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."
...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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
>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...
actually i think he may be ON his period.... don't mess with him.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
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.
ôó
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?
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.
Photoshop is most certainly NOT easy to use. No professional-grade application is. It may, once you're used to it, be fairly efficient, but it sure as hell is not easy.
"GIMP should be enough for anybody."
::ducks::
I do. I'm a professional, not a hobbyist, and want to do my damn work, not fuck around with the interface.
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 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
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.
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.
IIRC, the GIMP is lacking a lot of things because of software patents.
http://outcampaign.org/
One of the main reasons people don't care about GIMP, isn't just the questionably poor usability. It's still the features. Last time I check, things such as the ability to group layers, advanced typographical control, adjustable object effects, and color modes, were still far behind Photoshop.
Even in photography, I still find the GIMP lacking. The lack of LAB mode, which I often use, is one example.
The GIMP is a good project, and it sure has it's uses, but it's still far away from a Photoshop replacment for many people. It's like saying that MySQL is a suitable replacment for Oracles's top-of-the-line DB. For some; sure, for others; no F'n way.
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."
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 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
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.
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
It's called Ubuntu 5.10. It comes with GIMP. I gave a disk to a brain damaged man and he did it himself, no phone calls.
I'm not even lying.
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.
Never mind. I found it:
1. Photoshop
2. Autocad
3. Dreamweaver
4. iTunes
5. Macromedia Studio
6. Flash
7. Quicken
8. Visio
9. Quickbooks
10. Lotus Notes
I am batting zero today. Time to sleep.
Table-ized A.I.
Gimp for OSX requires X11. The average Mac user will not understand why they have to install this esoteric thing from their original OS install disks just to try out a graphics program. Then they will not understand why the main menu of the program (which by their reckoning is the one at the top of the screen -- the X11 menu) has absolutely nothing to do with the application that they are running.
The toolbox in a separate window thing, which I actually like on Linux, doesn't work on Mac because the first click on a window in OSX selects the window and does not activate any elements in that window. This means that selecting a new tool requires double-clicking in the toolbox window. Then using the tool requires double-clicking in the image window -- once to select the window and once to use the tool.
The entire GIMP user interface is alien on OSX. The application feels completely out of place. And this coming from someone who uses (and likes) the UI that everyone hates on his multi-head, multi-workspace Linux machine at work. In that environment, I like the separate toolbox and the separate image windows and the context menu. It works for me in that environment. But on OSX (which I'm running at home -- and have GIMP installed on) it just doesn't work.
"I have a good idea why it's hard to verify programs. They're usually wrong." --Manuel Blum, FOCS 94
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.
But do MDI and SDI really exist in the same way on the Mac as they do on Windows? Having a single menu bar at the top of the screen makes a big difference.
Photoshop on a Mac and a maximized Photoshop on Windows work almost exactly the same, as far as the user is concerned. The only difference is that on Windows you get a flat background behind everything, whle on Mac OS you can see the desktop in the background.
Sure, if you've got other apps open, you can mix-n-match, but for the base case of one app open with multiple docs, it's nearly identical.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
What is it, exactly, that Photoshop does for you? Read your mind and draw the image on the screen while you sit back ten feet with your arms folded and meditate? So there's lots of little windows instead of one big one. So most of the functions are accessible with a right-click to the canvas. What's the big deal?
Does this help to at least clarify some of why it's that way?
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.
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."
I'd gladly accept that challenge. I'm pretty certain my Dual PII 300 with 768 Megs of RAM would be only slightly slower than your workstation. Chances are there would be maybe 20-30 second differences in most math intensive filters. I've got a P4 workstation as well and it doesn't do much better than the old dual P II...
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
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
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.