am somewhat of a graphic professional and a Gimp user. While the GIMP does not match Photoshop feature for feature neither does it cost $1400 (the local cost).
I have long had difficulties regarding other designers and photoshop. I am self taught Photoshop was purhaps the 3rd graphics app I learnt, for most I suspect it is the first and last. It is not just the gimp that suffers from this it is just about every graphics app out there. For instance I read a magazine review of the latest version of Paint Shop Pro the only negative thing they could say about it was "it's not photoshop". I have known users who stubbornly have waited years for photoshop to gain a feature rather than use another tool which is built for the job they are trying to do. I will admit however there are some jobs where photoshop *is* the best choice.
Finally if you really could see yourself using linux but for photoshop. Write a letter to Adobe - Adobe wants to see that there is a market before they port. I don't think much else is going to convince them.
erm last time I loaded up the GIMP I couldn't even use any of the OS X fonts. Maybe you can (can you?) but that's a pretty big reason to use it for home-graphics use (ie when you can't afford/need photoshop). I'm pretty techie but I just couldn't be assed after 10 mins of googling and turning up no answers.
The only thing I miss in GIMP is ability to use 16 bits per channel. This is a must for quality photography and especially RAW image processing. There is ufraw plugin (dcraw-based) which processes RAW images internally at higher color-resolution and produces 8-bit image. This is partial solution.
Some time ago, there was a project named GEGL which could give as 16-bit in GIMP. Are they alive?
There is an alternative about the GUI for GIMP: it makes GIMP similiar (in a certain way) to Photoshop: http://plasticbugs.com/?page_id=294
As powerful as GIMP is, I find myself struggling to complete tasks that would be easier in Photoshop.
You mean stuff like resizing the brush with a keypress? After reading the manual, going to google, setting any arcanely named binding that might be it in the shortcuts preferences, the Gimp just sits there and stares stubbornly at me when I try it. Do these people never paint anything? OTOH, this is the same people that think that CTRL-K is much more logical for deleteing stuff than say, oh, I don't know... delete, maybe?
Apart from that, a lot of why the Gimp is such a struggle to use is those right click menus and image menus that the Gimp people are so proud of because they can do anything. Sure, they can do anything - but it also lists *everything*, always! It's called a context menu, and it could be incredibly powerful if it had any context. Oh, and things sorted in real categories.
I could very well live without a Photoshop interface, but I want a human interface.
Spine World
I'm sure that they'd sell many more than a few hundred copies to the Linux market. Maybe even a thousand.
$800 x 1000 copies = $800,000
A dinos^H^H^H^H^H company the size of Adobe would blow 800 grand just on meetings to discuss ways to get every employee a new 3-ring binder with amended versions of the corporate software licensing policy and equipment procurement standards with the necessary changes to allow developers to requisition Linux machines for preliminary development of a Photoshop port...
0 1 - just my two bits
What spending 600 quid on Photoshop gave me was hours of my life back. Ignoring the technical issues like 16bit support, LAB, plugins, etc. I still would have spent this money on CS2.
Being able to modify exposure, black point, contrast and white balance in a second or two per image cut my workflow on a standard shoot from about 2 hours to 1 hour. Beign able to do that non-destructively so that I can go back and try something else later is even more valuable. Cutting my time down behind the machine means I can spend more time behind the lens, and that's where the money really is.
Being able to make a change once and then copy it to every other image in the shoot, or a selected subset of those images means that I don't make mistakes.
The other big issue is information available. Adobe Photoshop CS2 for Photographers is an awesome book. It presents 'recipes' that are easily understood, achieve a specific goal and can easily be turned into actions. The Real World Camera RAW book was also fantastic.
Sensible defaults are better than telling people to customise what is out of the box the Worst... Interface... Ever.
Oh boy...
Along those lines, did you know that the PC LOAD LETTER error can be changed on most LaserJet II/III models? Maybe like "OUT OF LETTER" or "FEED ME A4". I still encounter these things in offices, and I still see one of the most cryptic error messages ever written. Exact proof of your statement: sensible defaults are essential, most people never figured out how to set the clocks on the VCRs; there's no way they can handle something like customizing a menu.
Years ago, I wrote a big long rant on why Linux isn't ready for the desktop; the GUI for virtually everything in Linux sucks. "Designed by geeks, for geeks" works great for admin-type stuff, but absolutely not at all for Joe Sixpack or PHB's e-mail client.
My original rant, only slightly appended over the years.
Until the Open Source community actively recruits user interface experts, we will never get Linux out of the server closet.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Although we can argue that scheme based scripts in gimp are "potentially" more powerful than recording actions in PS, for most of the time, simple recording can do the job. Now, I need to open a bunch of files in a given directory, apply a serious of filters, and save. In PS, I can do this in a second. In gimp, I have to write scheme code, debug somehow, which takes far more time than doing this in PS. Not that I do not enjoy writing functional code (i used to be in love with caml), but I do not think that the artistic community will share my love.
I tried GIMP. I spit four thousand times and I went back to Photoshop. Yes, interface is customizable and simply takes "getting used to" but I don't want to customize nor get used to it, all I wanted was to make a small animated toolbar (which I did in less than 10 minutes at home). Why can't there be a version that does things like Photoshop does?
I think GIMP is in the same UI trap as Lotus products that are trailing Microsoft Office popularity -- "We're different, and we don't care that more popular product has different interface, we'll force users to get used to ours". Yes, there will be perver strange people who will say they like Lotus UI because "it's different" but for most people Microsoft Office interface works, and Microsoft got where it is now not only because of the monopoly tie-in with OS products, but because they copy good things into their products, including UI. By being "different" Lotus office products limited themselves to situation where user is forced to use them. And for home they run for Word or for something that looks and behaves like Word.
Every time you encounter radically new interface it takes time and effort to get used to. People don't want and don't have to do it. Leave the radical and ugly dysfunctional interface to hobbyists, and copy Photoshop interface for the rest of users. If you want to make a point how easier/better GIMP interface is, add a little window that says "You could have easily done it in GIMP native interface by pressing blah blah blah". And, perhaps, allow pieces of interface being switch to native mode, so once user is completely accustomed to GIMP way of doing things whole interface would be reverted to radical mode.
Instead of that all I see is people argue with foam at their mouth on how much better GIMP interface is.
Hyperom.com
To draw a rectangle in GIMP you have to do some nasty tricks with masks. Hardly anything a beginner would expect. I'm still having difficulties understanding why the GIMP developers refuse to provide some basic bitmap editing possibilities like one finds in paint for windows 3.1
Look what he had to say to the GimpShop guy - http://gug.sunsite.dk/forum/?threadid=2721 - heaven forbid somebody try and improve on his oh-so-holy project!
Yes, it is HIS project, but the second you GPL the code, it's out of your hands and flaming people for trying to do something new with your idea is petty. You aren't by any means required to provide support to the forks (I'm sure he has no love for the FilmGIMP/CinePaint devs either), but a lack of civility makes your own project, nay, OSS at large, look like a giant group of elitist pricks.
How come then, that I have Acrobat 7.0 emerged on my Gentoo for some time now ?
Photoshop itself sucks. If you have an equal amount of experience in it and GIMP then most of the time GIMP will be easier to use in my experience. Where Photoshop shines isn't in itself but in all the add-on's that are available for it. If GIMP could make those add-on's work with it then it'd be a killer program but even so for the vast majority of graphic work you don't need all those add-ons to get things done.
Photoshop is mostly asked for because most graphic arts people have trained on it, and only on it, and lack the ability to adapt. It does have some capabilities Gimp lacks but likewise Gimp has some capabilities Photoshop lacks.
Of course my opinion may be twisted as I'm the kind of person that thinks a good drawing program should have a command-line option. Still, with no formal graphic arts training, I can produce graphics of equal or better quality as most 'real' graphic artists I've worked with in less time than they take to do the job and I think a lot of that has to do with using Gimp rather than Photoshop and just knowing a lot of tricks to gettings things done. I'm often amazed at how many graphic artists don't really understand how their tools work and therefore don't think of a lot of possible uses and shortcuts. I've found that when you find a graphic artist that has both talent (knowing what looks good) and knows their tools then you better keep hold of them because they aren't easy to replace.
An oft unmentioned paint program I like but rarely use is Paint Shop Pro. For quick and dirty stuff that isn't overly involved it is really good. I'd rather have it ported to Linux than Photoshop.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Phase 1: Let people steal our software
phase 2: Those people get hired as graphic artist and can only use photoshop
Phase 3: Profit
> As powerful as GIMP is...
There are a few killer designer-friendly features that just don't seem to have enough mindshare amongst developers to make it into GIMP, but slicing is the BIG issue.
(For the non-designers: Slicing means having multiple subimage exports from the same picture, arranged by green transparent rectangular overlays which snap-to-rules and each have their own export/compression settings. It's graphically analogous to scripting in the sense that it doesn't just make you work faster; you actually work significantly differently once you grasp the possibilities).
This was where Fireworks took on Photoshop and comprehensively beat it for a few years, partly by the ease of slicing and partly because of its lovely styles/vectors integration. It had all this in 2000 or so.
I'm hoping Inkscape will adopt a slicing tool, but GIMP has needed one for some time now. The python/perl ruler-based slicing tools are pretty painful once you've used Fireworks, ImageReady or Photoshop.
gimp sucks, film at 11.
The GIMP also doesn't have a CMYK colour-space. This is essential for print work: I know plug-ins exist, but this just isn't as friendly as native support: I'm extremely surprised there's no native support for CMYK. In comparison Film GIMP/CinePaint has the RGB colourspace required for film work, and a notable user-base. If CMYK support is added, the GIMP would stand a much better chance against Photoshop.
And it is not replacement for Photoshop, either. But post scriptum: for PROFESIONALS. For other crowd who pirates Photoshop just for little tweaks (who are also just people who takes "first hit for free") GIMP could be good enough.
See, I said - could be. Yes, GIMP has it's own share of problems and it feels somehow stagnated, sure. It could be better. So it is just too little confusing in GUI and lacks good help mode. That's all.
For professionals it is completely other story.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
A simple example which bugged me this weekend. I needed extra space to draw in so I resized the canvas. But I can't actually paint there! Why? Because the canvas size changed but the layer size didn't. This is so stupid. I only had one layer, so why didn't it ask me if I wanted to resize the layer too, or even provide that as a persistent checkbox preference in the Canvas size dialog? GIMP is replete with stupid little things like this. Such as the foreground / background colour selector where it is entirely non obvious how it works with the same tooltip covering 4 distinct actions. Or the scale selection (as far as it works in Win32) does not support proportional scaling and the grabber behaviour is totally insane.
Rather than attempting to play the same complex notes as Photoshop (another lousy experience IMHO), perhaps they should be simplifying its day to day use first. Make the next version a usability & bug fixing release only. People wouldn't be pining so much for Photoshop or any other decent tool if the one which ships with Linux didn't make them want to gnaw their own arm off with frustration.
Novells conclusion from the survay
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
GIMP is zero-cost software, why would anyone expect it to rival a $600 piece of software? I think the Free software community should really tone down the "replace all non-free software" rhetoric a bit (and yes, I am a free software developer). In general, people buy software because the value it gives them is greater than its cost. If Photoshop saves the user a few hours a week over a free alternative, it pays for itself very quickly. And, in general, the commercial alternative will, because they can afford to hire UI designers and product teams.
well actually i am using computers since ages... pre mouse era you know...
... just corrupt and politically uncorrect, but thats life.
;)
the photoshop / gimp talks is somewhat funny to me... heres my opinion.
1. photoshop isnt that widespread in terms of "licensed original versions" its widespread as copies (just like every popular windows application)
How many licensed versions of latest photoshop vs downloads of latest gimp + distro spreads are we talking about?
2. photoshop is commercial and thus if you wanna professionally work with it you gotta buy it.
3. photoshop due to its popularity sets a defacto gui standard
But the question is if its really better than gimp. For an artist learning a new tool might be time consuming and a problem... but the question is... why did he start to learn photoshop in the first place? Isnt that an "educational Problem"? I remember when i was at university in germany (a shitty one) i was forced to learn visual basic (a non portable, proprietary old and close to useless scripting language that is closed source). Its a political Problem... Professors get sticked money up their ass from companys to teach their students "their tool of choice (you choose what you get paid for...)". Not very scientific, not very "future save"
Personally i dont think that the photoshop gui is that great in terms of usability... . I even think that gimp reflects more the "old school non computer art tools". The "toolbox" window is pretty much comparable to a palette to me. But theres the question... how many computer artists are also real artists? i dont know. i wish thered be statistics.
Also the right click context menu provides quick access to nearly every functionality no matter where your mouse is on the picture (efficient).
If you dont want to learn new tools i think you shouldnt participate in scientific conversations.
the idea of "everything i can and have is great while everything else sucks" isnt proper argumentation.
If you artists out there really want a tool that is free and better than every proprietary tools give more feedback to the developers and support your favourite free projects... if it yet cant replace your proprietary tools go report your ideas upstream but dont do the above with a closed mind wanting to have app xyz reimplemented. We dont wanna have a copy of ages old software concepts... we need new fresh concepts and new fresh ideas to create tomorrows state of the art software products.
You also wont be able to fly tomorrows spaceships if you dont wanna learn
My personal experience yet with artists is that lots of those i know are pretty much non techies and also non scientific persons nor geeks. Artists need simple software with less buttons and functionality. Maybe gimp is just too much of functionality and the society isnt ready yet for learning a new gui concept.
an open source developer
p.s.
Summary:
if you dont like the gimp project you got various options
1. stop whining and spend your money on photoshop
2. stop whining and submit feature requests that make sense (=! i want photoshop so gimp gotta be like photoshop) or patches upstream to make the tool better
3. stop whining and write your own photo/paint software
From TFA: 'I wonder if some Photoshop fans just haven't looked at GIMP's upcoming 2.4 update.'
Gee, I wonder that too... I mean, everybody should just look at upcoming updates of all software they're not using... Stupid Photoshop fans.
>A better GUI for Gimp wouldn't hurt
See GimpSHOP at http://plasticbugs.com/?page_id=294
I use GIMP a lot for producing .eps files for my LaTeX articles and I've often wondered why I can't even draw a line in GIMP. I know its an image manipulation program and therefore it doesn't have to be a drawing program, but I'd really like to find simple things like this in it...
Sorry mate, I use UNIX every day, to run really big serious programs costing tens of thousands of dollars per year in licensing. I do it from the GUI. Sure, I occasionally type in real hard to understand commands like 'mdi', or 'dtfile' into the command line, but mostly it is just me and that big old boring HP UNIX GUI. The longest batch file I've ever written has 3 lines.
Elitism such as yours is both misplaced and counter productive. There is no really hard reason why a Knoppix type system, and a bit of fine tuning, would not make a consumer level OS. The problem is not the underlying OS, the problem is at the GUI level, and as such is solvable by scripting at the VB level.
One thing that always makes me go back to using Photoshop (or even Photoshop Elements) or any other freeware/commercial image manipulation application is the bad image quality I get when saving as .jpg under Linux. I have that under Debian, my girlfriend has that under Ubuntu and had that under FC. Most recently my girlfriend had the same problem with Krita, so maybe it is a problem with the library for this (libjpeg? not that much of a Linux guru).
And the quality is so bad in that I can easily see this. My girlfriend is an internet erotic model (cue stupid /. jokes about people here not having a girlfriend or whatever), and whenever I see a pic on the internet on her site or Myspace profile and it just looks crappy, I ask who edited it, and then she already looks at me with this "I know, I know, don't fucking ask" look and says she did it, with Gimp, or lately, Krita. When she does the job on my Windows laptop with Photoshop, pics always look great. And no, she is using the best jpg quality (12 or 100% or whatever the setting is called).
Had anybody else problems with this? I mean, I seriously cannot recommend the Gimp for any photo editing tasks as long as it does not produce top quality images with so simple a task. Are there different versions of the library, because of patents or the like? Is there a hidden switch, like "don't garble the pic with random noise and artifacts"?
Hell, just easily resizing selections should save more than that. Whoever said that adding and subtracting - without even constraining anything - was good enough should be shot. No, drawn and quartered. And hanged. And then shot.
You have to be able to drag the borders!
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Man that was hahahahaha, great, hahahaha. *Wipes tears*
Best laugh I had in weeks. Thanks!
---
(as you can see, I've been to your list, I've asked if I could help. Hi Carol, Sven!)
The way the toolbar icons are not the same as the cursor icons. For example, the crop/resize tool button in the main GIMP window looks like a paintbrush, but a different sort of paintbrush from the real paintbrush. (Later I theorized that the icon actually represents an artist's knife, for the "cropping" part, although I don't know how that relates to "resize".) But when you move the cursor onto the sheet, the "crop&resize" cursor looks completely different, and I'm not sure I've selected the right function. I'll let you find other examples of where the cursor shape is different from the toolbar button.
The way the "mask" concept is implemented is non-intuitive. You have a selected area, and anything you do only affects that selected area. For example, say you select a rectangular area in an empty layer. You fill the layer with a certain colour (using the Pouring Paint Can tool), expecting the entire layer to get filled, but only that rectangular area gets filled, even if you clicked the Pouring Paint Can outside the selected rectangle. All well and good, but
Suppose the mask is so small that you can't see it, or you don't notice that you have a mask on because you've zoomed to another area? Especially since I can't seem to find how to get rid of the mask. Say I used the mask for some other operation, eg. touching up the picture somewhere else. Now I want to get rid of the mask and operate on the entire drawing.
You could say, "Well, there's a keyboard shortcut for turning off the mask. It's [whatever]." Well, again, since GIMP is a GRAPHICS manipulator, I would expect something in the GRAPHICS user interface.
You could say, "Well, you can select the entire area." That's a cop-out.
The real question is, how am I supposed to know that there is a mask in the first place? I tried to get rid of the mask by using the rectangle selection tool and double-clicking in the picture, effectively making a mask of size 0. Well, GIMP thought that I actually did want a mask of size 0, and from then on none of the drawing tools worked (because they only operate on what's within the mask, and the mask is size zero). If I had not remembered that I had set a 0-size mask, I would have thought GIMP was not working.
There should be some indicator in the status bar that the mask is on. When the user double-clicks the selection tools (the dotted rectangle, dotted circle, or lasso), there should be a pop-up window with various options including "turn off mask".
(By the way, for anyone trying to tell me "but Photoshop does the same thing!" --stop trying to compare GIMP with Photoshop. GIMP should stand on its own, and actually I don't use Photoshop, so that doesn't help.)
This leads to the next topic: status indicators. As we mentioned, status indicators for whether a mask is in effect are sadly lacking. Other non-intuitive problems, where nothing you do seems to affect the picture, can be caused by selecting a non-visible layer: suppose not all layers are visible, and you somehow accidentally select a non-visible layer to work on. You might want to doodle all over your drawing, but nothing seems to happen! In the meanwhile, you are actually defacing a different layer of your drawing without realizing it. This is because the layer status window is a separate window.
Others have debated the wisdom of using multiple separate windows rather one big window containing all subwindows, so I won't rehash it here. My peeve is that there is only one window for layer status no matter how many drawings you are working on. Suppose you open a 3-layer drawing to work on; you see that drawing, plus the layer status window, plus the main GIMP window (plus the toolbar selection window if applicable). Now open another 2-layer drawing, say. Well, you still have the same window
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
That's not entirely fair, though I will grant you the interface has been a work in progress. I've found the GIMP is just different. It takes a while to get used to if you're coming from a Photoshop background.
Over the months and years I've been using the GIMP for things and now I have to stop and think about how to do the same functions in Photoshop. And there are still things in Photoshop I like better. The four-up view for saving an image for the web. Very nice. If GIMP has a similar feature I'm not familiar with it.
I'll keep using the GIMP, although sometimes I wish they'd change the name. GIMP gives me Pulp Fiction flashbacks.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Very few users belong to the first group and I (and Adobe as well) suspect that many do not use a licensed version of Photoshop. If they had to pay for one, many of them would be happy to use such a fine program like GIMP.
On se Internetz nobody noes your German.
Sorry for typo, it is Slackware, there is no "Slashdot" linux :)
:)
Allthough, I always counted Slackware as "Slashdot" linux
Krita, the painting and image editing application for KOffice is probably a better alternative to Adobe Photoshop on the Linux desktop. It is nicely integrated in KDE and its codebase is cleaner than that of GIMP, so it is easier to add features at a fast rate. In fact, even GNOME devs have been amazed by how fast it's growing.
To an extent, I would agree that GIMP is not enough to make a business convert from Windows to Linux. Windows offers both Photoshop and Paintshop Pro, two extremely great imaging programs and in my strongest opinion, GIMP cannot even compare to those two. But on the other hand, GIMP should be considered a factor in changing operating systems. But let's not forget about the thousands of other exclusive programs found only for Linux... even though more and more are moving away as we speak. For me, I am just happy enough installing the newest version of Cedega and emulating anything I need from every other platform just to keep my Penguin happy.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
but in my humble opinion, I'd say that the GIMP is the best thing since sliced bread. I just can't imagine working on a machine without that amazing program installed – it's done everything I could ever need it to, whether I'm color-correcting a scanned photo, digitally coloring the likes of Erlkönig, or creating proof that J. K. Rowling's been hard at work on the eighth book that everyone knows is coming. In fact, believe it or not, I've never even used PhotoShop in my entire life; all the graphics on my homepage (except the ones taken from elsewhere, of course, like the background image) were created using the GIMP. And, of course, a bit of ImageMagick here and there; I doubt PhotoShop's going to have a handy command line any time soon!
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
Once again: Photoshop ported to GNU/Linux/BSD/etc=good thing. I'm all in favor of it. Then we can all get off the Gimp's back. I've been fighting ignorance about the Gimp for five years, and I'm sick of it. The reasons cited in this article amount to "We need something else for transportation, because cars do not come with steering wheels, tires, and motors." OK, whatever the reason for the insanity, y'all do what you have to.
You have a lot of valid points here. I just hope you realize how pointless it is to post such user interface criticism on slashdot. It would be a lot more helpful to file bug reports for them or bring them up on the gimp mailing-list or in the GIMP forum at openusability.org.
GIMP is enough for me, but I barely do image editing. I mostly just crop and resize photos and make simple images for web sites.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
You're remark is a perfect example of why Linux remains a cult: Linux is for True Believers who'd rather deprive themsevles of access to good tools rather than soil their hard drives with "evil" code.
Understand that the vast majority of users will not move to a new OS if the programs they use are not available for the platform. Not equivalent programs, not clones, but the identical program.
Frankly, surveys like this simply confirm the obvious. Gimp has been around, for free, for several years. If Gimp was compelling enough for Photoshop users to switch to Linux to use it, they would have done so. The fact that they haven't -- that they'd rather pay hundreds of dollars for Photoshop and the other Adobe tools than pay nothing for Gimp and Linux -- ought to tell you something.
Rather than adopting an unwarranted elitist attitude about non-Linux users, you'd be better off listening to people explain why they won't use it.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Windows not enough for Photoshop users?
Well its good that you found a tool to do white balance, because GIMP sure ain't gonna do it properly.
>>"...It's due to the failing of our society to educate people enough to actually understand the tools they work with..."
That post is a blatant example of unwarranted Linux elitism at work. Why aren't most people using Linux? Because they are clever enough. Therefore, it must be true that people who use Linux are rather more clever than eveeryone else.
Sure.
The reason people don't use Linux is because they don't want to use Linux and they don't neeed to use Linux. You don't need to be more clever or smarter than average to use Linux. You just need to want to use it. People who aren't willing to go to the trouble of learning how to program to do something they already do on another platform are simply making a rational choice about how to spend their time and energy. Why learn Perl, for example, to accomplish a task when you already accomplish that task just fine on Windows or on OS X?
It is egotism that feeds that kind of post.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Ok, so by now we all know PS and Gimp fanboys alike, that PS has features that Gimp hasn't and makes working with images in a certain way possible were Gimp doesn't. Gimp doesn't have protocol, Gimp filters are a joke compared to PS, Gimp layers are ok but again PS excels here. And lets not get started on effects. Corel PhotoPaint is somewhere in between (I'd say closer to PS) and does nearly everything one needs perfectly on linux.
As I am a professional user that's used all three on professional projects let me provide the bottom line here:
Gimp -> nice usefull tool for editing images
Corel PhotoPaint (also available for Linux, free (beer)) -> nice professional tool for editing images
PS -> the bar
Even though a lot of stuff can be done with Gimp and might not technically justify buying a licence for Corel Draw/PhotoPaint for Linux (I did this before PP was availlable for free), there is a very good reason to do this anyway. Let me illustrate with another example:
I'm a Blender Fanboy. Blender rocks. I'm one of the few that own a commercial licence - back from the time where there was a commercial version available for about a year. Blender has come a long way since I joined at 1.8. 3D software vendors are doing wee-wee all over their pants when they see the growing featureset of Blender. It's allready got stuff that no other package in the industry has (i.e. B-Bones). With the ongoing Orange Project features are getting added every other week. I love the programm and I love to use it.
Yet I still bought a (reduced) commercial edition of Lightwave less than a year ago.
How's that work out?
Type in the word "Lightwave" at amazon.com and you'll get one reason. Lightwave has been in the industry for 10 years and it shows. You can get clobberd with books on LW. LW covers workflow from a to z. While workspacemanagement lacks compared to Blender, it is well though out. The Workflow has less to none of the little quirks that can spoil the Blender experience a little. Rigid and softbody stuff is well established in LW and cloth is void of that experimental prototype feeling it has with Blender. Platonic Primitives is a bonus over current Blender (2.4) I just got to enjoy the other day. I could go on but this outlines the issue at hand.
All in all, for a professional, it justifies the expense of 500 Euros for LW over Blender to get the job done quicker or make that needed extra possible. I have to spend some money on Books, but the point is that they are available. The ones for Blender still have to be written. I've volunteered for that but mind you, writing end user documentation for a 3D package is a hell of a job.
This is the narrowing difference between established software (be it commercial closed source or not) and software that isn't quite there yet. And believe me, as far as competitive oss design software goes, nothing is as mature as Blender.
In a way a Gimp/PP/PS debate is pointless. One about Blender/LW would actually be interessting.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Sorry I'm a little late to the barbecue. I couldn't find this point made yet.
It was a survey of non linux users, for fuck's sake. I'm 90% convinced that the title is as it is solely to inflame. The comments here generally state that it is in fact good enough for linux users, which may be accurate, but only relevant in the context of this STUPID MISLEADING TITLE which has nothing to do with anything.
I'm an avid Open Source Software fan. I distribute linux cds for free at work, to friends and neighboors. I also install Firefox and Open Office to show friends how nice those packages work. The Gimp? No way in hell will I confuse anyone I love with it. I'm sad to see such a nicely programmed application suffer so much from a delusionary view that the interface they have is the right one. So far they don't want to fix it and to me that represents the biggest hurdle for OSS to reach more people. The Gimp being so frustrating is the reason I still use Photoshop.
They are mostly spending big bucks. 24 bpp + alpha is more than my eyes can discern and I'd be surprised if the other 24 bpp was not mostly white noise to the camera as well. It's hard for me to imagine light and voltage differences controlled so finely in the imaging or display devices. At 16 bits you are talking about 65,536 levels of difference on each pixel. At a generous 5 volts, you are looking at controlling your signal to 7.6E-5 volts. If either your fancy camera or monitor can control line ripple to 1E-4 V, I'll give you a nickel of your money back.
As a test, take a picture of an object that's supposed to be one color under the most uniform lighting you can make then tell me how consistent all 48 bits of your color space are. I'm really interested. Point me to specs if they exist.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
a bit off topic but... As a noob to both gimp and photoshop and I must say gimp is more intuitive to me. Some of the guys in our IT dept are now using it as well. :)
I'm a Linux and open-source zealot. I love that the Gimp exists and it is a powerful product... BUT I admit that it needs a lot of work on the GUI. Maybe the people that made it and maintain it, like it... but NOBODY ELSE DOES! This is NOT a generalization. The GUI really stinks, even with all the improvement they've made to it over the years! I don't see why Gimp hasn't had a successfull (meaning popular, yes I know about cinepaint or filmgimp or whatever, hardly popular and not a better GUI anyway) fork yet with a completely redesigned GUI.
Meh.
I am a casual user of image manipulating software. I have never used photoshop. I use gimp, and I use those give-away apps that come with my scanner.
From my experience, gimp doesn't work as well as the give-aways. For example, using gimp, I cut a section out of a 3.5MB jpg. Gimp warned me that I need 225MB of RAM to store the section. I went to past the section, and was warned that gimp needed 335MB to paste the section. Gimp was also going *very* slow.
I rebooted into windows, and used some give-away software to complete the process easily, and quickly.
4. The name sucks and is innappropriate for a business setting. Why the hell did they name a product "The Gimp"?! That is just utterly stupid and offensive. I mean, come on, use some common sense and rename it already!
On a different note, I am planning a new distribution of Linux called "Crack Whore Linux©". It will be awesome and powerful... why would people not use it?
Meh.
There really is a need for a simple image manipulator for the masses with just the basic photo editing functions available in a single-click. I wish I knew how to code C++, I would program it myself.
Meh.
Simple test... create a new image, use the ellipse select tool to create a circle, stroke that circle. Look how absolutely nasty and NOT SMOOTH the stroke is. If GIMP can't handle a simple operation like stroke how on earth is it supposed to make people think it can compete with Photoshop?
sig.
I brought this up last week in a different discussion, but not only did they have a version for SGI at one point, they had a version for "UNIX" in the form of SunOS/SPARC. It was for SunOS 2.x and I think it was around Photoshop 3 or so.
s t/photoshopSun.pdf
This place has a PDF version of the Adobe product brochure:
http://computing.ee.ethz.ch/sepp/photoshop-3.0.1-
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Judging from your experience, it sounds like a Photoshop to GIMP handbook would be very useful and potentially a big seller.
I am a long long term linux and freebsd user (since about '94). I use unix for my software devel work and I run a freebsd server at home for web/dns/ssh/mail and so on. I have been using unix since the mid 80's.
;(
I hate MS and windows. I hate XP.
but I use pshop cs2. why? it actually works and for my photo hobby, it delivers.
HDR (high dyn range) processing for stacking bracketed images. gimp doesn't have this, I don't think.
16 bit color channels. I need this for raw processing.
neatimage (noise reduction plugin) does not run on gimp. they say the standalone version runs on wine but that's a poor 2nd to a native binary and plugin. I NEED NEATIMAGE (my camera is noisy and it can't be helped). neatimage was well worth the $50 I paid for it but it does not exist on unix
video is slow on unix compared to windows. all the x11 layers you have to go thru vs 'video in the kernel' of xp. this feature makes windows less stable - BUT it also makes bit blitting and video updates so much faster. (in fact, I use xp as my vnc-viewer system and my bsd box is my vnc-server. vnc-viewer on windows is MUCH faster than tightvnc or realvnc on unix. sadly to say...)
if the plugins will run on gimp AND the UI becomes closer to what us photogs are used to - AND all the other issues, above, are addressed, then I'll move back.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
If something is free, people complain. I'm sure if GIMP had full time paid programmers, it would indeed surpass Photoshop. Hard to compare free/unfunded vs. the corporate world. Instead of complaining, I'm sure the GIMP team would take a financial contribution or your own programming skills to make it better.
And that would be to continue to develop GnuSTEP and make is as API compatible with Cocoa as possible. Now, I know that Photoshop is an Carbon app, and therefore would not port to GnuSTEP, but there are plenty of other applications for OS X that are Cocoa and WOULD port to GunSTEP with some minor recompiling.
My sister is tired of Windows breaking on her, and can't afford a brand-new Mac. She'd switch to Linux in a heartbeat, but she's an art major and needs her Photoshop. It's not that she couldn't learn GIMP, it's that she already made the investment of time and money into Photoshop, and she's got little of either at this point.
... more text editors, mp3 players and photo album organisers. The people surveyed have got it all wrong!
I'd like to weigh in as an Artist/Coder. I think maybe I can shed some light to the GIMP/PS debate given my experience with both sides of the divide (creative/artist versus coder/hacker).
I do web design as my primary job, but I'm also doing freelance print design, web development, photography, illustration and video. I use almost all of the Adobe products (and formerly Macromedia ;) I have also been dabbling with Linux since Red Hat 5 and been using the GIMP since before version 1.
I deeply respect the OSS community and believe in it, support it with Creative Commons and use the tools it provides. I want to use Linux and hate that I'm forced to use Windows: I would switch to Linux in a second, if it did what I need my computer to do.
What do I need my computer to do? I need my computer to not get in the way of my creativity. Period.
I've installed many distros of Linux, and setup "equivelant" installations to my Windows box, but when it comes down to doing what I do (being a creative digital person) I can't create without recompiling some code, (re)searching through hundreds of webpages to figure out what OSS app will do something close to After Effects (or even Photoshop), or just running into wierd GUI setups that aren't intuitive enough to me. When I'm creating, I don't want to stop in the middle of it to decipher how a tool works (or hack it if it doesn't work). I just want to keep drawing/recording/editing/playing.
I know how to program, I know how to open the box and fix everything. I can do what i need to do. But as a creative, this is too much of a hindrance. As soon as the creative flow stops, that's it. Adobe's products keep me moving and focused on my work instead of how to do my work. This is the single most annoying thing about Linux for me.
I'm at the point now where I don't have time to spend a whole weekend installling a system and tweaking its settings. I just want to make stuff. Adobe + Windows allows me to do this. If Adobe could just support Linux for its apps, I'd convert right away. Sure GIMP is a good equivalent to Photoshop, but any creative person using a computer isn't only using PS for all their work you know. Where's the equivalent of Illustrator, or inDesign, or After Effects, or Premiere, or Flash? (I know of the Linux equivalents, but that doesn't mean they're actually equivalent).
As a person I want to use Linux. As a multimedia artist, I can't. Adobe + Linux would be a dream.
What do we do next?
Robert McLarty Multimedia Designer
"Most folks aren't smart enough to realize that if they switched to Linux, they wouldn't have to pay for upgrades. However, more importantly, they don't realize that they could hold onto their machines a while longer because the newer versions of Linux rarely push you off of your current hardware onto the latest and greatest."
And apparently you're not smart enough to realize that computer hardware is much, much cheaper than man hours.
Knowledge worker salary: $27k-$45k per year
Brand new computer: $1200
Take the median of those incomes, $36k/year, and look at what percentage a new computer upgrade costs. It works out to around 3%.
And about the 10 year old hardware. Give me a break. We'll benchmark your 10 year old GIMP workstation against my pretty basic Athlon XP-M 2500 workstation and see what the percentage improvment is. Now, apply that to worker man hours and the math will definitely come out in my favor. Being cheap can be a detriment. Recognizing when it makes sense to upgrade to new hardware is a business decision, not a geek decision.
Basically what you get into is a TCO argument. We all know that there are two camps, but to say one camp is not "smart enough to realize" just because they won't yeild to the other's view, is an incredible display of hubris.
I imagine implementing an MDI would be a bit of work but simply rearranging the menus must be trivial. As far as I can tell from my dabbling with GIMP, the logic of its functionality mirrors Photoshop pretty closely, but the menus are in slightly different places. (it took me ages to work out where "auto levels" was).
It's irritating that UI preferences cause so much reluctance to make a potentially beneficial switch to FOSS but it's just human nature.
Desktop GNU/Linux adoption is happening so slowly because there is little pressure on FOSS developers to address the genuine criteria by which casual computer users evaluate their experience.
For instance McDonalds don't sell millions of burgers because they are lovingly prepared and full of nutrition. They know perfectly well what motivates people to purchase and consume food, so they invest massively in these areas (make the food addictive by packing it with salt, sugar and fat, flood the public conciousness with advertising associating your food with health, sex and happiness).
Likewise Microsoft didn't sell millions of copies of windows and office by crafting lean, robust and open code. The pump it full of features to give the public a reason to keep upgrading, and sacrificed security to make it easier to use for non-techies.
While it seems fairly certain to me that you have to cater for this public stupidity(*) in order to shift volumes of product, i think that the FOSS community has the opportunity to do this without exploiting that public stupidity, or undermining the idealistic goals underpinning the FOSS movement.
(*) i dont mean this condescendingly - i'm referring to the general human capacity for stupidity that everyone has, including me ;-)
Without the financial imperative that Microsoft or McDonalds are totally dominated by, FOSS could provide the best of both worlds: stable, open, comprehensively featured, freely available software, that is also appealing on a superficial, casual level.
"Casual user" considerations can often require as much effort as the rest of the project, and as such aren't a particularly appealing expenditure of resources for a developer who is mostly concerned with producing powerful and robust software.
But as Microsoft and McDonalds have demonstrated, it is perceived value that counts in the public conciousness. In much the same way that the taste of Big Mac holds more weight than the fact it is poisonous filth, the horrific security and questionable licensing of Windows is disregarded because it takes less effort to understand how it works.
I think that commercial pressure on companies such as Red Hat, Linspire, etc will provide the pressure needed to expend sufficient resources on perceived value.
The great thing is, with the FOSS system, there doesnt need to be any trade-off. The incredible efficiency of open reusable code means the FOSS community now has the opportunity to create the software equivalent of a healthy Big Mac.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
I looked a bit further into DigiKam.. and realized there is also Showfoto, which is exactly what I'm looking for. Heck, I've been using Linux this long and didn't know about Showfoto, I feel like an idiot!
Meh.
What something on Linux that is better than GIMP & Photoshop? Photogenics is the ticket!
http://www.idruna.com/products.html
Err? Okay - try this in the GIMP.
I fail to see what is causing you problems.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
I am sure 20 slashdot users will say STFU troll but doesn't Wine http://www.winehq.org/ run photoshop? I have been using wine a lot lately and most programs that I don't have windows versions for started really running well with current wine versions 9.5+. I have not tried photoshop in wine, but I would be really suprised if it did not run.
The essential problem is not a problem with the OSS community. Its a problem with the fact that the OSS community is so diverse that it is not possible to label it in a way that does not avoid contradictions. One such contradiction you pointed out is the simple one that many OSS projects are not friendly enough to pull in converts yet many in the OSS community want everyone to convert from closed source software. But this falls apart when you don't try to apply a label to THE ENTIRE OSS COMMUNITY as a whole and focus on what each faction within the OSS community wants. And that sucks, because human nature prefers simple labels for everything.
What do I mean by that? Simple- some factions of the OSS community care about certain things more than other factions do. For example, maybe those in the GIMP community couldn't give a damn about converting another single user from Photoshop. Who could blame them- for years they have been assaulted by those demanding that GIMP do "this thing" or "this feature" exactly like Photoshop does. So maybe they don't care about spreading OSS to the professional crowd. I can tell you after a year of using desktop Linux I no longer push it with others like I normally would because I am sick of hearing people gripe about not getting their games to play like they want. This can also apply to other parts of life- my father quit offering a cosmetic procedure in his private medical practice just because he was tired of hearing people gripe about the side effects he told people they would have before he did anything. Sometime you get sick of complaining.
Yet those in another OSS group the goals might be very different. Those people supporting Firefox for example probably DO want to switch over most of the world because the higher marketshare Firefox has the less chance web designers will make pages that work only with IE. They obviously care because that group has things like "Spread Firefox" combined with an emphasis on marketing (full page Firefox ad in NYT). So for these people the gripes of ex-IE users matters a lot more.
The biggest problem with OSS community is that you can't tie together the GIMP people and the Firefox people and the Ubuntu people with a common label. EACH OSS COMMUNITY has its own priorities...each has its own wants and needs. This is a very bad situation for those of us who DEMAND simple labels for everything, and who are used to a software industry that DOES have a common label and purpose (to please customers to make money). What is even worse is when some takes this traditional perspective on software development ("you are doing this for me the user and no other reason") to the OSS communities and finds that a particular community could not give a damn about its potential "customers."
Some look to the OSS community and do not see the factions and believe the community has many contradictions. It doesn't. Its more complicated than that. Yes that sucks for many people who demand simplicity, and it is part of the reason OSS fans backlash against the "morons" that do not understand them or their cause.
Open Source Sushi
...is that if you install GhostScript and change some environment variables, you can manipulate any pdf file! No need to spend 100s of dollars on Acrobat to fill in pdf files! Unfortunately, you have to save them as bmp files instead...but you could drag the bmp into openoffice...and then export it again....
The points brought up in the article are nothing new. I've seen the same thing for *years*. The real problem is that I don't think the open source crowd really believes there are different classes of users.
Take a related case-- Microsoft Office. To many in the open source crowd, they look at things like StarOffice and so on and say, "see, we have exactly the same thing." No, you don't. You have exactly the same thing for casual users. The user who wants a spreadsheet to add a column of numbers and get a quick graph. The user who types a letter to Mom in a word processor. The user who wants a quick database. All these users are well served by what the open source community offers. And yes, that's probably the majority of users.
But it's not all. What many people in the open source world don't seem to get is that there are professional users with higher expectations. They don't see Excel as a spreadsheet, they see it as a platform where third-party data analysis add-ons are used. They don't see Word as a word processor, but a reporting component in a larger system. They don't do simple data analysis with Access, they are constructing huge databases with sophisticated relational links, referential integrity checks, and creating applications in Access.
I don't believe Microsoft Office is great software. But I do recognize that there are users who are using it far more sophisticated ways, who are not served by the current open source offerings.
The same with Photoshop in this article. The majority of users using GIMP are cleaning up vacation photos from their digital cameras or putting celebrity heads on animals. To the majority of people using GIMP would be equally well-served with any of the dozens of paint applications out there.
But professionals need more, much more. And most importantly, they aren't just using Photoshop itself, but also many of the third-party add-ons that make Photoshop a platform.
If the open source community wants to say, "hey, we've got some great applications that do the job for most people," then I fully agree. It's the people who don't seem to know that there is a level of sophistication beyond what they know who I have a problem with.
Package photoshop with wine. Wine needs to be properly configured to run photoshop. Include all the required dlls.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
If you need Photoshop, or are happy using Photoshop, then use it. On Mac, or Windows, or whatever platform it runs on.
If, as the article mentions, Photoshop is a Platform, and not just a piece of software, you really don't have a choice.
Maybe it will be released for Linux, maybe not. It almost certainly won't be released for SGI IRIX, or SUN Solaris.
That's pretty much all there is to that discussion.
===
Except that it leads to another question -- Why is Photoshop a platform OUTSIDE the limited area of Graphics Arts? In other words, why do a lot of people, who otherwise shouldn't care, use it?
For example, MS Excel is comparable with (say) GNU Gnumeric. I can't swear to the LATEST Excel version, but previous versions did really bad stats calculations. So, I used Gnumeric. However, MOST PEOPLE DON'T CARE ABOUT STATS! Exel is "good enough". People who did care, switched. In a similar vein, GIMP should be "good enough" but it isn't. Since Photoshop is quite expensive, more people should be happy with the "good enough" GIMP.
I don't do CMYK separations. I print pictures, and then forward stuff electronically to a publisher. The publisher can take care of it from there. She knows what to do (including "Photoshop").
There IS a reason that Photoshop is popular. "Photoshop" has become a common verb. There is an underground of "Photoshop" knowledge. Graft a head onto this picture &etc. And it must be easy to bootleg Photoshop. Otherwise it sure is an expensive way to "goatse" your photographs.
An interesting way to make money -- encourage bootlegging to provide a base, and then charge a fortune from the professionals.
Ratboy
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
if more than 10% of the posters here have ever used Adobes Graphics Suite for some time > 3 Month in daily use AND gimp also for the same amount of time on at least similar tasks. I do not believe so; after a few days Adobes products (i.e. Illustrator) kick the ass of all other Drawing/Image modification (unspecialized) Tools, if run on decent Hardware AND used for creating printable Documents. The UI is a little bit strange for a few days and featuritis does not make things better in the beginning, but when you get the concepts, which are less counterintuitive than the xfig GUI, the UI is very efficient. On the other hand: for most photo operations I use the gimp. Before Adobes procuct has finished loading the plugins on my computer, I am already done with editing using xfig or gimp and there are functions in the gimp which I actually did not find in Adobes products, since everyone who wants to play around is encouraged to do so. And I scripted the gimp when scriping was an unknown word in drawing/painting programs.
Wow, you are really out of touch.
Did you even click on the link you gave for CMYK support? Separate is just a rudimentary plug-in. Proper seps are deeply complex and require core support to be done properly. Even the Gimp developers agree that CMYK is simply not supported. Why would you pretend otherwise?
And then you bring up Cinepaint as an example of the Gimp supporting 16-bit pixels?? It has been almost SIX YEARS since CinePaint could be considered a part of the Gimp. From your own link, "CinePaint is undergoing a transition from being a monolithic GTK-based tool to a constellation of applications that use FLTK." Dropping CinePaint is, in my opinion, the worst decision that the Gimp project ever made. In the past six years CinePaint has thrived while the Gimp has pretty much stagnated. Oops.
So, you must agree that the *Gimp* supports neither CMYK nor 16-bit, right? If not, have you got that LART handy? You may need a healthy dose of it...
If the answer is "yes", I'm moving the item up my to-do list. That's exactly the sort of situation that does get to me. Coders have every right to decide what they want to code and what patches they want to accept, but there is a big difference between being selective and becoming stagnant. Selective is necessary. Stagnant is best left to swamps and marshland.
In fact, if early coders had kept pace, the GIMP might never have been written. Between existing painting programs, the Utah Raster Toolkit and xv, early image manipulators had plenty of resources. At least, for the time. Those tools have long-since rusted.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I'd be the first to admit that GIMP is annoying. I've asked them many times to re-do the GUI. Look at projects like K-3D for evidence that massive GUI changes can be made, in complex software, if you care about users. BUT, I also want to point out that Photoshop is absolutely NOT the be-all-and-end-all of bitmap image editing. I'd much prefer to see a vector/bitmap combo package, like Xara are now developing as open source, or something like Corel Draw/Paint. Photoshop is basically an over-developed retouching utility, not an art program.
Updates are often and free. With every version it keeps improving. It is made by artists for artists.
...but no one offering to write a different GUI for GIMP. Stop bitching and do something about it.
Is it not possible to fork the code? Maybe call it the PIMP fork (Pleasurable Image Manipulation Program)?
If forking is not allowed, then just write a plug-in that has an improved GUI. Or something. My point is, this is something YOU can do something about. Stop whining and do it.
The GIMP is a fabulous tool, but: I hate the floating tool windows--having to click around to find the tool window I need. This is not a complaint specific to the GIMP, Inkscape and XSANE have a similarly frustrating interface. I could live the floaty bits if they would just make all windows raise to top if you clicked on any part of the application.
Well, duh, that's what internal representations are for and it has nothing to do with what I was saying. When I write an image filter, I use a 32 bit float for each channel, regardless of the input file type. Gimp does a similar trick. General input libraries handle file formats. My point was that it's unlikely that a camera will be able to capture 16 bits per channel, your eyes can't tell the difference and that people who spend big bucks on such devices are usually wasting their money. That's double the case if the camera maker uses some silly format for storage representation that they won't tell anyone about.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
As for Cinepaint, I'm going out on an extremely short limb and guess that you've never run it. I have. I've run more programs than you could count. Cinepaint, included in say, for instance, MediainLinux IS Gimp, with fewer plugins and 8/16/32-bit support and a sexier name (since everybody harps on the name). Same interface, same menus, same multiple windows everybody harps on. I addressed all that you bring up in this post, and considered it too bleeding obvious to repeat.
You can get one point back if you can even tell me the origins of the term "LART".
Hate to bust your chops, GIMP apologist, but Photoshop's Save For The Web has MORE choices than GIMP. More controls. More features. More details.
You clearly never use Photoshop or you would have understood the GP's point about the measily, paltry GIMP output offerings versus the comparatively deep and robust offerings of Photoshop.
You are indicative of the GIMP fanboys who have NO IDEA what Photoshop users need. And have.
"That is why you fail."
-littlegreendude
UFRaw and dcraw appear to give me a nice way to load RAW photos into the GIMP. The conversion from RAW is done with 16-bits per component accuracy, although the end result will then be sampled down to 8 bits per component. Obviously, this is not quite the same as having the 16-bits per component accuracy available all the time, but at least things like color balance, brightness/gamma etc. can be tweaked within the more accurate representation before the downsampling.
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
And there are so many gfx-pro's using linux that it turns out at nr.1 of the most wanted apps list? What does it mean, Linux desktop is used most by gfx artists?
You're kidding right, a bunch of people just filled in some app because they want PS (and only PS) and not Gimp (or any other linux alternative). I wonder why, 90% of the people don't even need all the power that the gimp gives them.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
I only know onw person using Photoshop on a Mac, but he's in the graphics design biz. I know a lot of everyday PC users who use "photoshop" as a verb when they need to edit a photo, remove the two-finger bunny ears, redeye, etc. These aren't Macheads or Linux geeks, these are average PC users.
I've used gimp a little. More accurately, I've tried to use gimp a little. I wasn't very successful, and I wanted to do some extremely basic stuff like make a jpeg with some text in it. I couldn't figure out how to crop off extra margins around the text I managed to create. In trying to place a couple lines of text, it kept doing weird things and one of the lines was sortof faded, as if it was stuck in some mode I didn't understand or know how to get out of. Granted, I didn't read any howtos or anything, but it was such a stupidly simple thing that would have been extremely easy in MS Paint, but I only have a Solaris box at work and I learned to hate the gimp.
I've never used Photoshop myself at all. If it's as hard to figure out such a simple thing as it was in gimp, then I don't want to. For the love of god I hope it's more intuitive than gimp is. For myself, given the choice between gimp and some other tool I've never used before, I'll take the one I'v enever used before, as I already know I'm not productive with gimp.
Might gimpshop be the answer? Possibly. It's not as easy as "emerge gimpshop" though, so for my home linux box I'm probably too lazy and will just boot into Windows and use paint, or use an old Amiga program I like, and at work I'm pretty much screwed but luckily I don't have to deal with such things at work very often.
It doesn't matter how powerful or what feature set gimp has. Often average-joe business types get the final say, and if they can't get gimp, then they won't sign off on it. If they're accustomed to Photoshop, that's what they'll prefer to stick with. If I was a businessman, I'd prefer to avoid gimp based on my personal experience with it so far. Photoshop is a big brand name that will of course be in demand.
I think a better idea than trying to convert Photoshop users to gimp is to get Photoshop well supported in Wine. Maybe it already is. Get a good IT guy to deal with supporting it as surely Adobe won't, and the users can have their favorite tool, and businessmen can choose Linux while keeping with the big graphics brand.
I love KDE and all, love it, but that's still basically an insult to Photoshop and Photoshop users.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
People have used the terms Folder and Document since long before Windows 2000. Something isn't new just because you hadn't heard of it.
I believe Microsoft introduced the terminology with Windows 95. DOS, like Unix, had "files" and "directories". Folders and documents probably make more sense to an inexperienced user since they correspond more closely to real world equivalents. In the real world documents go in files (folders). The term folders was no doubt chosen to avoid confusion with the legacy use of the term files.
Suck figs.
People have been complaining about the GIMP UI for ages. The coders have made efforts to reduce the pain. However, as far as I've ever seen, very few open source programs ever get their UI iteratively improved towards perfection. As with Eclipse versus Emacs, they're surpassed by newer programs with fresh UIs, more modern design ideas, better dev methods.
that's still basically an insult to Photoshop and Photoshop users.
Eh? Where's the insult? He merely suggested a Linux alternative that might be more suited to Photoshop users than the GIMP.
If the GIMP people needed to make money off of the software, they would be required to listen to what the users wanted. However, they don't. So they can make a piece of software that pleases themselves, programmers who sometimes dabble in image manipulation.
My other first post is car post.
I uploaded two images to this gallery at http://www.pbase.com/gorim/raw_workflow
Basically it shows one of the reasons why one would need to work at 12-16 bits / color channel, with full sized sample images I took and processed.
I am working on a second example, one that shows introduction of artifacts when too many filters/transforms are applied to an 8 bit / color channel image (as one might need to do in reality, as opposed to arbitrary manipulations that could make anything look bad).
This thread has mostly died down, but hopefully people who are interested still manage to take a look and if it helps spur GIMP development, so much the better.
Because Acrobat 7.0 is not Acrobat version 6?
I tried photoshop, but I do not like it. Maybe because I do not like Adobe in general, especially its PDF format and especially when it is placed on the web. PDF freezes my browser (and computer) and I have to loose my time on this stupidity.
The *best* support you could get in Gimp is a work-around.
That may be true but it's not due to patents. Basic CMYK is supported in the new Krita, and work is progressing on color cal and Pantone seps. If patents are not a problem for other projects, why are they showstoppers for the Gimp? If you want to discuss this further, how about posting the #'s of the potentially infringing patents?
Cinepaint, included in say, for instance, MediainLinux IS Gimp
Yes, old Cinepaint was derived from the Gimp. But, as you say, it doesn't have many features and all further developemnt is dead. Unless someone steps up to maintain and merge it, it's irrelevant for the discussion at hand (I'm not holding my breath). If you recall, we're talking about whether or not the *Gimp* can do better than 8-bit channels. And it can't.
So, my points are secure. But, hey, a point to you for knowing how to look something up in the Jargon dictionary!
It seems the GIMP project has stagnated, exemplified by some bad decisions in the past (see non-cooperation with FilmGIMP/CinePaint).
Is it time for a fork, a la XFree86/X.org?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
"Who says it sucks? You? Maybe the some people think it's great."
I gave it an honest try, but eventually removed it. I cringed every time I used the perverse "go out of its way to be difficult" file load/save interface. A good example of the poor planning that went into it is found in the Rotate command. There is a crippled, useless verison of Rotate command, easily found in a menu where it is supposed to be. The usable full-fuction Rotate (with the same name) is buried deep inside a tools/extras/etc menu. They never thought to only have one Rotate (a good one) and make it easy to find.
It comes across as a shareware written by a middle-school kid (the kind where the kid writes it and nobody ever likes it enough to register and pay him). Or, perhaps like a "camel" because we know more than one person wrote it. Ever hear the joke that a camel is a horse designed by a committee?
I bagged it and went back to Paintshop 4.14. You know, the one that is about 10 years old, and looks much more up-to-date and refined than the latest kludge of a GIMP.
...can be a bit of a bastard, and when you do find it, the newly installed software might not work, or might break something else.
For a case in point, the wireless on this laptop is unreliable under MS-Windows XP and bulletproof under Mandriva Linux 2006.0; it was even less reliable until I figured out that ZoneAlarm kept forgetting to allow DNS access to fully-blessed programs (I had to give it carte blanche on DNS), and finding that out was pretty obscure.
Installing stuff on Mandriva Linux is a breeze, you just scroll down to it in RPMdrake, click on it and here comes the package and everything it needs to survive. I understand that Synaptics, YAST and friends are pretty much the same. On MS-Windows, you first have to search out the program (forex, on TuCows) and a program to do what you want may not be available from a trusted supplier, so you probably have to install it "blind" from some random site on the net -- or three or four of them. And even the ones without nastyware enclosed might have specific, conflicting prerequisites, in which case you're screwed: pick your favourite and delete the other(s). If you can. Under Linux I have the option of pulling down an SRPM (the source! shock, horror) and clicking on it to have the machine make a version tailored to itself. Oh, yes, and if you delete a package (using one central tool), it's really gone (it and optionally any dependencies unique to it).
VB is an effing nightmare to maintain, or to build anything really large in. Use Ruby and FreeRIDE instead -- yes, even on MS-Windows.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing