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The GIMP Now Has a Working Single-Window Mode

Posted by timothy on from the how-long-were-the-contractions dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix is reporting that The GIMP now has a working single-window mode, a long desired feature by the open-source graphics community to be more competitive with Adobe Photoshop. There's also a number of other user highlights in the new GIMP 2.7.3 release. The GPLv3 graphics software can be downloaded at GIMP.org."

2 of 403 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Working on the right features, I see by vlm · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Wake me up when I can finally use 16, 32 or 64 bits per channel, and the channels aren't restricted to RGBA or integers ...

    Overkill slightly? Power dynamic range from single photon starlight to laser eye damage is only about 100 dB... You can't buy 64 bit A/D converters, unless you're talking about some kind of marketing thing where you have 4 16 bit A/D in the same box. LCD monitors are very low contrast, just barely above 20 dB, paper and ink's only about 10 dB.

    There does not seem to be a practical input or output technology that can use more than 16 bits. 8 bits is probably too low. I would advocate for 16 bit, but 32 is as pointless as using scientific notation for each channel.

    --
    "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
  2. Re:Working on the right features, I see by dada21 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    16bits per channel is really important.

    I own some print shops, we take artist original prints and paintings and produce reproductions, a la Giclée. We scan as high res as possible, with as many bits per color channel as possible.

    Since no scanner is eprfectly color accurate, we do some post production work in Photoshop. 8bits per channel does bring some loss to saturation, contrast and gradients during post production. 16 bits per channel lessens these effects.

    Do we use 32 bits? Almost never, but it does come in handy in *rare* instances. Recently we had to scan a painting with metallic inks. 32 bits per channel actually allowed us to properly map the metallic colors to our metalic ink on our printer.