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GIMP 2.4 Released

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the bring-out-the-gimp dept.

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."

10 of 596 comments (clear)

  1. What about... by calebt3 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:What about... by BlueParrot · · Score: 5, Funny

      I'd like to suggest a colour space which treats every pixel as a small black-body, storing every colour as a long double precision floating point temperature value. It has probably already been done, and it is probably completely useless, but at least then I can troll the CMYK people by complaining that their colour-space doesn't properly support cosmic background radiation.

  2. Re:Most important thing by jklappenbach · · Score: 5, Informative

    I don't know about Paintshop, but there's a Photoshop-esque makeover for GIMP called Gimpshop. It has a couple of rough edges, but it's a testament to the modularity of design that a self-declared novice developer could take the existing GIMP framework and remake it in PS's image.

    The download link can be found here.

    http://www.gimpshop.com/download.shtml

  3. Why bother reading? by domatic · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!.................

  4. Re:Most important thing by Blakey+Rat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    But then there is this other group of people who will complain that GIMP is just being a PhotoShop wannabe and not innovating.

    Yeah, but it's already not innovating. It's just not innovating with a crappy UI, as opposed to not innovating with a good UI.

    BTW, a good UI doesn't (necessarily) mean Photoshop. Paint.NET for Windows has a pretty damned good UI, and it's not much like Photoshop at all.

    --
    Comment of the year
  5. Adjustment layers by tepples · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's got layers currently, or were you needing something more specific?

    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.

  6. patents by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    A lot of the key algorithms, particularly for color space conversion, are patented. Guess who holds a bunch of those patents?

    1. Re:patents by ozmanjusri · · Score: 5, Informative
      What part of "patent" do you not understand?

      No, that's not the problem.

      CMYK and spot colors by themselves are not patent encumberd. They are actually part of the open published standards for Postscript and PDF. Anyone saying anything different is clueless or spreading FUD and/or openly demonstrating their ignorance of the fact. http://rants.scribus.net/2006/06/03/why-no-cmyk-in-gimp-is-a-good-thing-now/

      The Gimp developers do intend to bring CMYK to the app, but the underlying graphics engine is based around 8bpp RGB. Rather than hack the old engine to work with CMYK and higher bit depths, they decided to build the future Gimp on a generic graphical library called GEGL. That meant waiting until GEGL had a stable API and worked well enough to be better than the existing 8bpp engine in production use.

      GEGL will most likely be in 2.6, along with the new MMIWorks-designed UI UI

      --
      "I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
  7. Re:Most important thing by Hennell · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you have actual ideas for the GIMP UI go mention them at http://gimp-brainstorm.blogspot.com/ rather then just complaining here. They are aware the UI is generally disliked, they just need the best ideas of how to change it.
    ---
    Did the Ancient Egyptians play stone, papyrus, scimitar?
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  8. Re:Most important thing by Bluesman · · Score: 5, Funny

    Maybe he just can't walk. Let's have a little class, and not make fun of people for their disability or odd sexual proclivities.

    --
    If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.