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Local Newspapers Use F/OSS For a Day
An anonymous reader writes "The Journal Register Company owns 18 small newspapers, and in honor of the July 4th holiday and Ben Franklin, the company's newsrooms produced their daily papers using only free software. The reporters were quick to note that 'the proprietary software is designed to be efficient, reliable and relatively fast for the task of producing a daily newspaper. The free substitutes, not so much.' I applaud the company for undertaking such a feat, but I hope their readership's impression of free software won't be negatively affected by the newspaper's one-day foray into F/OSS."
But I find horrifying problems every time I try.
Make an image with two layers. Set one to 50% transparency and put it top. Now try to move one on top of the other and resize it to line up a few points in the images. I for example was trying to line up the wheels in two car silhouettes.
In the GIMP, the layer you made 50% transparent turns opaque while you try to resize it, so you can't see how to line up the layers. What a mess.
I went home later and did it in Photoshop CS3 (that own, but only at home) and it worked fine, remained transparent during resize.
I know it's free and all, but if you make your living doing image editing, the GIMP is absolutely no substitute for Photoshop. You'll easily waste more money in labor than you saved not by buying Photoshop.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
when removing the white to transparency in a picture, it made the whole thing translucent. I still don't know why or how it happened, since all I did was use the "colour to alpha" tool, which is supposed to turn that specific colour to transparent.
It is "supposed to"??? Why, because that's what it means in Photoshop?
My expectation would be that the amount of the chosen color is used to determine transparency. In your case (you chose white) only pure black would remain opaque.
I will admit that having both alpha and layer masks is complex, but I'd be surprised if Photoshop didn't have this complexity as well.
I think you'd be better off making a color-based selection, paying attention to the feathering and anti-aliasing options. Better yet, use the magic scissors tool, which is sort of a freehand-select that snaps to edges. Hit the quickmask button to fix any defects, especially if you selected by color and there might be areas of that color within the object you want to keep. Once you have the selection, make that transparent or just invert it and copy the object alone.
Remember that the selection, the alpha channel(s), and the layer mask(s) are all interchangable and invertable. You can move the object outline from one to another.
Maybe you should check it out again before making disparaging comments about it.
Just last night I was working on a multi-layered composite image for some cover art and it was working great. Not quite sure what you mean by "fine control of selections", with GIMP I can select and position image elements down to 1 pixel resolution without a problem.
Since I've never used Photoshop I'll refrain from making comparisons about it, other than for someone who can't afford it, doesn't want to pirate it or can't run it since they use Linux anyway it might be worth their time try using GIMP.