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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."
...Why not have some test samples for in a more practical situation?
All of the samples on the site clearly can't "fool" anyone
I saw that site a few weeks ago when folks were going gaga over PS's "new" feature (GIMP Resynth has been around for a few years now)...
I'm sure Adobe has seen it, I'm sure Adobe took the time to try and make theirs better.
The question is the Adobe implementation worth the cost of PS, or is the GIMP plugin "Good enough"
That really comes down to the consumer though. I think it is "Good enough" for my needs...I can easily touch-up anything it does that I disagree with.
-- Dave
up 12 days, 22:30, 2 users, load averages: 993.20, 994.21, 994.56
*makes note to limit user processes...
http://thedailywh.at/post/522085228/photoshop-cs5s-content-aware-fill-not-good
I was going to say this is NSFW, but on closer inspection, I just don't know what to say.
I was going to say this is NSFW, but on closer inspection, I just don't know what to say.
A picture is worth a thousand breasts!
I can't speak for everyone who uses PS and/or Gimp, just for myself.
The real news was not the ability to do this kind of interpolation, but the fact that's built-in and integrated in the workflow.
For Photoshop, Alien Skin Image Doctor has been available for years (2002 maybe). What matters for me is that I no longer need to use a plugin and I can use this smart fills in several scenarios, including as a brush to remove fine things like wires.
The same goes with another new feature in PS CS5, the new selection tools. There were at least 2 or 3 plugins (like Fluid Mask) that could do tricky selections, but now it's built-in.
Same with the new lens corrections, no need for PTLens anymore, I can even profile my own lenses using the new lens profile creator from the labs.
I don't want to sound like I'm defending Adobe here, I used to hate them. For 10 years I've been using Corel Photo-Paint (from v3 to X3) plus a few others including The Gimp. In the end I realized that despite its shortcomings, PS really is the best tool for the job. When you're under pressure to deliver, small differences add up.
Then people will say, "Look how Gimp quickly put together a crappy imitation of Photoshop's content aware!"
It's a lose-lose situation now, unless Resynth gets much better and offers results at least as good as Photoshop's in every situation, which is probably not going to happen anyway: since the algorithms have different strong points, each will be better in a different situation.
Seriously, it's a very useful tool to get the gist of things.
More amusingly, it come up with gems like this, (FTA):
The circus is armed: who is better at cutting the world?
Most of the 'prosumers' I've seen dismiss Gimp just repeat stuff they've read on Slashdot, knowing that it makes them look +5, insightful. They're probably as lazy when it comes to learning new tools as they are when it comes to independent thought.
I know this is off topic, but I am not going to bother joining a GIMP forum.
I installed GIMP (windows) yesterday. I wanted to downscale some images and do a light USM, but GIMP downscaled images came out looking over-sharpened before I even got to the USM step. I know downscaling does make images appear sharper if the original was a bit soft.
But this is compared to downscaling in other programs. GIMP output looked over-sharpened with artifacts.
I could find no setting that indicated it was doing any USM on scaling, so I promptly un-installed GIMP, since it can't do something this basic without degrading the image.
It doesn't really matter. They will buy photoshop and diss Gimp as long as they THINK it's an important feature, regardless of whether it actually is at all.
It's one of the great differences between proprietary software and open source software. If Gimp is indeed still 8 bit, it may be because the developers have found that that 16 bit color is not a great advantage to image editing. Meanwhile Adobe has found that 16 bit color is a great advantage to selling copies of photoshop.
Well, that would be because you do printing in the physical world and not in the plane of platonic perfection where, apparently, all of the GIMP print jobs get sent to (I assume this since I have never seen, in 15 years in the biz, an actual print job made with GIMP). A cloud-filled wonderland where 4-color separations happen by magic, trapping is done for free by dedicated itinerant monks (trappists... get it?) and fluffy bunnies pre-flight your print jobs while you drink frothy mugs filled from the free-as-in-beer trees.
It's the classic OSS answer to missing features: "Who needs it?"
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
It still it, mostly because switching the engine over to something else is a fuckton of work, but it's finally underway. There is no question about 16-bit being useful, and I'm looking forward to the day when GIMP finally supports it. Meanwhile I'll make sure to do most of my adjustments in Ufraw. However I suspect many 'prosumers' and too many professionals don't have a good grasp of what exactly the limitations of 8-bit are and when 16-bit actually makes a difference. Computer graphics in general and digital photography in particular are technically heavy disciplines, and while one can get around without a good understanding of that things refusing to learn just because you're an 'artistic type' is a dead end. A person who is as good as you on the artistic side of things and has a good grasp on the technical side will always be your superior.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
I am a proponent of FLOSS and I want the gimp to be great. But it does not matter until Gimp gets the basics right. Until the underlying pixel engine of Gimp can give Photoshop's pixel engine a run for it's money then the gee wiz features don't mean squat for anyone trying to do real work. Bottom line get back to me when the gimp can do full 16 bit per channel images throughout the entire program as quickly and efficiently as Photoshop can.
This is one of the biggest problems with FLOSS the volunteer programmers go and work on the neat gee wiz stuff because that's whats more fun and easier. Getting people to do the hard unsexy stuff just does not happen in a timely fashion. The number of people who are good enough at the engineering to build a really solid pixel engine are quite rare. And the number of those people who are willing to do that in their free time gratis appears to be even more rare. I say this in a goading manner because I want someone to take up the challenge.. someone that can really make that happen.
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).
Most professionals, who have narrow yet deep specialization in particular field, are very very reluctant to learn new tools. Yet always keep an eye on them.
No we're not. We're happy to learn a new tool, especially when it saves us time/energy. That's why apps like ZBrush, Mudbox, 3D Coat, Modo, etc manage to find a market. Double bonus if it's cheap or free. The problem isn't reluctance, it's lack of time. And when an app goes out of it's way to be counter-intuitive, it's frustrating, especially when that change has no obvious benefit. (Look up ZBrush 2's history for a peek into why somebody would bother to accept BS like that.) Both the GIMP and Blender suffer from this problem to a maddening level. However, Open Office and FireFox are great examples of the other end of the spectrum. FireFox, in particular, is familiar enough to IE users but provides more functionality. GIMP's differences aren't 'quirks'.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Damn right, people are completely unaware of exactly what increasing the number of bits in a fixed-point format will do. They are assigning magical properties to it. It does nothing except make the problems a bit smaller and harder to see, possibly hiding them until it is too late and they bite you.
If you are using 16 bits on modern processors you should be using half floats, representing the linear value of the color (ie double the value makes the image twice as bright or doubles the exposure). Using integers means you are living in the past, floating point has been faster than integers on modern CPUs for 10 years or more now, and hardware support for half floats is on most GPUs now and will probably appear in CPUs very soon.
I have no idea what GECL (sp?) does but I do hope they have seen the light and support half and full float data as linear.
8 bits encoded as sRGB is a nice compression format and there is nothing wrong with supporting that. But taking this flawed format and pretending that wasting more memory on it will "fix" it is stupid and shows that you have not studied the problem at all. But photo professionals have proven to be stupid over and over again, just look at them regugitating the same junk right here, whether they want to insult Gimp or Photoshop.