Re:Sort of a weird feeling about it
on
20 Years of Photoshop
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Many Photoshop users feel this way; I don't think you're alone in that. There are many features that Photoshop has that are very powerful, like its Type tool, which bears a sharp contrast to GIMP's rudimentary text tool. Even if you compare Photoshop of, say, four versions ago, to GIMP of today, you come away with many features where GIMP falls short.
This shows why feature set alone isn't the main motivator for GIMP users. Some of them are just cheap; some of them want a portable graphics package; some are sick of dealing with licensing and activation pains; some have had bad experiences with Adobe customer support.
On the other end of the spectrum, I think, are full-out artistic types who view the issue of freedom as a vast battlefield upon which commercial interests can become the worst kind of double agents, often actively working to subvert the interests of the wider community in favor of extra profits.
I tend to lean this way myself, having worked on many marketing teams and now owning my own business. I'm more interested in my own mental and spiritual development and its application in the digital domain (tough as the going may be), and less interested in putting Deanna from Marketing in a new Lexus.
That can sound pretty fundamentalist, but many artistic-types really do need the extra room to breathe.
To respond to your first point, you are right on. I've never had a positive review of GIMP by a Photoshop student who hadn't already tried it prior to taking the course. Most of the crits come from interface-related issues. In my case, I had other motivations for using GIMP, and had already worked with free software, so I knew that I needed to adapt myself to "GIMP's way of doing things"; after I learned the TAB key shortcut and other little helps, it got a lot easier. But it is really nice to see that GIMP have got Peter doing some great interface work that will be rolled into future versions.
Also, someone used to Photoshop will be more likely to move to an open toolchain rather than a single app like GIMP, if they're considering migrating to free software-land. That means also learning software like Inkscape, possibly Blender, possibly ImageMagick, and so on. But that quickly becomes one powerful toolchain, for all its quirks.
I wonder if GIMP isn't designed by and for advanced users who've outgrown Photoshop!
I'm not sure I would go that far. Features-wise, Photoshop has a lot to offer. If I didn't think so, I wouldn't be teaching it.
But in a way, you're right. Once you're really competent in Photoshop, you should have realized what bounds you are working with and should at least have some computer graphics concepts down pat.
This makes it easier to become concerned with issues like proprietary software vs. freedom software, which is one thing that happened in my case. I tried to think about how much Adobe really cared about creativity and freedom of expression, but I just couldn't get there.
I've noticed that consultants I work with who prefer freedom software for its open aesthetic are almost universally better grounded in the fundamentals, and are more productive and more sought after because of it.
There are a lot of web designers who started out in Flash who made the same journey too, and now they're pushing out standards-compliant code and talking about open toolchains.
Really? No beachballs of death at least? Anyway, for all I know you're just cropping images all day. My students are typically doing work that acquaints them with more advanced features -- even if they're not totally necessary -- so perhaps that's where the difference comes in.
In fact, some of my illustrator friends have a bad habit of not saving often. Why Murphy's Law hasn't taught them a lesson about that I"ll never know.
So it's just your illustrator friends who have stability problems?:-)
Anyway, those following this thread might be interested in reading Adobe UI Gripes. The comments after this blog post are also pretty instructional, I think.:-)
Re:Keyboard shortcuts are better than scroll wheel
on
20 Years of Photoshop
·
· Score: 1
Actually it's a very nice feeling. I know what you mean about adjusting opacity values, but what about minor things that don't have such convenient shortcuts? What about auditioning fonts? I'd rather do that with the scroll wheel than any other method I've tried, keyboard-based or not.
Photoshop instructor here. It's a great app, but really is overkill for most needs. I actually used GIMP to design my Photoshop class websites, since I like some of the GTK conveniences better than Photoshop's relatively primitive widget set (can't hover over a spinner and use the scroll wheel alone to change the value, being one example).
Of course, I don't really advertise GIMP in my classes, but I do give extra credit to students who are willing to give it a try and write a review (they can also choose to try other software, like Aviary).
Anyway, it's nice of Adobe to keep improving Photoshop, but it's amazing how many millions of dollars have gone into this software, and it is still getting a bad rep for tons of crashes, expensive third-party plugins, weird bugs, etc.
Saddened is a good word for it. I thought it was sort of awkwardly incongruent when Canonical rolled out Ubuntu One. They could have made their entry so much more unique by positioning it with respect to some of the core values that free software rides on. That's the sort of creativity they'll need in order to compete with the likes of Dropbox, unless they intend to lock down the entire Ubuntu platform at some point.
I guess we haven't learned our collective lesson about software freedom when there's a Cloud involved...
Matt, you were intensely criticized by members of the Free Software community for your critical stance facing "vague concepts" like software freedom and "no vendor lock-in." Reading your blog, it seems to me like you are still a fan of focusing on "high quality software at a compelling price" rather than these other concepts. How will this position affect your work with Canonical and more specifically, its relationship with freedom-first software advocates?
>brainstorms ideas, patents them, then lives off of the licensing revenue
Still holds true, according to the article
>without actually contributing real products to the world
For all values of "contributing," yeah, they might be considered contributors to the greater welfare. But keep that in mind next time you invent some revolutionary way of helping the developing world, start selling it for super-cheap prices, and then find yourself in court staring at Nathan's lawyers.
>or even prototyping their vaguely defined ideas
Here's your prototype, pal. See? We have GREAT ideas. And they're all...well, ours.
You might give OpenShot a try. It's the new kid on the block, but it's had a really good reception.
Cinelerra is nice, but it is absolutely necessary to read tutorials and documentation to be able to use it effectively. You can get a lot of helpful information at the Vimeo Cinelerra group and even some of the linux video podcasts that are out there. A lot of podcast authors have established a workflow (what formats to use, etc) that works for them.
A separate tool like Avidemux, which is meant for muxing? I'm not sure I would call any tool "all-in-one" as there will always be some edge cases where users aren't satisfied. "All in one" is more of a marketing term that is applied by corporations and zealous users, I think.
I'm not sure what kind of video editing features you're thinking people need for this contest, but maybe you could name some so we can all understand?
I do video editing for my business, about an hour's worth of video every month, that is then passed on to my clients for training or promotional purposes. And I use Linux to do it.
While I'm not terribly interested in contests, and I agree that the theme has been done to death, I often receive video from "videographers" that is so poorly done as to force me to request source files (usually their "youtube versions" are a joke, interlacing artifacts and terribly desaturated colors) and re-export.
The "video editing on Linux sucks" criticism is EXACTLY like GIMP vs. Photoshop too, and I say that as a part-time Photoshop instructor. If you know how pixels/fields/frames work, you are 200% further along the road than most people who own Final Cut. I would say about 40-50% of my video editing work is done with hand-written scripts and mencoder, now that I know what I'm doing.
There's also Blender, which I'm now using for effects work (there's a good compositing book out for it now)....
Bah, this sort of argument without firm evidence stuff bugs me.
41 errors isn't so bad, considering you're talking about a busy, understaffed news service like/. The way people complain about the editorial policy here, I would expect at least 200 or so errors. (This from someone who looks at W3C validation pages all day.;-))
Sorry, we only offer True3D(tm) in countries where ubiquitous camera coverage is available. This currently includes the UK, and some smaller countries such as Chicago.
Stuff like this video illustrates the point better than TFA. Basically you can use Google's annotations tool to turn videos into "Choose your own Adventure" games or even full multimedia presentations. From TFA it sounds like Google want to make it possible to do this all within a single video. Not a bad idea.
I think it would be a great idea for Google to spin off a Youtube-like site for videos of this type that tell interactive stories.
I *love* that C-SPAN has the uncensored coverage of our congress
Uh, actually C-SPAN censor stuff whenever they like (or are required to). They censored a guest's (interesting, perhaps even insightful) speculation on nuclear war from a panel discussion on the deteriorating economy back in October 2008. There have been other discussions about this phenomenon elsewhere on the net.
I'm a freelance web developer. I asked one of my clients for a testimonial, and he responded with a glowing writeup saying how I was their go-to "IT guy" and a real "techie." I was completely blown away.
This was from a guy who is also outsourcing his *real* IT to an IT company. So you're right, people see us as a solution. If we really want to grow, we need to grow socially, so peole *like* seeing us as a solution over other potential solutions.
Typical Vimeo user profile: "30-something Caucasian with a HUGE iTunes library, prosumer camera gear and/or a copy of Processing, with a penchant for shallow-depth-of-field effects."
There's non-fair-use copyright-infringement all over the place on that site, and it's absolutely weird that nobody at Vimeo HQ has even batted an eyelash. Really, it's that bad. (I'm a big fan of CC myself, and I think that if people would just stop using RIAA tunes to enhance their own creative works, the problem would solve itself)
Business folk have been shooting around Pincus interviews for months now. "What is it that makes him so great?" "How can I invent a simple Facebook game and be rich?" "It's so easy, right?" etc.
It's bad enough that a trusted associate is trying to get me to drop everything and develop "apps," because everybody knows they're the next big thing.
But the fact is, Pincus and his people (with great encouragement from his mentor, who *only* cares about money) looked up every sleazy trick in the book and put them all out there. Now they get Sleazy results, and the media suddenly have occasion to finish up the Pincus Story by presenting a dark side. They'll be all over that.
Slashdot Mirror
Many Photoshop users feel this way; I don't think you're alone in that. There are many features that Photoshop has that are very powerful, like its Type tool, which bears a sharp contrast to GIMP's rudimentary text tool. Even if you compare Photoshop of, say, four versions ago, to GIMP of today, you come away with many features where GIMP falls short.
This shows why feature set alone isn't the main motivator for GIMP users. Some of them are just cheap; some of them want a portable graphics package; some are sick of dealing with licensing and activation pains; some have had bad experiences with Adobe customer support.
On the other end of the spectrum, I think, are full-out artistic types who view the issue of freedom as a vast battlefield upon which commercial interests can become the worst kind of double agents, often actively working to subvert the interests of the wider community in favor of extra profits.
I tend to lean this way myself, having worked on many marketing teams and now owning my own business. I'm more interested in my own mental and spiritual development and its application in the digital domain (tough as the going may be), and less interested in putting Deanna from Marketing in a new Lexus.
That can sound pretty fundamentalist, but many artistic-types really do need the extra room to breathe.
To respond to your first point, you are right on. I've never had a positive review of GIMP by a Photoshop student who hadn't already tried it prior to taking the course. Most of the crits come from interface-related issues. In my case, I had other motivations for using GIMP, and had already worked with free software, so I knew that I needed to adapt myself to "GIMP's way of doing things"; after I learned the TAB key shortcut and other little helps, it got a lot easier. But it is really nice to see that GIMP have got Peter doing some great interface work that will be rolled into future versions.
Also, someone used to Photoshop will be more likely to move to an open toolchain rather than a single app like GIMP, if they're considering migrating to free software-land. That means also learning software like Inkscape, possibly Blender, possibly ImageMagick, and so on. But that quickly becomes one powerful toolchain, for all its quirks.
I'm not sure I would go that far. Features-wise, Photoshop has a lot to offer. If I didn't think so, I wouldn't be teaching it.
But in a way, you're right. Once you're really competent in Photoshop, you should have realized what bounds you are working with and should at least have some computer graphics concepts down pat.
This makes it easier to become concerned with issues like proprietary software vs. freedom software, which is one thing that happened in my case. I tried to think about how much Adobe really cared about creativity and freedom of expression, but I just couldn't get there.
I've noticed that consultants I work with who prefer freedom software for its open aesthetic are almost universally better grounded in the fundamentals, and are more productive and more sought after because of it.
There are a lot of web designers who started out in Flash who made the same journey too, and now they're pushing out standards-compliant code and talking about open toolchains.
Really? No beachballs of death at least? Anyway, for all I know you're just cropping images all day. My students are typically doing work that acquaints them with more advanced features -- even if they're not totally necessary -- so perhaps that's where the difference comes in.
So it's just your illustrator friends who have stability problems? :-)
Anyway, those following this thread might be interested in reading Adobe UI Gripes. The comments after this blog post are also pretty instructional, I think. :-)
Actually it's a very nice feeling. I know what you mean about adjusting opacity values, but what about minor things that don't have such convenient shortcuts? What about auditioning fonts? I'd rather do that with the scroll wheel than any other method I've tried, keyboard-based or not.
Photoshop instructor here. It's a great app, but really is overkill for most needs. I actually used GIMP to design my Photoshop class websites, since I like some of the GTK conveniences better than Photoshop's relatively primitive widget set (can't hover over a spinner and use the scroll wheel alone to change the value, being one example).
Of course, I don't really advertise GIMP in my classes, but I do give extra credit to students who are willing to give it a try and write a review (they can also choose to try other software, like Aviary).
Anyway, it's nice of Adobe to keep improving Photoshop, but it's amazing how many millions of dollars have gone into this software, and it is still getting a bad rep for tons of crashes, expensive third-party plugins, weird bugs, etc.
Saddened is a good word for it. I thought it was sort of awkwardly incongruent when Canonical rolled out Ubuntu One. They could have made their entry so much more unique by positioning it with respect to some of the core values that free software rides on. That's the sort of creativity they'll need in order to compete with the likes of Dropbox, unless they intend to lock down the entire Ubuntu platform at some point.
I guess we haven't learned our collective lesson about software freedom when there's a Cloud involved...
Matt, you were intensely criticized by members of the Free Software community for your critical stance facing "vague concepts" like software freedom and "no vendor lock-in." Reading your blog, it seems to me like you are still a fan of focusing on "high quality software at a compelling price" rather than these other concepts. How will this position affect your work with Canonical and more specifically, its relationship with freedom-first software advocates?
>brainstorms ideas, patents them, then lives off of the licensing revenue
Still holds true, according to the article >without actually contributing real products to the world
For all values of "contributing," yeah, they might be considered contributors to the greater welfare. But keep that in mind next time you invent some revolutionary way of helping the developing world, start selling it for super-cheap prices, and then find yourself in court staring at Nathan's lawyers.
>or even prototyping their vaguely defined ideas
Here's your prototype, pal. See? We have GREAT ideas. And they're all...well, ours.
YES. Mod parent up; those of us who purchased pro fonts recently have felt the pain.
You might give OpenShot a try. It's the new kid on the block, but it's had a really good reception.
Cinelerra is nice, but it is absolutely necessary to read tutorials and documentation to be able to use it effectively. You can get a lot of helpful information at the Vimeo Cinelerra group and even some of the linux video podcasts that are out there. A lot of podcast authors have established a workflow (what formats to use, etc) that works for them.
A separate tool like Avidemux, which is meant for muxing? I'm not sure I would call any tool "all-in-one" as there will always be some edge cases where users aren't satisfied. "All in one" is more of a marketing term that is applied by corporations and zealous users, I think.
Ah, and one more, just because it's related to video contests and open source software: Open Video Contest entry.
BTW: If this isn't enough editing power to get you into the running for the contest, I'd say you are probably over-thinking your concept.
See also: Vimeo Cinelerra Group, Vimeo Blender 3D Group, KDEnlive, OpenShot Video Editor, Mencoder, Avidemux, Kino, etc.
I'm not sure what kind of video editing features you're thinking people need for this contest, but maybe you could name some so we can all understand?
I do video editing for my business, about an hour's worth of video every month, that is then passed on to my clients for training or promotional purposes. And I use Linux to do it.
While I'm not terribly interested in contests, and I agree that the theme has been done to death, I often receive video from "videographers" that is so poorly done as to force me to request source files (usually their "youtube versions" are a joke, interlacing artifacts and terribly desaturated colors) and re-export.
The "video editing on Linux sucks" criticism is EXACTLY like GIMP vs. Photoshop too, and I say that as a part-time Photoshop instructor. If you know how pixels/fields/frames work, you are 200% further along the road than most people who own Final Cut. I would say about 40-50% of my video editing work is done with hand-written scripts and mencoder, now that I know what I'm doing.
There's also Blender, which I'm now using for effects work (there's a good compositing book out for it now)....
Bah, this sort of argument without firm evidence stuff bugs me.
Actually, Mr. Absolutist Grammar Genius, it sounds like he was going for "would've had," so he's at least phonetically correct.
41 errors isn't so bad, considering you're talking about a busy, understaffed news service like /. The way people complain about the editorial policy here, I would expect at least 200 or so errors. (This from someone who looks at W3C validation pages all day. ;-))
Sorry, we only offer True3D(tm) in countries where ubiquitous camera coverage is available. This currently includes the UK, and some smaller countries such as Chicago.
Stuff like this video illustrates the point better than TFA. Basically you can use Google's annotations tool to turn videos into "Choose your own Adventure" games or even full multimedia presentations. From TFA it sounds like Google want to make it possible to do this all within a single video. Not a bad idea.
I think it would be a great idea for Google to spin off a Youtube-like site for videos of this type that tell interactive stories.
Uh, actually C-SPAN censor stuff whenever they like (or are required to). They censored a guest's (interesting, perhaps even insightful) speculation on nuclear war from a panel discussion on the deteriorating economy back in October 2008. There have been other discussions about this phenomenon elsewhere on the net.
...poor guy
I'm a freelance web developer. I asked one of my clients for a testimonial, and he responded with a glowing writeup saying how I was their go-to "IT guy" and a real "techie." I was completely blown away.
This was from a guy who is also outsourcing his *real* IT to an IT company. So you're right, people see us as a solution. If we really want to grow, we need to grow socially, so peole *like* seeing us as a solution over other potential solutions.
So you think they'd still be sued if everybody used freely-licensed music rather than stuff like Lady Gaga or Band of Horses? Doubtful.
Typical Vimeo user profile: "30-something Caucasian with a HUGE iTunes library, prosumer camera gear and/or a copy of Processing, with a penchant for shallow-depth-of-field effects."
There's non-fair-use copyright-infringement all over the place on that site, and it's absolutely weird that nobody at Vimeo HQ has even batted an eyelash. Really, it's that bad. (I'm a big fan of CC myself, and I think that if people would just stop using RIAA tunes to enhance their own creative works, the problem would solve itself)
Business folk have been shooting around Pincus interviews for months now. "What is it that makes him so great?" "How can I invent a simple Facebook game and be rich?" "It's so easy, right?" etc.
It's bad enough that a trusted associate is trying to get me to drop everything and develop "apps," because everybody knows they're the next big thing.
But the fact is, Pincus and his people (with great encouragement from his mentor, who *only* cares about money) looked up every sleazy trick in the book and put them all out there. Now they get Sleazy results, and the media suddenly have occasion to finish up the Pincus Story by presenting a dark side. They'll be all over that.