Slashdot Mirror
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."
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...
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.
It's not there yet, but look out for Krita. It has great ICCM colour support, but it's kind of slow.
I'm sure there are plenty of developers that simply want Dreamweaver etc. who are quite capable of coding a standards compliant web page by hand. Nowhere in my original post did I say or imply otherwise. That doesn't take away the fact that a large number of web developers are completely lost without their tools. I've done a ton of web development for major corporations (mainly server side programming not the HTML/CSS) and I've worked with a ton of them. I also have many contacts who are web developers and the good ones always get a kick out of how many so called professionals in the industry are completely lost without their tools.
"A Lisp programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing." - Alan Perlis
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
For dealing with photos or even scanned images you will often want more than 8bpp, especially when you want to do things like shadow enhancement or highlight recovery. In this way it lets you choose what will be thrown away instead of having the camera throw information away when it converts to JPEG. There is a lot of detail that is often thrown away that can be brought out with the right software.
For example, one technique used when shooting photos in high contrast lighting conditions is to shoot the photos a bit underexposed then go back and adjust them after the fact, since otherwise the camera can screw up the highlights, often causing them to shift colors due to saturation. Having the extra bits gives a lot more room to change the photo later.
RAW images are becoming increasingly popular, and though there are several different formats, just supporting Canon and Nikon will probably make 90% of the people happy. For those not familiar with raw image formats, most high-end cameras support more than 8 bits per pixel, often 12 bits and preserve the original CCD/CMOS mosaic pattern. Code like dcraw has already been written which can read most of the formats out there. I myself as a Linux user have fallen in love with Bibble, which allows me to quickly go through hundreds or even thousands of photos and fix things like white balance, shadow recovery, lens distortion, sharpening, etc. all while supporting the higher color depth.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Look, the lack of CMYK isn't the show stopper that it once was. Many modern workflows use RGB images throughout and have a colour-managed approach to conversion to CMYK that only happens just before the final output stage (be that to PDF or to an image/platesetter)
There are many advantages to an RGB workflow - smaller image sizes and easier for software to work with is one, less RAM and disk space used, less data to crunch etc.
Using a fully ICC profiled workflow, from capture/acquisition through retouching and editing and finally to output means that the one source image can be retargeted at a number of different output devices and keep the highest possible quality. The days of using pre-separated CMYK images are drawing to a close, as once you've converted to CMYK you don't want to go flipping back and forth between that and RGB. Also, once you've got CMYK, you will find it very hard to use the same source image for, say, printing on newsprint at 75lpi and printing the same image in a glossy magazine on high-brightness stock at 175lpi, or using stochastic screening...
Anyway, having said all that, I totally agree with you that the GIMP is totally unsuited to a professional workflow.
Time is money, and the time you waste with GIMP over a couple of weeks will easily cover the purchase price for the entire Adobe Creative Suite where you have a heap of apps that all work together and, more importantly, are recognised in the industry as having proven themselves to work...
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
Novells conclusion from the survay
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Actually no. The main reasoon GIMP is lacking lots of things is lack of active developers. There's really nothing that keeps us from adding support for high color depths and/or other color spaces like CMYK except that GIMP is being developed by a small group of volunteers with limited free time. If you want to help out, there are plenty of tasks in our bug tracker over at bugzilla.gnome.org that are waiting to be implemented. The GIMP developers will be happy to hold your hand and answer your questions.
Adobe most certainly sold thousands of copies of Photoshop 3.0 for IRIX, since those came bundled with certain versions of SGI's entry level workstations (Indys, O2s). However, as another poster already mentioned, this was a very shoddy port, essentially just the MacOS version recompiled with a MacOS on Unix library. It looked and worked like the Mac version, was slow and unreliable and was completely out of place on a normal irix desktop. On top of all this, back in those days Photoshop wasn't "the" standard like it is today, it was just one of many image manipulation packages, and especially on Irix, there were quite a few to choose from.
I have licenses for Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere on one of my SGIs at home, as well as the now discontinued Eclipse, and Eclipse was miles ahead of Photoshop back then. I don't use any of the Adobe packages anymore, mostly because i find them totally awkward to use - significantly worse than gimp.
a) Pay someone to do the changes
Kind of misses the point of free software. When you say, "it's free, so stop your bitching," what you're really saying is "you get what you pay for, and you're better off paying for it." How does that make open source software better again?
b) Do the changes yourself
Not everybody is a programmer. This is the first excuse that a lot of people run for, and it's weak. The whole point of an "open-source community" is the idea of people exchanging ideas to create really useful software for everybody. End users's opinions shouldn't be shot down just because they're not programmers. Even real programmers might have good opinions but just not enough spare time in their day to dive into the cruft of somebody else's buggy code and start making it better.
One of the biggest complaints of the guy who cobbled together GimpShop was that all the resources were scattered around with no rhyme or reason, making tracking things down really hard to do. If a programmer came in and fixed all that, who's to guarantee that the maintainers will buy it? There are egos involved, not to mention a "community;" one person can't fix everybody else's mistakes at one go.
c) Don't use GIMP and STFU
Yep, that's a sure-fire way to make the Gimp better. "Sure, our program sucks, but you don't have to use it." Might as well pack it in and call it quits with that kind of attitude. What's the point of creating software if people don't want to use it? Why even make it public it if you're not prepared to hear what the rest of the world hears about it?
What we're talking about is the large majority of serious Photoshop users, not just one or two malcontents. I think it would be cool if the Gimp competed. There are just a few basics that could be implemented that would make some serious waves in Gimp adoption, without turning the Gimp into some sort of bastardized Photoshop clone.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life