"If you're reading text then why are longer lines so much harder to read?"
From what I understand, line width and line spacing go hand in hand: once you arrive at the end of a line, the eye has to travel back to the left and correctly guess the next line. The wider the lines, the more spacing you need to correctly guess the next line.
"I'm sorry, I'm still not getting what you want from the Gimp that Photoshop color management supposedly has."
Nothing! I thought you wanted something.:-)
As you point out, colour management is useless for the web. I would like to take it a step further: it is downright dangerous! I have had it happen too often that the art department delivered their Photoshop produced images with the wrong colours. I wish they stop doing that.
Luckily, most designers I work with are professionals, but sometimes an intern gets put on a site that I am going to build. Anyway, I digress.
"And, just to please the slashbots, note that it wouldn't be "stealing" if another band used your material, it would be "copyright infringement"."
When it is an actual creator who utters the word "theft" rather than your average RIAA shill roaming these boards, we will make an exception, because we understand the word is uttered in fear or frustration, rather than from bored greed.
However, we do take offence at the word "protect": songs like to be covered by all and sundry, and to be used in hemroid cream commercials. Don't assume that just because you wrote the song means that you know what is best for it.
"What do you want from color management other than converting reliably and predictably between different color spaces and devices? What kind of interactivity do you want?"
I don't know. I work for the web: from RGB to RGB. Anything that tries to muck with that gets thrown out of the toolbox.
If you want the result to look good in the other colour space, would it be sufficient to preview that other colour space, or do you also want to convert to it from the GIMP? The GIMP does the former, I can imagine that there are third party apps that can do the second too.
I am reminded of a story about this comic artist (I forget his name--if it has men in tights, I don't read it). Apparently, his publishers kept telling him his latest album was only doing so-so. He, however, also owned a comics store, and in the leaflets that the publishers were sending him as a bookstore owner they were telling him how great he as an artist was doing.
"Could you please back up your claim that: "just about all bands make negative money from their first contract. This is important, if you sign with a label, you will end up in debt"."
"that's truely why the Recording Industry is going to the toilet."
It's not the entire recording industry that is going to the toilet, but just the CD stores. And not the big chains at that, but the mom-and-pop stores.
"and in the speedy moderation of the above as "Troll" we see proven yet another thing - that the truth hurts!"
There is a very simple lithmus test for this specific case: if somebody is using FOSS to share his opinion that FOSS sucks, he is a troll. If he weren't, he'd be spreading his gospel on proprietary Slashdot look-alikes using proprietary software on not-the-internet (because the internet is built largely on FOSS or variants thereof).
"Photoshop isn't a Drawing Program, and it isn't a Paint Program. Microsoft Paint, Painter, Shi Painter, Open Canvas and The GIMP are Paint Programs. Illustrator, Freehand and Inkscape are Drawing Programs. Photoshop is Photoshop."
The GIMP is not a paint program either. Perhaps the fact that the GIMP had brushes that were far superior to those in Photoshop confused you? The GIMP, like Photoshop, is a bitmap graphics editor.
"Adjustment layers are the way to go and they've been asked for several years already but evidently the gimp developers don't care about them enough to provide them."
Just because someone on Slashdot tells you that adjustment layers are easy to make, doesn't make it true.
Adjustment layers are discussed in bug report 79025, where Sven suggest that their implementation depends on GEGL.
From what I seem to remember from earlier discussions (nobody will correct me if I am wrong), the problem is as follows: an image can be made up from hundreds of layers. For the renderer to correctly composite your view of the image, it has to traverse all these layers and decide per pixel whether to render it, or not, or part of it. This can slow things down tremendously, so tools like the GIMP and PS have smart caching routines that allow them to skip part of the rendering loops. Apparently, interfering with the layer stack (for instance by adding adjustment layers) means rewriting the caching routines.
Again, this is from memory, I probably remembered it wrong.
"There are excellent command line tools for color management on Linux."
If they are command line, they are probably not interactive. And if they are not interactive, there is a chance they are not very useful for the GIMP. And of course the GIMP already has had non-interactive colour management for the past two stable versions.
"Aehm, no that doesn't produce a real one-pixel width circle either, just something [seul.org] that is somewhat close to a circle, but actually not even round."
Yes, as I said it is an approximation of a circle. If you want a better circle, edit the path.
"Beside that its a few orders of magnitudes harder to use then a simple circle tool which you will find in mainy other paint programms."
The GIMP is not a paint program.
May I suggest you use a paint program for painting tasks? Although if you want to make real circles, a draw program is probably even better. InkScape or Sodipodi seem to work fairly well for simple tasks. The GIMP can even load Sodipodi paths.
"Actually, for this particular one, they tend to say "NOTABUG" or "WONTFIX"."
Since your flunkies modded you 40% insightful and 30% informative, could you please point to the exact Bugzilla reports that proposed the GIMPShop solution and that have been marked NOTABUG or WONTFIX?
I haven't been able to find a single one.
The following came close though:
- Bug 150927. The reporter proposes to add the ability to change the menu names of Photoshop plugins. This one is still open.
- Bug 158149. The reporter proposes to change the name of a menu item. The developers decide WONTFIX, because they are content with the current shared GIMP/Photoshop solution.
- Bug 161970. I cannot say I completely understand what the reporter is trying to say. Marked NOTABUG, because this was a problem with GTK+ for Windows, not with the GIMP. (Although related, they are separate projects.)
- Bug 140439. A major improvement from GIMP 1.2 to GIMP 2.0 was in the usability department. For one thing, menu items were put in positions that made sense. The Layers menu was renamed to Layer menu and received all the functions that operated on just one menu instead of on the entire image.
Someone moved "Flatten image" from the (now defunct) Layers menu to the Image menu, and the reporter takes issue with that. Although the developers were still discussing this, the reporter himself closed the bug!
- Bug 121169. The reporter claims the GIMP should be less like Photoshop. I agree! This report was RESOLVED as INVALID though, because it contained a list of bugs, which is not a very useful way to work with Bugzilla.
- Finally, Bug 118115. This is a tricky one. The reporter says the GIMP, like Photoshop and other tools, should use the Delete key "for deleting things". Again, the reporter closed this bug himself before the developers were finished discussing this.
I am eagerly awaiting your real list of bug reports that addressed the issue GIMPShop addresses and that were closed by the developers as a non-issue.
"Even worse is that "Edit->Stroke" is not only hard to figure out and hard to use, it doesn't even work the same as a real shape tool would, when you want to get a simple one-pixel width cicrle you will have a real hard time with Gimp, since it will always give you a ugly two or more pixel width one."
I had no trouble getting your 1-pixel circle. Guess I must have been doing something wrong.
BTW, in the GIMP a selection is a pixel based mask. A circular selection is just a bunch of pixels with, say, a selection property set. You will always get forms of stepping when stroking a selection, no matter how intelligently the stroke renderer works.
You can see this if you do the following: - make a circular selection - stroke it - turn the selection into a path (this will create a path that approximates a circle) - move the path around a little, then stroke the path to compare the results
You can stroke using a brush, or using the built-in "brush" of the stroke tool. Try and set sub-pixel values if you feel the circle is still too fat.
"Drawing a rectangle is not only not easy to figure out, but is time consuming as hell."
Select rectangle, stroke rectangle, done. It takes one step more than it should, but then again, if you want to draw rectangles, maybe you should use a tool that was intended as a drawing tool?
"Random hint... how useful. Look, random hints are crap. Yeah we've all seen them but they don't help you when you want help with a particular thing... are you going to click 'Next' ad infinitum hoping to find a hint that helps you ? Gotta be one of the dumbest comments I've seen in a while."
And earlier you wrote:
"Maybe GIMP should have a hints section of their help files. Stuff that doesn't need a tutorial, just a mention."
"Your response, however, is great. You picked up exactly the kind of thinking that would happen if the same mindset was applied to real world situations. I wonder why this idea that why settle for less when you can pirate the best is so prevalent in the software world"
It seems to me there are three things to consider here; 1) why buy when you can copy?, 2) why take a lesser tool when you can get the best? 3) it's costly, so it must be better than cheaper alternatives. (And perhaps, 4) PS is the established leader in its field, so I want that.)
Any which way, to some extent at least copying levels the playing field (although I have met people who exhibited 1 - 3).
"The question is how to advertise or reach those people to market them products. Be it low cost photoshop light (or whatever it is called), a different tool for smaller price (PSP, Fireworks), or a OSS tool (GIMP), these people will use none of these by default. Similarly, MS Office is the right tool for office editing, why use Abiword or OO.o. Etc. Etc. These people think that the underdog alternatives are underdog for a reason. How does one go about convincing these people otherwise?"
The only thing I know of is word of mouth, and word of mouth is usually accompagnied by some killer app. The killer app for Firefox for instance is that it seems impervious to most spyware. This may change in the future, but for now non-geeks are switching to Firefox for it.
The digital photography revolution could have been the killer app for the GIMP, if the GIMP was what amateur digital photographers wanted. (Keep in mind that for a long time, professional photographers stayed well clear from digital.)
"Use "Selective Gausian Blur" to clean CCD noise."
The GIMP website has two tutorials on removing CCD noise, only one of which uses Selective Gaussian Blur. (The PS variant of that filter would be Smart Blur, although they are not exactly the same.)
Unless CCD noise is predictable (I don't know much about it, I'm afraid), the Selective Gaussian Blur method would seem to be the one to use, though.
"With a good UI, you should not need to resort to documentation."
Bullshit. No interface is intuitive unless you worked with other, similar interfaces before. And if you worked with other similar interfaces before, you can hardly pretend your opinion on the subject is objective.
"What? Shift? With the pencil tool? Holy shit. I would NEVER have figured that out. Good job proving his point."
Really depends on what his point is. If his point is that GIMP is not Photoshop, sure, point proven. Why on earth anyone would want to state the bloody obvious is beyond me though.
If his point is that the GIMP's UI is not up to its task, he has chosen the lousiest example imaginable. The GIMP is not a drawing tool. It is a photo manipulation tool. That people can draw with it is great, but that is not its core function.
"A bigger factor I think is the interface. I doubt one user in 10 could figure out how to draw a line in the Gimp without looking it up. (Anti-Hint: there's no line tool!)"
I doubt one in ten car drivers can point out where the hot tub is in their car.
Oh wait, a car is a transportation vehicle, not a massage parlour? Well, the GIMP and Photoshop are tools for modifying photos, not for drawing. There are, and this may surprise you, specialized tools for drawing on computers that are called, gasp!, drawing tools.
As others pointed out to you, the GIMP is such a powerful tool though, that it has many means of drawing a line. You could use the pen tool. You could use the pencil tool. You could use the airbrush tool. You could even use the eraser tool (and several others).
Now, there aren't many people who just need to modify photos. Often these photos need to be part of a larger whole, need to be captioned, need to be mixed with line art et cetera. Since draw tools are good at drawing, but not good at photo manipulation, and vice versa, and compositing tools are often good at neither, the user is in a tough spot.
Luckily, the GIMP is such a powertool that it even offers you some functionality for drawing and for compositing. And like you would expect from a powertool, non-essential functionality is not always easy to find. However, for drawing straight and bended lines, the GIMP has several tools and functions, not in the least the Paths tool.
What you probably meant is: "Why isn't the GIMP more like Photoshop?" But if you want Photoshop, with its endearing straight line tool, why not buy Photoshop? Some smart buying will get it you for far less than the RRP, if money were an issue.
Slashdot Mirror
"If you're reading text then why are longer lines so much harder to read?"
From what I understand, line width and line spacing go hand in hand: once you arrive at the end of a line, the eye has to travel back to the left and correctly guess the next line. The wider the lines, the more spacing you need to correctly guess the next line.
"Damn, does that mean we're stuck with them then?"
There's always the catapult.
"I'm sorry, I'm still not getting what you want from the Gimp that Photoshop color management supposedly has."
:-)
Nothing! I thought you wanted something.
As you point out, colour management is useless for the web. I would like to take it a step further: it is downright dangerous! I have had it happen too often that the art department delivered their Photoshop produced images with the wrong colours. I wish they stop doing that.
Luckily, most designers I work with are professionals, but sometimes an intern gets put on a site that I am going to build. Anyway, I digress.
"And, just to please the slashbots, note that it wouldn't be "stealing" if another band used your material, it would be "copyright infringement"."
When it is an actual creator who utters the word "theft" rather than your average RIAA shill roaming these boards, we will make an exception, because we understand the word is uttered in fear or frustration, rather than from bored greed.
However, we do take offence at the word "protect": songs like to be covered by all and sundry, and to be used in hemroid cream commercials. Don't assume that just because you wrote the song means that you know what is best for it.
"What do you want from color management other than converting reliably and predictably between different color spaces and devices? What kind of interactivity do you want?"
I don't know. I work for the web: from RGB to RGB. Anything that tries to muck with that gets thrown out of the toolbox.
If you want the result to look good in the other colour space, would it be sufficient to preview that other colour space, or do you also want to convert to it from the GIMP? The GIMP does the former, I can imagine that there are third party apps that can do the second too.
I am reminded of a story about this comic artist (I forget his name--if it has men in tights, I don't read it). Apparently, his publishers kept telling him his latest album was only doing so-so. He, however, also owned a comics store, and in the leaflets that the publishers were sending him as a bookstore owner they were telling him how great he as an artist was doing.
"Could you please back up your claim that: "just about all bands make negative money from their first contract. This is important, if you sign with a label, you will end up in debt"."
Here's the Kretschmer report.
"that's truely why the Recording Industry is going to the toilet."
It's not the entire recording industry that is going to the toilet, but just the CD stores. And not the big chains at that, but the mom-and-pop stores.
"and in the speedy moderation of the above as "Troll" we see proven yet another thing - that the truth hurts!"
There is a very simple lithmus test for this specific case: if somebody is using FOSS to share his opinion that FOSS sucks, he is a troll. If he weren't, he'd be spreading his gospel on proprietary Slashdot look-alikes using proprietary software on not-the-internet (because the internet is built largely on FOSS or variants thereof).
"Photoshop isn't a Drawing Program, and it isn't a Paint Program. Microsoft Paint, Painter, Shi Painter, Open Canvas and The GIMP are Paint Programs. Illustrator, Freehand and Inkscape are Drawing Programs. Photoshop is Photoshop."
The GIMP is not a paint program either. Perhaps the fact that the GIMP had brushes that were far superior to those in Photoshop confused you? The GIMP, like Photoshop, is a bitmap graphics editor.
Heh, great analogies. :-)
"Adjustment layers are the way to go and they've been asked for several years already but evidently the gimp developers don't care about them enough to provide them."
Just because someone on Slashdot tells you that adjustment layers are easy to make, doesn't make it true.
Adjustment layers are discussed in bug report 79025, where Sven suggest that their implementation depends on GEGL.
From what I seem to remember from earlier discussions (nobody will correct me if I am wrong), the problem is as follows: an image can be made up from hundreds of layers. For the renderer to correctly composite your view of the image, it has to traverse all these layers and decide per pixel whether to render it, or not, or part of it. This can slow things down tremendously, so tools like the GIMP and PS have smart caching routines that allow them to skip part of the rendering loops. Apparently, interfering with the layer stack (for instance by adding adjustment layers) means rewriting the caching routines.
Again, this is from memory, I probably remembered it wrong.
"There are excellent command line tools for color management on Linux."
If they are command line, they are probably not interactive. And if they are not interactive, there is a chance they are not very useful for the GIMP. And of course the GIMP already has had non-interactive colour management for the past two stable versions.
"Aehm, no that doesn't produce a real one-pixel width circle either, just something [seul.org] that is somewhat close to a circle, but actually not even round."
Yes, as I said it is an approximation of a circle. If you want a better circle, edit the path.
"Beside that its a few orders of magnitudes harder to use then a simple circle tool which you will find in mainy other paint programms."
The GIMP is not a paint program.
May I suggest you use a paint program for painting tasks? Although if you want to make real circles, a draw program is probably even better. InkScape or Sodipodi seem to work fairly well for simple tasks. The GIMP can even load Sodipodi paths.
"Actually, for this particular one, they tend to say "NOTABUG" or "WONTFIX"."
Since your flunkies modded you 40% insightful and 30% informative, could you please point to the exact Bugzilla reports that proposed the GIMPShop solution and that have been marked NOTABUG or WONTFIX?
I haven't been able to find a single one.
The following came close though:
- Bug 150927. The reporter proposes to add the ability to change the menu names of Photoshop plugins. This one is still open.
- Bug 158149. The reporter proposes to change the name of a menu item. The developers decide WONTFIX, because they are content with the current shared GIMP/Photoshop solution.
- Bug 161970. I cannot say I completely understand what the reporter is trying to say. Marked NOTABUG, because this was a problem with GTK+ for Windows, not with the GIMP. (Although related, they are separate projects.)
- Bug 140439. A major improvement from GIMP 1.2 to GIMP 2.0 was in the usability department. For one thing, menu items were put in positions that made sense. The Layers menu was renamed to Layer menu and received all the functions that operated on just one menu instead of on the entire image.
Someone moved "Flatten image" from the (now defunct) Layers menu to the Image menu, and the reporter takes issue with that. Although the developers were still discussing this, the reporter himself closed the bug!
- Bug 121169. The reporter claims the GIMP should be less like Photoshop. I agree! This report was RESOLVED as INVALID though, because it contained a list of bugs, which is not a very useful way to work with Bugzilla.
- Finally, Bug 118115. This is a tricky one. The reporter says the GIMP, like Photoshop and other tools, should use the Delete key "for deleting things". Again, the reporter closed this bug himself before the developers were finished discussing this.
I am eagerly awaiting your real list of bug reports that addressed the issue GIMPShop addresses and that were closed by the developers as a non-issue.
"Even worse is that "Edit->Stroke" is not only hard to figure out and hard to use, it doesn't even work the same as a real shape tool would, when you want to get a simple one-pixel width cicrle you will have a real hard time with Gimp, since it will always give you a ugly two or more pixel width one."
I had no trouble getting your 1-pixel circle. Guess I must have been doing something wrong.
BTW, in the GIMP a selection is a pixel based mask. A circular selection is just a bunch of pixels with, say, a selection property set. You will always get forms of stepping when stroking a selection, no matter how intelligently the stroke renderer works.
You can see this if you do the following:
- make a circular selection
- stroke it
- turn the selection into a path (this will create a path that approximates a circle)
- move the path around a little, then stroke the path to compare the results
You can stroke using a brush, or using the built-in "brush" of the stroke tool. Try and set sub-pixel values if you feel the circle is still too fat.
"Drawing a rectangle is not only not easy to figure out, but is time consuming as hell."
Select rectangle, stroke rectangle, done. It takes one step more than it should, but then again, if you want to draw rectangles, maybe you should use a tool that was intended as a drawing tool?
The GIMP website has a list of such complementary tools.
"Random hint ... how useful. Look, random hints are crap. Yeah we've all seen them but they don't help you when you want help with a particular thing ... are you going to click 'Next' ad infinitum hoping to find a hint that helps you ? Gotta be one of the dumbest comments I've seen in a while."
And earlier you wrote:
"Maybe GIMP should have a hints section of their help files. Stuff that doesn't need a tutorial, just a mention."
Forgot to take your pills?
"Your response, however, is great. You picked up exactly the kind of thinking that would happen if the same mindset was applied to real world situations. I wonder why this idea that why settle for less when you can pirate the best is so prevalent in the software world"
It seems to me there are three things to consider here; 1) why buy when you can copy?, 2) why take a lesser tool when you can get the best? 3) it's costly, so it must be better than cheaper alternatives. (And perhaps, 4) PS is the established leader in its field, so I want that.)
Any which way, to some extent at least copying levels the playing field (although I have met people who exhibited 1 - 3).
"The question is how to advertise or reach those people to market them products. Be it low cost photoshop light (or whatever it is called), a different tool for smaller price (PSP, Fireworks), or a OSS tool (GIMP), these people will use none of these by default. Similarly, MS Office is the right tool for office editing, why use Abiword or OO.o. Etc. Etc. These people think that the underdog alternatives are underdog for a reason. How does one go about convincing these people otherwise?"
The only thing I know of is word of mouth, and word of mouth is usually accompagnied by some killer app. The killer app for Firefox for instance is that it seems impervious to most spyware. This may change in the future, but for now non-geeks are switching to Firefox for it.
The digital photography revolution could have been the killer app for the GIMP, if the GIMP was what amateur digital photographers wanted. (Keep in mind that for a long time, professional photographers stayed well clear from digital.)
Er, GIMP website's tutorials at www.gimp.org/tutorials/.
"Use "Selective Gausian Blur" to clean CCD noise."
The GIMP website has two tutorials on removing CCD noise, only one of which uses Selective Gaussian Blur. (The PS variant of that filter would be Smart Blur, although they are not exactly the same.)
Unless CCD noise is predictable (I don't know much about it, I'm afraid), the Selective Gaussian Blur method would seem to be the one to use, though.
"With a good UI, you should not need to resort to documentation."
Bullshit. No interface is intuitive unless you worked with other, similar interfaces before. And if you worked with other similar interfaces before, you can hardly pretend your opinion on the subject is objective.
"What? Shift? With the pencil tool? Holy shit. I would NEVER have figured that out. Good job proving his point."
Really depends on what his point is. If his point is that GIMP is not Photoshop, sure, point proven. Why on earth anyone would want to state the bloody obvious is beyond me though.
If his point is that the GIMP's UI is not up to its task, he has chosen the lousiest example imaginable. The GIMP is not a drawing tool. It is a photo manipulation tool. That people can draw with it is great, but that is not its core function.
"A bigger factor I think is the interface. I doubt one user in 10 could figure out how to draw a line in the Gimp without looking it up. (Anti-Hint: there's no line tool!)"
I doubt one in ten car drivers can point out where the hot tub is in their car.
Oh wait, a car is a transportation vehicle, not a massage parlour? Well, the GIMP and Photoshop are tools for modifying photos, not for drawing. There are, and this may surprise you, specialized tools for drawing on computers that are called, gasp!, drawing tools.
As others pointed out to you, the GIMP is such a powerful tool though, that it has many means of drawing a line. You could use the pen tool. You could use the pencil tool. You could use the airbrush tool. You could even use the eraser tool (and several others).
Now, there aren't many people who just need to modify photos. Often these photos need to be part of a larger whole, need to be captioned, need to be mixed with line art et cetera. Since draw tools are good at drawing, but not good at photo manipulation, and vice versa, and compositing tools are often good at neither, the user is in a tough spot.
Luckily, the GIMP is such a powertool that it even offers you some functionality for drawing and for compositing. And like you would expect from a powertool, non-essential functionality is not always easy to find. However, for drawing straight and bended lines, the GIMP has several tools and functions, not in the least the Paths tool.
What you probably meant is: "Why isn't the GIMP more like Photoshop?" But if you want Photoshop, with its endearing straight line tool, why not buy Photoshop? Some smart buying will get it you for far less than the RRP, if money were an issue.