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GIMP Resynth vs. Photoshop Content Aware
aylons writes "Just after Adobe released videos showing off the content-aware feature of Photoshop CS5, the GIMP community answered by showing the resynthesizer plugin, which has been available for some time and can do a similar job. However, are they really comparable? (In original Portuguese, but really, the images are pretty much self-explaining.) Compare them side by side removing the same objects from different kinds of images. Results do vary, but the most interesting part may be seeing the different results and trying to understand the logic of each algorithm."
Wait till you hear from pseudo-professionals who would trash GIMP at any given opportunity. Clearly, GIMP was ahead of PS on this so called revolutionary concept, but nobody made a big fuss about it. And then hell broke loose when PS announced it - the earlier thread on it was full of multiple orgasms by the same 'professionals'.
People will find a new pet issue to criticize. What most of them really mean is "I don't care, I don't want to try anything new", but that doesn't sound good, so they will always find a new issue as long as GIMP isn't a carbon copy of the latest version of Photoshop. For the record, there are no serious UI issues beyond it being unfamiliar, there is a ton of minor ones, but to see them you actually have to spend some time with the program, so unsurprisingly they are not the target of much criticism.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
My Portuguese isn't exactly good (working on it), so I can't tell if this is explained in the article, but as I've used resynthesizer before, I noticed that their results looked far worse than what I usually experience. I've only tested one image, but there GIMP performed *much* better than what that blog would let you believe. I resynthesized the same area in the large picture, so for comparison, look at the original compared to this - then contrast to the small version supposedly done by gimp in the bottom right corner: Original My attempt (warning: 2.7MB, saved as PNG to avoid further artifacts).
If 'some time' is more than 10 minutes.. sure.
I use The GIMP. A lot. Almost exclusively, in fact. My secondary editor? Picture Publisher 5.0a from 1995. It's 16bit. No, that's not the color bitdepth - that's the "Was made for Windows 3.x" bit. Only reason is because it still does some things better/faster. (Tertiary is a toss-up between several.. actually, if IrfanView would count as an 'editor', it'd be 3rd).
I'm familiar with its interface, I'm familiar with how it differs from Photoshop, I simply moved the floating dialogs around on the screen with a big central window to get a more familiar feel.. no problem.
But it still only took me 10 minutes to realize there's a -huge- UI-related workflow issue with The Gimp...
No. Unified. Transform tool.
In The Gimp, you may:
A. Scale
B. Rotate
C. Shear
D. Distort (called the Perspective tool, but as each corner point is independent, I'm not too sure about that term).
Pick any one - but only one.
No, you can not scale down -and- rotate*. You can scale down - and then you can rotate. Two operations - twice the filtering. In fact, you'd probably want to rotate first, and -then- scale, just so the rotation operation has more data to work on for a higher quality result.
( * unless you want to get crackin' with a calculator and determine the new corner pixels and use the Distort (perspective) transform. )
Apparently it's on the list for 2.8 - so here's hoping.
( I'd point to the gui.gimp.org topic on the unified transform tool, but that site is - once again - blank. )
Ideally it would never actually put anything into pixels until you requested it to be (so that a layer scaled down to 10% and then back up by 1000% would simply yield the original image give-or-take some float precision errors), but that's much further away and not really UI/workflow related.