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GIMP 2.4 Released
Enselic writes "After almost three years since the release of GIMP 2.2, the GIMP developers have just announced the release of GIMP 2.4. The release notes speak of scalable bitmap brushes, redesigned rectangle/ellipse selection tools, redesigned crop tool, a new foreground selection tool, a new align tool, reorganized menu layouts, improved zoomed in/zoomed out image display quality, improved printing and color management support and a new perspective clone tool."
How long since GIMP 2.3 was released or am I missing something important?
In either case, here at Microsoft, we feel standards are important. And we have fun, too. Doug Mahugh, Microsoft
I hope they moved the gui closer to that of Paintshop. I can't tell you how many times I've been unable to edit an image for one reason or another, or the expected behavior is what happens. I know a lot of people love GIMP and its scripting abilities, but seriously, when they're trying to enter the market dominated by a few programs with that same gui and behavior, they should replicate it.
Maybe 5 of the posts will have something actually illuminating. The rest of them will be GIMP and Photoshop fanbois going at each other. Let me save everybody the trouble.
GIMP has an unprofessional name! Waaaaaaaaaaah!
GIMP only does 8-bit color! Waaaaaaaaaaah!
GIMP isn't UI identical to PhotoShop on every menu 3 levels deep! Waaaaaaaaaaaah!
GIMP manages windows sucky! Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
Does not! Does too! Does not!.................
for feedback when you develop a paint program. The GUI is horrible, and it only takes a five-minute interview with a Photoshop user to understand what needs to be done. I think GIMP is suffering from a serious case of bad focus.
And they can't release a non-US version that people in the US will "accidentally" download?
Despite your lame attempt at humor, you make a very good point. Photoshop is a tool, and a very versatile one at that, which is used by professionals to get the job done right. It's expensive and complicated, and for good reason.
The GIMP, on the other hand, is a comparatively simple tool, though still very useful and quite versatile in its own right. It is what us amateurs use because the pro tools are overkill and/or too expensive. It also happens to be free, in more than one sense of the word, which makes it ideal for its target audience. For example, I do web graphics sometimes. Why in the world would I spend close to US$500 for something that is rarely used and would be overkill to boot? I'd rather use my free image program with more tools in its toolkit than I would ever need for that task.
This is why I will never understand the PS vs. GIMP debate. GIMP will never be a Photoshop killer because there is no need for a Photoshop killer. Those who need the power of Photoshop will buy it (or steal it), those who don't will use GIMP or another simple tool.
GIMP was NEVER intended to replace, duplicate or mimic photoshop. Neither was it created to draw users from photoshop. Unfamiliar doesn't mean bad or uncomfortable. They go their own way. Some like it, some don't. You are free to use gimpshop if you like to. I really see no points in this interface discussion.
For only $649
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/index.html
I know if I was just starting which one I would try first. (And I mean try very very hard)
I hate to bring in price as a selling point but that's almost two weeks (after tax) wage for me.
Fortunately that functionality can be obtained through a plugin:
http://cue.yellowmagic.info/softwares/separate.html
How many people that care deeply about CMYK also care deeply about spending a couple of hundred bucks a year on software?
GIMP needs to be better than Photoshop for those people to use it, not equivalent(because they feel a little safe with Photoshop).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Americans?
Respecting your software freedom to share and modify the program has never been an option with Photoshop, no matter how much you pay. Freedom has always been a part of the GIMP.
Why stress software freedom? I want the social solidarity that you only get in freedom; I want to be independent from masters and make sure my computer only obeys me. I'd rather have less functional or powerful free software than a more powerful or reliable proprietary program because I can hire people to improve the free program or I can ask the community to help me improve the free program. I can't free Photoshop. The catch here is that most people haven't been taught to value their software freedom, so they don't know to look for it and they haven't been taught to think of the consequences when their freedom is absent. I aim to change this by teaching people to value freedom for its own sake. I hope you will too.
Digital Citizen
Probably the most useful thing in this new release is the barrel distortion correction abilities and red eye tools. I haven't gotten to play with it yet, but I hope it enables setting/saving lens parameters for different cameras.
This will definitely streamline my photo editing, as I had to go to panotools and hugin to correct the barrel distortion in my point-and-shoot cameras, but the gimp for color correction, cropping, etc. The improved color menu layout and cropping tools will be great (I always hated that alternate-diagonals cropping system it had before).
The 16 bit color and CMYK, I couldn't give half a crap about. I mean, what proportion of gimp users need that stuff anyway? One percent? Half a percent? I think most gimp detractors just like panning something for the sake of it.
Signed,
A GIMP user for years.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
I know GIMP isn't supposed to be everything to everyone, so it's not fair to say "Well program X can do it, so why can't GIMP?!?!?"* But seriously, should it be this hard to make a freaking circle?
*BTW, "program X" in this example is MS Paint.
My grandmother used anecdotal evidence all the time, and she lived to be 120 years old.
in our metro newspaper there is not one job opening in photography that does not include expertise in Photoshop as a requirement.
these shops have no interest in a program that increases their legal exposure. no interest in a program that can't deliver basic functionality and live within the law.
That is so amazingly wrong that it's impressive.
No, they never said that about 2.0. 2.0 was focused on revitalizing GIMP development, restructuring and modularizing its rather messy internals, plus a few features.
A few people theorized about GEGL in 2.2, but no one with a clue ever really expected it. 2.2 did add some nice new features, but it was still primarily about fixing the code up -- largely so that potential contributors wouldn't take one look at it and run screaming.
GEGL *was* expected to be in 2.4. Various things took longer than expected, though, and the developers decided it was better to release another version without GEGL to get some of the features they had in the works out there, and to avoid delaying 2.4 for another year or so.
GEGL is not only expected for 2.6, but GEGL integration is the primary goal for 2.6. Sven Neumann recently said that 2.6 may well turn out to be functionally almost identical to 2.4, the only difference being the fact that GEGL is used as the internal graphics representation. If you don't know who Sven is, suffice it to say that he's a guy whose opinion carries a lot of weight in the GIMP developer community.
Time will tell, but between the vastly cleaned-up and modularized internals, and the power and simplicity of GEGL, I expect GIMP development to really take off after 2.6. Most of the code is now improved to the point that a reasonably competent developer can dig into it and start making productive changes very quickly, and GEGL will make doing really cool stuff very easy, which should encourage its use as a test environment for people doing innovative things with graphics. The new XML-based file format that comes along with GEGL should facilitate all sorts of other little tools, too -- you'll be able to reimplement most of Imagemagick with XSLT if you want. All of this should not only make GIMP development easier and faster but should *also* increase the GIMP developer population.
Or not. But I think things are going to get much more interesting in GIMP-land after GEGL is integrated.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
There's patents for RGB->CMY(K) conversion ?
... this was probably nearly 20 years ago. You'd think that if there were such a patent it would have expired long ago given that computer driven CMYK printing has been around for a long time relatively speaking.
Crap I must have violated those a bunch of times when I bought my first color printer and had to write software to drive it
I think you mean "faze", unless you're worried about the price tag synchronizing you with a waveform.
(Sorry--you just happened to overflow my patience counter for this mistake.)
um .. and when they go to press, what kind of software do they use to convert to cmyk or spot inks?
That is a little egocentric. To make my point let's just take "industrialized" countries/regions other than the U.S. You would have to agree that they would have a lot of graphic artists in that these are predominantly capitalistic based economies where advertising is important. Using population as a roughly equivalent measure of market base (numbers are rough but pretty close):
:D
:) ).
European Union: 500,000,000
Japan: 127,000,000
Russia: 143,000,000
Ukraine: 46,000,000
And throw in Canada: 33,000,000
and Australia: 21,000,000
Those total about 800,000,000 people.
America: 300,000,000
Of the ones who do care, the majority are not in America. Of any one country sure, but that doesn't really matter. Companies and people buy software. And anyway, even if there aren't as many advertising agencies in those other places (and I would think there would be comparable numbers) the overwhelming population advantage of the other industrial countries still says you are very likely wrong.
And then there are the up and comers like India. Even if only a fraction of their population can be considered at an 'industrial level' (recognizing that there are still areas of poverty and ignorance), given the population size, that still represents a lot of people who care. And as their country gets more advanced that will only increase. So for arguments sake let's add another say 250,000,000 million people to draw from. I'd include China, but they would probably just pirate whatever someone else made anyway.
And like I said, the rest of the world is rising economically while the U.S.A. seems to be shrinking. Probably due to stupidity like software patents and over emphasis on stock holders profits instead of long term growth of companies (short term gain instead of long term steady performance... a tortoise and the hare algorithm
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
The tool in question is improving with each iteration. Eventually it will get to a level when it is usable by professional people, as it is it is good enough for many people.
We had *nothing* 10 years ago.
Some people simply don't understand the dynamics of open software and how the cumulative improvements are not lost and will eventually get you where you need to be.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You seem to think CMYK is somehow 32 bit (8 bits of each?) and that because 8-bit rgb has 24 bits it can't represent it, but because 16-bit rgb has 48 bits it can.
This is wrong. CMYK has FOUR dimensions. It is completely impossible to represent it in a 3 dimensional space. You claim is like saying that if I put finer graduations on a ruler, it can suddenly measure 2 dimensions rather than one!
The converters you talk about (and incidentally are in Gimp already, and in printer drivers when you send them rgb colors) map the 3-D space into the 4-D space. But they cannot fill the 4-D space, any more than you could fill a room with a piece of paper (while keeping the paper's shape a non-fractal). Thus there are CMYK colors that are not output. This has NOTHING to do with color resolution. No useful RGB->CMYK converter will produce both CMY=0,K=1 and CMY=1,K=1 output. Even if the CMYK device was 1 bit per ink and thus only capable of printing 16 different colors, you could not represent all those 16 possibilities with 24, or even 48, or 96 bits, or an infinite number of bits of rgb!
In reality the highest quality CMYK printing devices available have much less than 8 bit resolution in how much ink they lay down (once you take into account errors in ink delivery and spread). The resolution is so low that the volume represented by the RGB->CMYK conversion is over-sampled by many times when the source is 8 bit rgb. So actually 16 bits does not help one tiny bit in the area you are asking for.
The reason for more than 8 bits is for processing in the digital realm. For instance if your picture is 1/4 as bright as you want it, and you multiply by 4, then you lose two bits of resolution (as the bottom 2 will be zero). If your screen shows 8 bits and the original was 8 bits, you have effectively reduced your screen to 6 bits. If the original was 16 bits (and your screen was showing the top 8 bits) then after the multiply your screen is still showing an 8 bit image (the top 8 bits of the remaining 14). (that is not real accurate, a correct program with knowledge of sRGB would do something more complex and you would lose more than 2 bits at the bright end, less at the dark end).
Also more than 8 bits should absolutely use 16 bit half float data. 16 bit integers is a total waste of effort. Float data has the advantage that it is not clamped (this eliminates gamut limitations), and that a vastly larger range of useful data. Even 16 bit data would start to lose resolution on an 8 bit screen if multiplied by more than 256 (actually somewhat larger if sRGB is correctly followed). But 16-bit float would allow a multplication by 65540 or so before there would be loss. The only reason for 16-bit integers was that older computers could not do float fast enough, but this is not a problem now, modern graphics cards even take half-float data directly.
The answer is unfortunately very simple: not enough contributions. The number of active GIMP and GEGL developers is probably much smaller than you think.
Most developers work on GEGL during their spare time and this is not always easy. When you only have a handful of active developers and they can only spend a few hours per week on improving the code or discussing enhancements, it is difficult to do everything quickly. Also, there was a gap of several years during which almost nobody worked on GEGL.
I think that if only a few percent of the people who complain about GIMP or GEGL would try to start contributing to the projects, then GIMP would have had perfect support for 16 bits per color channel since several years. Note that there are many ways to contribute and there is room for everybody. Besides programmers who help with the code, the contributions to the documentation, translations, bug reports, web site and tutorials are always appreciated.
-Raphaël
.... and it only takes a UI expert 30 seconds to tell you so (I am telling you now).
The problem you are referring to is familiarity with another UI (in this case Photoshop's one), this problem is not intrinsic to the GIMP, the developers can't do much about people unwilling to try new things, nor should they.
People happy with other tools should keep using those tools, people trying to use a new tool (for whatever reason compelling them to do so, perhaps a different set of features, or in this case perhaps about legitimate concerns with openness of the source code, or the price) should at least make an effort to understand the idiosyncrasies of a new tool (sorry, but 10 minutes of biased assessment is not good enough).
This problem is normally overcomed by abundant, easy to understand documentation, you would have a point if you were highlighting this problem.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Are these designers for whom RGB is inadequate using CYMK monitors, or are they designing outside the range they can see on screen?
Oh, shut the fuck up about CMYK already. It's a piece of piss to convert between RGB and CMYK -- basically no more than an extension of de Morgan's theorem, or the star-delta transform in electronics. Your fucking printer driver does it on the fly in real time every time you print anything. And your eyes can't see more than 8 bits per colour per pixel. In fact, they can't distinguish more than four pixels per millimetre.
As for the user interface, think about this: Reverse gear on a Ford is to the right and towards you. Reverse gear on a Vauxhall is to the left and away from you. And here's the thing: People get used to this and manage to move between cars without problems. You could get used to the GIMP's user interface if you could be bothered. In fact, if you understood the abstract concepts (like when the gear lever is in reverse, the car moves the other way) you probably wouldn't notice the user interface.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
It isn't just advertising and it isn't just print.
You are irrelevant to the commercial artist and designer anywhere in the world if you can't match Photoshop point-for-point.
In January 2003, the Scottish Parliament debated a petition...to refer to the blue in the Scottish flag (saltire) as 'Pantone 300'. Countries such as Canada and South Korea and organizations such as the FIA have also chosen to refer to specific Pantone colors to use when producing flags. U.S. States including Texas have set legislated the PMS colors of their flags. Pantone
And it comes full circle.
Guy 1: Why doesn't GIMP do CMYK?
Guy 2: CMYK is patented.
Guy 3: Why doesn't someone implement CMYK anyway?
Guy 4: Professionals won't use a patent-infringing product.
Guy 5: I'm a professional and I don't care; why should others?
Guy 6: Because GIMP doesn't do CMYK.
And every one modded interesting, informative, or insightful. I love Slashdot.