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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
CMYK colors and other functionality that keeps it from being able to replace Photoshop completely? Not to understate all the effort that has been put into it, but something like that does seem pretty basic for three years of development.
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.
I've recommended some artists to try gimp instead of proprietary stuff. The major complaints were about drawing tablet support. Gimp has tablet support, but the options available to the artist are very limited. Also, there are no smoothing algorithms for tablet-drawn strokes - a pretty major drawback if you draw on the computer instead of scanning things in. /.)
Other than that, gimp is awesome - and almost everything you can think of is available as a plugin - I've already tried the new context-sensitive resizing plugin (context-sensitive resizing has been mentioned a few months ago on
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
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!.................
Sorry all, I meant layer styles, those incredibly useful things that let you add various effects like outlines and shadows and then adjust them dynamically later. My brain was somewhere else when I wrote the original post.
Adjustment layers. If you're not familiar with the adjustment layers that Photoshop 5 software introduced, they're layers that copy pixels from layers below them and run a filter on them, and they automatically update when the layers below them are changed. It's been said that GIMP is one of the best Photoshop 3/4 clones around.
A lot of the key algorithms, particularly for color space conversion, are patented. Guess who holds a bunch of those patents?
Have you tried inkscape for tablet support? This appears to come from GTK so YMMV but is stated to support pressure and angle sensitivity.
I haven't, but I love the app. They've made considerable advances in the last couple of releases. I know there's a tutorial by a guy who draws and shades comics using it. Also that you can simplify lines or using some (built in python) scripts add jitter or add jitter as you draw.
If you've not tried it recently it's worth a punt.
I'm using Slackware 12 and installed the development release via autopackage (http://inkscape.org/download/?lang=en).
Artists are not the only people who ever use Gimp. Many users only use it to crop/resize images and maybe tweak the color balance a little bit. In other words, make artists your primary target, but don't ignore geeks' opinion, either. The GUI is horrible, and it only takes a five-minute interview with a Photoshop user to understand what needs to be done. Disagree 100%
Here's why: just because Photoshop is the "industry leader" doesn't mean it's perfect - nor does it mean that the UI is perfect. What it means is simply this: it's the "industry leader".
Gimp UI is actually pretty well thought out and is highly customizable. You can learn the UI inside and out in a day, even if you're really lazy/slow. I think GIMP is suffering from a serious case of bad focus. Agree 100%
As with many other open sourced projects, the developers don't follow the same common path, but instead spread out into their areas of interest. A perfect solution would be if some company used Gimp as a base and polished it to suit the most demanding users. Just like what CrossOver Office does with Wine.
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
The linked site looks 'shopped.
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.
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
The digital color world is slowly but steadily shifting to an RGB workflow. The one thing that has impeded this move is the use of 8-bit color, which effectively means mapping a 32-bit color space to a 24-bit space. This mapping is a cube-hypercube mapping done via an ICC colorspace conversion. The cube-hypercube mapping is subject to error. This error is trivialized once the RGB colorspace is in 16-bit. Then the conversion is 48-bit to 32-bit, relegating conversion errors to noise that is below the threshold of vision, or even of the output devices.
Furthermore, RGB colorspaces almost always have a wider gamut than standard CMYK colorspaces such as ISO, SWOP, and GRACoL. Here again, the 8-bit problem comes into play. When RGB color is converted to a standard CMYK colorspace, the conversion is not really even 24->32 bit, since part of the RGB space is outside the gamut of the CMYK colorspace. Effectively, this means that instead of getting a 256-step gradation in any given channel, you get a smaller gradation, sometimes (for instance in the case of Adobe98 RGB -> SWOP) a MUCH smaller gradation. This leads to stepping problems in gradiants and a loss of detail in images, particularly in shadows. Once more, the move to 16-bit RGB color eliminates these problems.
So, here's the point: By working in a 16-bit RGB color space, one can effectively do anything that they could in a CMYK colorspace. (Yes, the extra channel is nice for color correction, but not necessary). The final step, conversion to CMYK, has already been implemented in at least two open source engines: ArgyleCMS and LCMS. The conversion to CMYK in an RGB workflow, is the final step. (Unless, of course, you are printing to a lightjet, lamba, etc). The CMYK colorspace that would be used is the colorspace of the output device.
In professional color, this is not even an issue, for the most part, since most modern RIPs do this conversion for you. 16-bit color support is now starting to become universal in the RIP world. As that happens, the Gimp becomes a viable tool for professional color work.
Mir tut es leid, Menschen daß Einfältigfehlersuchenbaumfolgendenaffen sind.
Those are some awful, needlessly complicated directions directions for drawing a circle.
1) Use the ellipse drawing tool while holding down Shift to define the circle.
2) Under the Select menu, choose "To Path"
3) Under the Edit menu choose "Stroke Path..." where you can define line width, brush style, etc.
You could replace steps 2 and 3 with Edit -> Stroke Selection, but converting to a path results in a smoother line.
Still to complex? You only need to get the location and size of the circle right once. Then you can experiment with line, color, etc. with the stroke menu.
there is a CYMK plugin for the gimp called separate+ @
http://cue.yellowmagic.info/softwares/separate.html
it is, as many solo projects, has always been in beta, but it worked well for me (though I am not really a graphic artist).
And as screwed up as the whole patent system is, you still can't patent something like CYMK because it is something fundamental to nature. What would be patentable would be the process. Two things can have the same end result as long as they don't use the same method, unless of course that method is fundamental to nature.
So yeah and stuff. Enjoy.
What I really want to see in TheGimp is a Python script recording tool! Since the toolkit itself is the fundamental part of the program with a graphical front-end, shouldn't a macro recorder be insanely simple to implement?
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
You can create CMYK TIFF files with GIMP (Separate plug-in), doing a color separation based on the printer's ICC profile Shouldn't that be enough to get your work printed?
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.