What GIMP is missing
on
Beginning GIMP
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· Score: 2, Informative
I too love free software, but finally I had to bit the bullet and get Photoshop.
Gimp is great, but not for professional image processing. The most glaring things left out:
Supports only 8 bits. My scanner has 16 bits/channel. I have been using cinepaint, which now is going through a transition period, but Photoshop is definitely nicer than cinepaint for photo editing.
No support for color profiles. This is a killer if you want to do any kind of digital darkroom with some accuracy.
No decent support for stitching photos to make panoramics. Before you say that you can twiddle with layers to do this, go see how Photoshop handles this, there is a huge difference. Photoshop can detect similar areas and distorts the photos (to make up for perspective change and lens distortion) to stitch them together properly. In GIMP it's hopeless.
Aside from this, GIMP has more than its share of bugs. Just yesterday I was doing a complicated selection from an image, and trying to bucket-fill it with solid color. For unknown reasons the filling would alter also non-selected areas. Go figure. In Photoshop this worked fine.
I use linux for everything else, but for photo editing, Photoshop IS much better.
Also, the GIMP code is an undocumented mess. At some point in time, I wanted to hack into it to add some functionality, and I spent 2-3 hours staring at the code without being able to figure out how to access the image pixels. At that point, open or closed source, what's the difference to me?
Re:Nothing beats yahoo and mutt
on
Gmail vs Pine
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· Score: 1
mutt is not superior.
The problems with mutt are:
Most importantly, mutt relies on a local sendmail program. This is a show-stopper for machines that need to rely their email.
For the above reason, it is hard to use mutt to manage different email identities with mail relied from different hosts. It is possible to do this in pine.
The address list is stored locally, not remotely as in pine.
On an unrelated note, for me the biggest advantage of Thunderbird or Gmail over pine/mutt is that I can have more than one email in front of me at once - for instance, I can compose two emails at once, or I can compose an email and while I do that, I can search other emails for info I need.
In pine, I need to postpone the composition, which is a pain.
I think people will care.
I think what will scare them off is not so much the need to buy the odd cable, but rather, the risk that their investment might quickly become obsolete due to the DRM. After all, only free use has some guarantee to last in time.
What will happen when the special cable is no longer made?
Will one then lose ability to view the movies with full resolution?
This risk can certainly be a big deterrent to buy a large collection of BlueRays!
I concur. And Novell/Suse is not that impressive.
At least in the 10.0 version I got, xine doesn't work, I cannot view most avi files, let alone other video formats.
Hibernate is not supported for my laptop, and going from wired ethernet to wireless, and using various wireless networks when starting/waking up the laptop, is not nearly as painless as in Windows.
I use linux for all my work, I maintain several systems and domains.
However, it has been long time since I have installed linux on laptops, except for one test installation (the above SuSE); windows + cygwin is just more functional.
Moreover, as linuxes go, I prefer Debian; at least it supports video formats out of the (inexistent) box.
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- Supports only 8 bits. My scanner has 16 bits/channel. I have been using cinepaint, which now is going through a transition period, but Photoshop is definitely nicer than cinepaint for photo editing.
- No support for color profiles. This is a killer if you want to do any kind of digital darkroom with some accuracy.
- No decent support for stitching photos to make panoramics. Before you say that you can twiddle with layers to do this, go see how Photoshop handles this, there is a huge difference. Photoshop can detect similar areas and distorts the photos (to make up for perspective change and lens distortion) to stitch them together properly. In GIMP it's hopeless.
Aside from this, GIMP has more than its share of bugs. Just yesterday I was doing a complicated selection from an image, and trying to bucket-fill it with solid color. For unknown reasons the filling would alter also non-selected areas. Go figure. In Photoshop this worked fine.I use linux for everything else, but for photo editing, Photoshop IS much better. Also, the GIMP code is an undocumented mess. At some point in time, I wanted to hack into it to add some functionality, and I spent 2-3 hours staring at the code without being able to figure out how to access the image pixels. At that point, open or closed source, what's the difference to me?
- Most importantly, mutt relies on a local sendmail program. This is a show-stopper for machines that need to rely their email.
- For the above reason, it is hard to use mutt to manage different email identities with mail relied from different hosts. It is possible to do this in pine.
- The address list is stored locally, not remotely as in pine.
On an unrelated note, for me the biggest advantage of Thunderbird or Gmail over pine/mutt is that I can have more than one email in front of me at once - for instance, I can compose two emails at once, or I can compose an email and while I do that, I can search other emails for info I need. In pine, I need to postpone the composition, which is a pain.I think people will care. I think what will scare them off is not so much the need to buy the odd cable, but rather, the risk that their investment might quickly become obsolete due to the DRM. After all, only free use has some guarantee to last in time. What will happen when the special cable is no longer made? Will one then lose ability to view the movies with full resolution? This risk can certainly be a big deterrent to buy a large collection of BlueRays!
- ssh (was for the longest time only available from abroad)
- decent encryption (hosted abroad)
- BBC (try it, better than most US news sources, ALSO regarding the US)
- Ocaml (developed and hosted in France)
- Python (I bet originally this was not hosted in the US, even though van Rossum is now at Google)
- SuSE Linux
- LOTS of open source projects
- Well, linux! Linux was started abroad.
- Email/web would instantaneously cease to be the main means of scientific communication, as there is research all over the world.
- Think at companies that do commerce or have subsidiaries offshore...
Frankly, a regional internet is a ridiculous idea, even more so that a regional phone network.I use linux for all my work, I maintain several systems and domains. However, it has been long time since I have installed linux on laptops, except for one test installation (the above SuSE); windows + cygwin is just more functional. Moreover, as linuxes go, I prefer Debian; at least it supports video formats out of the (inexistent) box.