Tuatara. Also, "living fossil" is something of a misnomer. In the case of both the Coelacanth and Tuatara, the modern animals just bear a very strong resemblence to their fossil counterparts.
Agreed. I guess I didn't have a big problem getting it to work, but the break in interface from Every Other Imaging Software Package(tm) to GIMP is definitely a sticking point and a thorn in GIMP's side.
Except, of course, the examples touch on corner cases that most people will never have to deal with.
I often find that even 16 bit isn't enough to capture the full spectrum of, say, a cityscape at sunset, which is why I often bracket and merge into 32 bit HDR then tone map.
To me, this looks just like an audiophile trying to justify the need for a $1000 power cable for his stereo system
To you it may look like that, but to me a better analogy would be an audiophile trying to justify the need for 192kbit mp3 bitrate because it just sounds so much better than 96. I am not necessarily saying 'go out and buy photoshop' to someone who uses GIMP and likes it, I am simply saying that support for 16 and higher bit imaging is a very important aspect most professionals working with images consider when choosing their software. This is why CinePaint exists (and a major component of why it was forked from GIMP, for that matter), and why most other free and commercial software supports at least 16 bit and is moving beyond (eg. Krita now supports 32 bit HDR, and photoshop introduced support for this in CS2).
Amateurs wouldn't care (for the most part) about the 8-bit vs. 16-bit difference
Which I guess is why software with native 16 bit and 32 bit imaging capability dominates in enthusiast and professional imaging circles.
he ought to have better equipments (camera with fast lenses...
A camera with a fast lens is no help when you have a scene in front of you with an enormous tonal range. All it lets you do is shoot the same scene faster at a higher aperture (which may not be what you want anyway, especially if you want a high depth of field in the image... but I digress).
... scanners that can do this sort of adjustment while scanning, not after the fact)
Many dedicated film scanners do precisely this (however many of them also provide significantly inferior controls), but I can't for the life of me fathom why you would want to downsample an image's bit depth simply to cater for software limitations.
you can't actually do most of the work in 16-bit, since most actions are disabled in Photoshop until you convert that picture to 8-bit
I guess you haven't used photoshop lately. Or Corel Photopaint (a very worthy equivalent at a tenth of the price of photoshop).
I'm not saying that flexibility 16-bit gives... isn't good. I'm just saying it's not *that* good.
That's great, stick with 8 bit then. Just don't begrudge those who have a significantly different opinion, and prefer to work in a format that offers more flexibility and allows you to completely change the lighting and tone in an image, at will, without compressing the tones to a point where banding is visible, or reshooting. *shakes head*
Believe me, I am a fan of GIMP and am waiting for the day it supports 16 and 32 bit imaging natively so that I can use it more often for the type of imaging work I like to do. I just get a little more cynical when I look at every version update and see that it is 'on the horizon'.
The whole process can't have started with a JPG because JPG doesn't support 16 bit colour. Since at the end of the article he recommends opening from a RAW file in 16 bit colour mode, I would posit that that is what he initially did. The fact that he is playing with a 16 bit image with a jpg extension suggests to me that he started with a RAW, converted it to 8 bit for the initial edit, saved as a JPG, then stepped back into the history to 16 bit mode and edited it again. That's what I would have done.
That's fine but off-topic.
You asked what specifically Photoshop can do that GIMP cannot, I responded with two items, which you then attempted to bin by relegating them to the status of irrelevant.
I shoot stitched panoramic landscapes and I would say the largest transition in image quality for me was when I made the jump from using 8 bit jpgs as my base exposures to 12 bit Canon RAW converted to 16 bit TIFF.
16 bit image support is very relevant to me, not so relevant to you, but its relevance to either of us individually doesn't negate its value.
As a supplement to the parent comment, and just to vindicate support for your very relevant link, I will relay a section from near the end of that page:
[8 bit image]
Yikes! Just as with the gradient, the 8-bit version of the image suffered quite a lot of damage thanks to the edit. There is very noticeable color banding, especially in the water, which now looks more like some sort of painting effect than a full color photo. You can also see banding in the beach ball itself, and in the sand at the bottom of the photo. At this point, the 8-bit image is of little use to us anymore.
[16 bit image]
Once again, just as with the gradient, the 16-bit version survived without a scratch! It looks every bit as good as it did before the edit, while the 8-bit version lost a ton of detail. And it's all because the 16-bit version has such a tremendous amount of possible colors available at its disposal. Even after an edit as drastic as the one I performed, I was unable to make the slightest dent in the quality of the image thanks to it being in 16-bit mode.
This has been repeated ad nauseum, every time a GIMP or Photoshop article has found its way to slashdot.
16 bit images. Extremely important for preserving dynamic range in an image when adjusting contrast and colour saturation.
Adjustment Layers. Very, very useful for non-destructive contrast and colour adjustments.
There are probably more but they are the most outstanding in my mind.
In short, GIMP is useful for most web and electronic imagery, but less than adequate for print - especially saleable print.
As far as other OSS products are concerned - I think Krita supports 16 bit images but last time I tried it, it was still a little flakey. Cinepaint supports 16 bit images and HDR, but have you ever tried to use it? Paint.net is pretty awesome but a little unstable as well, and though it's free I am not too sure about its code's status.
I quite like Inkscape though.
Anything is arguable by psychologists. However, if you don't need to believe in an absolute moral code, you also don't need to believe in an archetypical behaviour pattern to which we all adhere (read: behaviour pattern that dictates everything we do is part of some elaborate mating ritual). As such, it may be the case that there are many different reasons why people dedicate themselves to work.
In the case of great scientists, artists, politicians or inventors, it may simply be about pure fascination with their particular interest (eg. Darwin studying and classifying barnacles for 8 years - 1856 to 1864), an altruistic (read instinctive if you will) desire to make living conditions better for their counterparts (eg. Norman Borlaug, 1970 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, for his research in wheat agriculture leading to the Green Revolution), or some other reason.
In short, perhaps not everything is about f-cking, however f-cking certainly is everything to some.
Just to clarify - no "hacking" needs to be done to install XP unless you intend to image a USB stick with an XP installer because you don't have a USB CD reader. If you have a USB cd reader it's as straightforward as installing on a typical pc. There are optimisations after install to minimise SSD writing - they are probably the most technical aspect of an "access-to-cd-drive" install.
The only part of that excerpt that could be interpreted as usenet.com encouraging copyright infringement - that I can see - is the word 'warez' in the last paragraph. The rest is simply advertising the viability of Usenet as a medium for obtaining free (read: not necessarily pirated) files.
Looks like the tired old argument about free files equating or not equating to pirated files is still alive and kicking.
Your argument is simply your viewpoint and I accept that. It's not a black and white issue however. See my response to parent.
Also, please don't dramatise by projecting intent onto me personally. There's no need to do it and it's not particularly good form in a purely academic discussion.
As an aside, I didn't make any allusions to the 'information wants to be free' argument. You just correlated my comment to that (I assume due to the language I used to make my point) and forked from there.
Admittedly, we're in agreement that information doesn't want to be free, by virtue of the fact that information obviously has no inclination whatsover. I certainly believe that a sizeable portion of society in general wants information to be free however, as evidenced by the rise of peer to peer file sharing and free information resources such as google and wikipedia. I also believe that in some cases, the importance of information to the furthering of society sometimes outweighs an ip owner's right to absolute control over it (eg. AIDS vaccines).
I guess that's getting into off-topic territory. We are on the same page in that I share your lament about zealotry in any form, and one-sided blinkering (ie lack of lateral thought / critical analysis).
Both acts are equally wrong because you're trying to take away the rights of the person who MADE the thing (the information itself doesn't want to be free. it doesn't want to be anything.)
Whether it's wrong or illegal is determined by the legislation in the country in which the act takes place.
There is obviously more than one train of thought on this issue, and it's yet to be determined if any is wrong or right. Probably never will be as long as people want control over information.
Ironically, they tend to be the same people that say "copying music isn't stealing" but turn around and raise mortal hell if someone misappropriates open source code in a closed project when the two things are actually pretty much on par.
The acts oppose each other in outcome. One is releasing proprietary / closed media (ie music) from a narrow distribution model (ie making it open), the other is capturing open media (ie code) and shackling it to (presumably more code in) a traditional narrow distribution model (ie making it closed).
It's debatable as to whether either act is stealing or not. It really depends on the legislation in place in the country in which the act is taking place.
There's no real need to store your data on partitions that are exclusively accessible to Windows.
Simply make your data partitions ext2/3 and access them in Windows Vista with Explore2FS. A commenter in this recommendation of Explore2FS claims that it works fine in Vista Beta 1, so it's moderately safe to assume that it will work in subsequent iterations.
Also, there is an Ext2/3 filesystem driver for Windows which works in XP, and may or may not be ported to Vista as well (it may even work already, but I haven't seen any evidence for this).
Slashdot Mirror
Tuatara. Also, "living fossil" is something of a misnomer. In the case of both the Coelacanth and Tuatara, the modern animals just bear a very strong resemblence to their fossil counterparts.
Agreed. I guess I didn't have a big problem getting it to work, but the break in interface from Every Other Imaging Software Package(tm) to GIMP is definitely a sticking point and a thorn in GIMP's side.
Except, of course, the examples touch on corner cases that most people will never have to deal with.
I often find that even 16 bit isn't enough to capture the full spectrum of, say, a cityscape at sunset, which is why I often bracket and merge into 32 bit HDR then tone map.
To me, this looks just like an audiophile trying to justify the need for a $1000 power cable for his stereo system
To you it may look like that, but to me a better analogy would be an audiophile trying to justify the need for 192kbit mp3 bitrate because it just sounds so much better than 96. I am not necessarily saying 'go out and buy photoshop' to someone who uses GIMP and likes it, I am simply saying that support for 16 and higher bit imaging is a very important aspect most professionals working with images consider when choosing their software. This is why CinePaint exists (and a major component of why it was forked from GIMP, for that matter), and why most other free and commercial software supports at least 16 bit and is moving beyond (eg. Krita now supports 32 bit HDR, and photoshop introduced support for this in CS2).
Amateurs wouldn't care (for the most part) about the 8-bit vs. 16-bit difference
Which I guess is why software with native 16 bit and 32 bit imaging capability dominates in enthusiast and professional imaging circles.
he ought to have better equipments (camera with fast lenses ...
A camera with a fast lens is no help when you have a scene in front of you with an enormous tonal range. All it lets you do is shoot the same scene faster at a higher aperture (which may not be what you want anyway, especially if you want a high depth of field in the image ... but I digress).
Many dedicated film scanners do precisely this (however many of them also provide significantly inferior controls), but I can't for the life of me fathom why you would want to downsample an image's bit depth simply to cater for software limitations.
you can't actually do most of the work in 16-bit, since most actions are disabled in Photoshop until you convert that picture to 8-bit
I guess you haven't used photoshop lately. Or Corel Photopaint (a very worthy equivalent at a tenth of the price of photoshop).
I'm not saying that flexibility 16-bit gives ... isn't good. I'm just saying it's not *that* good.
That's great, stick with 8 bit then. Just don't begrudge those who have a significantly different opinion, and prefer to work in a format that offers more flexibility and allows you to completely change the lighting and tone in an image, at will, without compressing the tones to a point where banding is visible, or reshooting. *shakes head*
Believe me, I am a fan of GIMP and am waiting for the day it supports 16 and 32 bit imaging natively so that I can use it more often for the type of imaging work I like to do. I just get a little more cynical when I look at every version update and see that it is 'on the horizon'.
The whole process can't have started with a JPG because JPG doesn't support 16 bit colour. Since at the end of the article he recommends opening from a RAW file in 16 bit colour mode, I would posit that that is what he initially did. The fact that he is playing with a 16 bit image with a jpg extension suggests to me that he started with a RAW, converted it to 8 bit for the initial edit, saved as a JPG, then stepped back into the history to 16 bit mode and edited it again. That's what I would have done.
If you try the same thing with an 8 bit TIF or PNG you will get the same result.
That's fine but off-topic. You asked what specifically Photoshop can do that GIMP cannot, I responded with two items, which you then attempted to bin by relegating them to the status of irrelevant. I shoot stitched panoramic landscapes and I would say the largest transition in image quality for me was when I made the jump from using 8 bit jpgs as my base exposures to 12 bit Canon RAW converted to 16 bit TIFF. 16 bit image support is very relevant to me, not so relevant to you, but its relevance to either of us individually doesn't negate its value.
Probably the most poignant and relevant post in this thread.
This doesn't matter to a hobbyist crowd with a vested interest in promoting some manufactured cause in the name of its pet software.
GIMP is fine for cropping files. The interface is just different.
As a supplement to the parent comment, and just to vindicate support for your very relevant link, I will relay a section from near the end of that page:
[8 bit image]
Yikes! Just as with the gradient, the 8-bit version of the image suffered quite a lot of damage thanks to the edit. There is very noticeable color banding, especially in the water, which now looks more like some sort of painting effect than a full color photo. You can also see banding in the beach ball itself, and in the sand at the bottom of the photo. At this point, the 8-bit image is of little use to us anymore.
[16 bit image]
Once again, just as with the gradient, the 16-bit version survived without a scratch! It looks every bit as good as it did before the edit, while the 8-bit version lost a ton of detail. And it's all because the 16-bit version has such a tremendous amount of possible colors available at its disposal. Even after an edit as drastic as the one I performed, I was unable to make the slightest dent in the quality of the image thanks to it being in 16-bit mode.I tend to agree that it is a huge and noticeable difference. As for Cinepaint, please see my parent thread, specifically my reference to Cinepaint.
By the way - as a supplement to the comment above, here is a simple example of the difference between 8 bit and 16 bit colour:
Benefits Of Working With 16-Bit Images In Photoshop, Page 2- 16 bit images. Extremely important for preserving dynamic range in an image when adjusting contrast and colour saturation.
- Adjustment Layers. Very, very useful for non-destructive contrast and colour adjustments.
There are probably more but they are the most outstanding in my mind. In short, GIMP is useful for most web and electronic imagery, but less than adequate for print - especially saleable print. As far as other OSS products are concerned - I think Krita supports 16 bit images but last time I tried it, it was still a little flakey. Cinepaint supports 16 bit images and HDR, but have you ever tried to use it? Paint.net is pretty awesome but a little unstable as well, and though it's free I am not too sure about its code's status. I quite like Inkscape though.Anything is arguable by psychologists. However, if you don't need to believe in an absolute moral code, you also don't need to believe in an archetypical behaviour pattern to which we all adhere (read: behaviour pattern that dictates everything we do is part of some elaborate mating ritual). As such, it may be the case that there are many different reasons why people dedicate themselves to work.
In the case of great scientists, artists, politicians or inventors, it may simply be about pure fascination with their particular interest (eg. Darwin studying and classifying barnacles for 8 years - 1856 to 1864), an altruistic (read instinctive if you will) desire to make living conditions better for their counterparts (eg. Norman Borlaug, 1970 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, for his research in wheat agriculture leading to the Green Revolution), or some other reason.
In short, perhaps not everything is about f-cking, however f-cking certainly is everything to some.
The cost of XP wasn't my point. The lack of hacking required to get it running was :)
Just to clarify - no "hacking" needs to be done to install XP unless you intend to image a USB stick with an XP installer because you don't have a USB CD reader. If you have a USB cd reader it's as straightforward as installing on a typical pc. There are optimisations after install to minimise SSD writing - they are probably the most technical aspect of an "access-to-cd-drive" install.
The only part of that excerpt that could be interpreted as usenet.com encouraging copyright infringement - that I can see - is the word 'warez' in the last paragraph. The rest is simply advertising the viability of Usenet as a medium for obtaining free (read: not necessarily pirated) files.
Looks like the tired old argument about free files equating or not equating to pirated files is still alive and kicking.
Your argument is simply your viewpoint and I accept that. It's not a black and white issue however. See my response to parent.
Also, please don't dramatise by projecting intent onto me personally. There's no need to do it and it's not particularly good form in a purely academic discussion.
As an aside, I didn't make any allusions to the 'information wants to be free' argument. You just correlated my comment to that (I assume due to the language I used to make my point) and forked from there.
Admittedly, we're in agreement that information doesn't want to be free, by virtue of the fact that information obviously has no inclination whatsover. I certainly believe that a sizeable portion of society in general wants information to be free however, as evidenced by the rise of peer to peer file sharing and free information resources such as google and wikipedia. I also believe that in some cases, the importance of information to the furthering of society sometimes outweighs an ip owner's right to absolute control over it (eg. AIDS vaccines).
I guess that's getting into off-topic territory. We are on the same page in that I share your lament about zealotry in any form, and one-sided blinkering (ie lack of lateral thought / critical analysis).
Whether it's wrong or illegal is determined by the legislation in the country in which the act takes place.
There is obviously more than one train of thought on this issue, and it's yet to be determined if any is wrong or right. Probably never will be as long as people want control over information.
Ironically, they tend to be the same people that say "copying music isn't stealing" but turn around and raise mortal hell if someone misappropriates open source code in a closed project when the two things are actually pretty much on par.
The acts oppose each other in outcome. One is releasing proprietary / closed media (ie music) from a narrow distribution model (ie making it open), the other is capturing open media (ie code) and shackling it to (presumably more code in) a traditional narrow distribution model (ie making it closed).
It's debatable as to whether either act is stealing or not. It really depends on the legislation in place in the country in which the act is taking place.
My love for Microsoft grows with every passing moment
There's no real need to store your data on partitions that are exclusively accessible to Windows.
Simply make your data partitions ext2/3 and access them in Windows Vista with Explore2FS. A commenter in this recommendation of Explore2FS claims that it works fine in Vista Beta 1, so it's moderately safe to assume that it will work in subsequent iterations.
Also, there is an Ext2/3 filesystem driver for Windows which works in XP, and may or may not be ported to Vista as well (it may even work already, but I haven't seen any evidence for this).