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The Gimp

The Future Of The GIMP 119

Posted by Hemos from the bring-out-the-gimp dept.
LinuxNews Team writes: "Sven Neumann and Michael Natterer prepared an RFC about GIMP. We learn that there will be three branches in CVS: 1.2.x branch (stable GIMP), 1.3.x ( devel GIMP but not many new features) and 1.9.x (VERY devel GIMP with whole new structure, GEGL and GCim stuff). Looks like GIMP 1.2.0 is on its way to the users. Check out the RFC."
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The Future of The GIMP More

The Future of The GIMP

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  • GIMP pic eyes are freaky! GET RID OF THEM! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I had /. open in netscape, and was proceeding to play minesweeper with netscape still in the background, and I thought I was going crazy when it looked like the gimp logo's eyes blinked. Turns out they only moved to the bottom right and back again rather quickly, but it is freaky! Here [slashdot.org] is the image in question. Next is ./ going to have background sound that has someone very, very softly repeating "Dave, Dave, what are you doing? I can feel my mind going..."

  • Re:When will The Gimp have CYMK support? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The GIMP's been CYMK compatible for awhile now, bud. Remember the hype up to the huge scare last New Years? I think most modern programs would have to be CYMK compatible now, to operate normally past the year 2000.
  • Would it work on male images as well?

    I've got a bunch of RMS photos on my HD...

  • Gimp 2.0 will never be released (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Despite the best intentions of the developers (and they have done an AMAZING job, I love the gimp), I've been following on the gimp-devel list I can virtually garauntee you, we will never actually see a gimp 2.0 with all the novel features that are proposed.

    There are an uncountable number of vapour open source projects that say 'we are going to re-write and revamp everything', lay out a development roadmap and make cool acronyms for the different components required etc...but without someone (or a very small group) that does the 'core' of the package entirely on their own (as Spencer and Peter did), it will never ever get done. Projects like gimp get started form a initial jolt of need, the motivation to re-write something totally new after things have come this far just isn't there.

    Open source is not synonomous with research and development; from what it appears they are proposing, gimp 2.0 would indeed be an amazing novel software package...sorry to be such a party pooper.

  • Re:Gimp 2.0 will never be released (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    > we will never actually see a gimp 2.0 with all the novel features that are proposed.

    Probably not.

    > Open source is not synonomous with research and development

    Of course the further development of gimp is being paid for by serveral commercial groups, including a hollywood effects studio (rhythm.com), so I think that you will see some work get done indeed.
  • I think it may be patented (no details though) but even if it is, someone in an enlightened country could/should implement it and put it up on FTP. Then we could all help ourselves. :-) It wouldn't be possible to put it on Linux CDs sold in the USA, but that wouldn't stop people from getting it.
  • I belive that the "new structure" is referring to mostly backend changes. The front end from what I understand from conversation on the gimp-dev list will not change drastically. The backend however has a lot of leftover code from the beginnings of gimp and gtk, when there was no established object system yet. Now there is, I think the idea is to move the GIMPs backend data structures and layout to a "real" object system.
  • That's quite possibly the most disturbing image I've had in a long time.....

    I saw RMS dancing the funky chicken at LWE in san jose last year too, I've barely recovered from *that*!
  • but it didn't crash nearly as much as Photoshop did.

    I can't remember the last time photoshop crashed on me - my only current problem seems to be a driver bug that both Painter and Photoshop tickle in my GeForce... big blits in certain situations kill the machine completely. On my other system, PS is rocksolid though - has been since v4 or so.
  • Pantone Color is a proprietry colour-matching standard - you buy a license to allow you to use it in your app.

    The theory goes that when you specify your colour as a Pantone number, your printer, or repro house can match that colour exactly because their ink manufacturer can sell them spot colours in those exact colours, rather than mixing up CMYK to get there. You can get a book of 'perfect' prints of these colours, and then use that to be sure that you're going to get what you want, because your screen is not going to give you WYSIWYG in colour terms.

    Many people use particular Pantone colours in their letterhead/logo etc, and having a graphics app with support for it allows you to match their colouring for work you produce. It's more important for print than online work though.
  • >Photoshop allows for editable type using both
    >Type 1 and TrueType ("scalable") fonts.
    Gimp depends on X fonts, so whether or not you use Truetype fonts depends on X. I'm not complaining about your post, just pointing out what a blithering idiot the original poster is both ways.
  • A quick search at IBM's Patent Site [delphion.com] indicates 2 patents - one filed 1975/granted 1977, one filed 1994/granted 1998.
  • My thought was that this might have something to do with moving and resizing layers. If you put 5 different images together and put them under one branch of the tree, then you could translate these layers and the registration between them would remain the same.
  • Bring out the GIMP! ;) I'm sorry. It had to be said. Please subtract the nominal karma fee for such a blatant outburst. :)
    ---
    seumas.com
  • thanks for the killer link!

    look like it's for osX based systems and nothing previous. guess that makes sense in a way - love to have a gimp that ran under os 9.
  • for those of you who haven't seen it, here's a link:

    link [marketwatch.com]

    In other news, a link was posted in a slashdot comment today that wasn't to goatse.cx...
  • actually, GTK+ is "The Gimp Toolkit". www.gtk.org points this out. gtk was created after the original authors of the gimp got tired of Athena Widgets. after it was created, they branched it out, so others could use this toolkit. :) awfully nice of em, eh?
  • And forget about another glaring weakness of the GIMP... lack of support for Pantone colors, which will never be remedied, since that'd require paying patent licensing fees. Still, incredibly useful
  • In any case, lack of Pantone support pretty much shuts the Gimp out of the professional high-end DTP realm, moreso than lack of CMYK, IMO.

    No... CMYK is first and Pantone is 2nd or 3rd... Because, you can lie about pantone colors if need be, in that you can make a multichannel image and specify to the printer - now, please print black black plate in black, the cyan channel in Pantone Blue 072, the magenta as Pantone Red 032, and the yellow plate as a varnish. :)

    The file will look absolutely aweful on your screen though, but you can fake your way around with out actually using Pantone colors while creating your files, but that all depends on supplying a file format that will separate correctly at the service bureau (ie, you can examine the plates of a CMYK file in advance by printing separations on your laser printer, but even if you do so with a RGB file, the service bureau will convert your file from RGB to CMYK and destroy anything you thought was going to be a separation...

    But again, GIMP won't ever have access to Pantone colors, and since CMYK is more unilaterally useful, it would seem obvious that right now, it's its greatest sore spot... Then device independent color (LAB) for color management purposes... I won't rattle down the entire list of short comings though, because CMYK's enough of a start to making the GIMP a useful program for tasks beyond making simple web graphics.
  • Who cares if 2 + 2 sometimes equals 3.9999999999 on a chip?

    Obviously you've never been involved with a branding campaign... Consistency counts. If every piece of collateral about your company was in a slightly different shade of color, it'd make your company look low-budget at best and amateur at worst. Using Pantone colors from a design perspective costs you nothing. You'll have to pay a couple extra dollars to the printer because they have to pay more for their inks, but in the end you end up using colors that you know will always look the same, regardless as to where they appear, or who you have print each job...
  • If they would drop support for non-scalable fonts, it would be a lot easier to do what PS does.

    Photoshop allows for editable type using both Type 1 and TrueType ("scalable") fonts.

    As for your beef about photoshop... The conspiratory theorist in me would say that they remain separate to generate extra revenues... But in the end, i think that they're two separate tools with two separate markets that overlap a lot. Simply integrating type layers into photoshop though kills off a lot of the need to go to illustrator (in my world). I also think that Photoshop would turn into a huge mess if they merged illustrators functionality into it. You'd have a huge selection of tools that only worked in one mode or another , or on one layer or another. Ditto for plug-ins and filters.
  • good point
  • > Does anyone know when The GIMP will support CYMK?

    When it pries the relevant patents from Photoshop's cold, dead fingers.

    --
  • Why not use 1.1? It's stable enough. I've been using it for a long time now.

    PS. Which book didja get?
  • When it pries the relevant patents from Photoshop's cold, dead fingers.

    I don't think Adobe (or anyone else for that matter) has patents on CMYK -- it certainly predates photoshop, or even computer design by a long shot. Pantone on the other hand....

    BTW-- I like your sig.
  • It's not the operating system that's holding the printers up. It's chemistry.
  • Sorry, just because CORBA is used in GNOME doesn't mean CORBA is ONLY used in GNOME. You could still have CORBA without all the GNOME dependencies.

    I know CORBA is not used solely in GNOME, but AFAIK KDE uses a different scheme, KParts. So CORBA is a more integral part of GNOME than it is of KDE, in other words, it is more GNOME-specific than it is KDE-specific. That was the point I was trying to make. (And though there surely are many other applications, I have heard of CORBA only in when talking about GNOME, so I'd guess GNOME constitutes a major part of CORBA-using software.)

  • Your right. I recently discovered Terraform [sourceforge.net], which seems to implement much that The GIMP already does.

    The one thing that AFAIK has not been modularized in GIMP is the drawing of the images to the screen. The height field could be implemented also this way. I think that a plugin or module for drawing the image might be more consistent with the design of The GIMP. This would allow switching between wireframe/2D map/etc. easily or allow for several simultaneously with several views open.

    Of course, more modularization could be done to allow external programs to function as "plugins". Could for example CORBA be used? This, OTOH, could make The GIMP more GNOME-specific, which would make some KDE people somewhat angry (or does KDE implement CORBA?)...

  • Just grab Gimp 1.1.30. It has what you ask, and works well.

    You have paths (bezier curves), you can stroke them, modify them, and also convert arbitrary selection to bezier paths.

    Paths can be easily exported/imported to/from textfiles, and creating a plugin to convert them to/from EPS should be simple (I'm making some experiments as now).
  • This, OTOH, could make The GIMP more GNOME-specific

    Sorry, just because CORBA is used in GNOME doesn't mean CORBA is ONLY used in GNOME. You could still have CORBA without all the GNOME dependencies. Also, if you look at other posts, it appears that CORBA will be used in the 1.9 development branch.
  • And yet I get BSOD's on this Win2k box just as often as I did on NT4... As all recent MS boxes, it's rock solid if you don't use it much... (ie. a one or two app box.) As with Win16, Win32 and MacOS boxen, if you use it FOR REAL (d/l all sorts of doo-dads and gadgets) it breaks frequently. I'm still on the OS X public beta kick for my G3....it's great. Very stable. Biggest gripe is no drivers for my 3-button scroller mouse. Strangely, OmniWeb and other "Cocoa" applications have full multi-button and scroller support from the get-go, but the "Workspace" and "Finder" don't, nor do the apps within Classic. Should be a patch out soon that allegedly removes volumes of "development code" and gives a serious speed-boost. Can't wait.
  • Oh, and about the graphics tablet stuff...

    We have a Wacom Intuos A5 - a very nice bit of hardware.

    Gimp for windows tries. But fails all too often. I will try an update of WinGimp - that might fix the problems.

    Anyway, even with proper tablet support, Gimp is not a natural media package like Painter. Painter creates natural, smooth graphics. Gimp generates a series of varying sized circles. It doesn't know what to do with the tablet in the end, which is a shame. A lot more work is required in this area for the Gimp to have decent natural media functionality and decent tablet support.
  • I hope that the next devel version of The Gimp will allow script-fus to be undone. That's the only reason I don't like using them much --- they are not completely undoable.
  • whadaya mean, patent fees?

    Pantone's gone and patented COLOR?

    Or could you expand a bit, please?

  • Ok, that little GIMP guy freaked me out when his eyes moved - I thought I'd gone nuts. They only move when I'm not looking at them! :)

    --
  • Can you explain to me exactly what Cyan Yellow Magenta blacK has to do with what year it is?
    _____________
  • kinda funny that the only topic icon that's animated on /. is the Gimp... which can't write images in GIF format [burnallgifs.org].

  • It doesn't look like VA was accused of any wrongdoing... just the investment banks. Not really news for nerds... IMHO.
  • Actually PS 5.5 and onwards is bundled/integrated with Adobe Imageready, and you can easily (much easier than in the gimp) make animated GIFs. No avi or mpeg stuff like the gimp, but you can do a multiframed animation.

    I would use the Gimp's animation capabilities if the interface wasn't such a kludge. Can't they just invent a new palette that's designed for and suitable for animation? Layers?? come on...

    Anyway, Adobe would be crazy to start integrating Premiere into PS, they're already bringing in Illustrator features and if it keeps continuing, it'll end up a complete mess.
  • actually, GTK+ is "The Gimp Toolkit". www.gtk.org points this out. gtk was created after the original authors of the gimp got tired of Athena Widgets. after it was created, they branched it out, so others could use this toolkit. :) awfully nice of em, eh?

    Actually, the toolkit they got tired of was Motif. This was back in the days of 0.5* (IIRC) which I used on Linux and Irix for a while.

  • As long as the Gimp doesnt support Pantone colors
    then it will never commercialy replace photoshop, correldraw ...
    i know pantone color is proprietary but there could be a commercial pluging for it ..

  • Pantone's gone and patented COLOR?

    No, color specification. You can say that your logo's shade of red is "Pantone XYZ", and you'll get pretty much exactly the same red on your printed material, your trade-show doodads, the sides of your trucks, etc.

    Don't know too much more about it than that, because the whole concept of color gives me a headache--it's enough to make me go out and buy a Mac just for the built-in color correction.

    In any case, lack of Pantone support pretty much shuts the Gimp out of the professional high-end DTP realm, moreso than lack of CMYK, IMO.

  • Oops (Score:1)

    by moogla ( 118134 )
    I just realized that what I asked for is the main new feature in PS 6.0 &nbsp :)

    Okay GIMPish devs, get your butts in gear!
  • It [Photoshop, PaintShop] lacks extensibility for the common user without special tools.

    So how is it a rip-off? It's a one-up!
  • Indeed, the availability of editable Text and associated effects in the Photoshop are quite useful, and I use it more than GIMP for that reason alone. However, one must understand that the GIMP tries to be friendly to all users of X and supports bitmapped fonts. It's font tool wants to render a layer, either with bitmaps from X, or TTF/Type-1 rendering... and that's it. One shot, one model, one layer. If they would drop support for non-scalable fonts, it would be a lot easier to do what PS does. Or they could have two font tools (like "textbox" and the old one).

    Now my beef about Photoshop: if you're going to support realtime vectors in the form of fonts, why not add full Illustrator functionality, with vector layers? God how I miss a simple circle or arc tool in PS. Same to GIMP, let's see some vectors!

  • Isn't the LZW patented due to end next year? We should get compressed GIF support pretty soon.
  • gimp 1.1 has paths, so 1.2 will have it too.
  • Well gnome is (mostly) based on GTK+, and GTK+ is developed for GIMP.

    If GIMP will be under heavy redesign, thus we mach expect the same thing for GTK+ which is a bad thing for GNOME as it's approaching 2.0 (or 1.2) version.

    Or maybe GTK+ is already a distinct rpoduct from GNOME, thus we have no problem...

  • Ah, the "foxy female" reference. Have you been watching "That Seventies Show" agian?
  • have you USED the gimp on win32? It's slow, clunky, crash prone, etc etc

    Just remember, an application can only be as good as the operating system it is running on...

    ---
    "Fdisk format reinstall, doo dah doo dah,
  • I think some of them are in fact undoable, but some are not. I guess it is the plugin author's responsibility to implement undoability, but you're right: it really should be done outside of the plugin code and in the main app. I hope this'll happen in the future.
  • Wow...I have seen many messages where people say that the transition from Photoshop to Gimp is a rocky one with less features....But I have a slightly different story...I have used gimp for a while now (at home) and feel pretty comfortable with it -- however I just got a shiny copy of Photoshop on this "nice" NT machine here at work -- and having never used Photoshop before -- I am at a complete loss to get anything done....Good thing I have Exceed....I think if I want to get any work done today I best fire up Gimp from one of the *nix boxen sitting around here collecting dust...(Now if only I could have such a comparable option to replace Excel, Quicken, IE5, Lotus Notes, Homesite --- I would be a happy camper.)

  • [A] lack of support for Pantone colors [] will never be remedied, since that'd require paying patent licensing fees.

    How long ago was that patent granted? The first I heard of Pantone was working as a temp for a print shop in 1995, and even then it seemed to be an established standard. I realize patents last quite some time, but they inevitably expire.

  • 'Nuff said, but /. wouldn't let me post without a body....
  • LMAO. That's actually funny before you think about how mac users work at the moment =) I dont think I need to point out the modifier keys (command/shift etc etc etc) =) But very nice wisecrack, all the same.
    [CK]

    ---
  • And here was me thinking GTK was Gnome ToolKit for C, and GTK+ was C++ extensions to the GTK. *shrug*. Oh well.

    ---
  • The only thing it doesn't really do quite the way I'd like is paths.
    If you could have strokable paths (especially if you could turn fonts into paths) then it would do just about everything I use Photoshop and Illustrator for.
    The Script-Fu is very useful indeed.
  • There's a huge manual. Really helpful. I thought I could do things quickly in Photoshop until I learned how to use GIMP moderately effectively. Now, rather than wondering how to do something in GIMP, I spend hours cursing Photoshop for not being able to do it.


  • Please excuse my somewhat off-topic post, but...

    Has anyone here heard of a V4L plugin for The GIMP? I tried the one from SANE (which has a v4l backend) but it failed miserably.

    Ranessin

  • Let's have the script-fu work regardless of the sex of the person in the image...

    Ranessin

  • As much as I may like pictures of nude men on occaision, this idea kind of scares me. I'm not sure that most Slashdotters are the kind of men I'd want to look at...

    Ranessin

  • So slow that I even responded to this out of sheer lack of other things to respond to.

  • I would just like to say how much I like using the GIMP. I'm able to do stuff that most people would think is impossible without paying for (or pirating!) photoshop. And it's easy to use, too!
    -mdek.net [mdek.net]

  • Must be a slow nerd news day.

  • So why don't you use Gimp for Windows, if that's what you've got at work? I've got it at home (my box multiboots slackware and nt, gotta have it for work), and it seems to work pretty well. A few flaky bits, but it's quite amazing to have an almost-up-to-date copy of the Gimp running without X. - Tim
  • Errr, make that 7.0....
  • Thank heavens! At least one Slashdot editor isn't posting repeat stories! Jon Katz has already covered this topic [slashdot.org]. Sample quote: According to a computing engineer who asked not to be quoted, prototypes of sexbots already exist in Japan. "I guarantee you," he e-mailed me, "that within 25 years, programmable, digital sexbots will be in many, if not most, American homes and apartments." Unfortunately, some idiot troll has wiped out the comments.

    I can't resist -- here's another quote: Or perhaps, Snell speculates, a new category of sexuality might emerge among humans - the technovirgin, people who find it simpler, perhaps even preferable, to have sex exclusively with sexbots. This would avoid all the emotional and physical complications of having sex with people.

    IIRC, Rob added the ability to filter by author in response to this article.

  • Thanks Bob, maybe I'll pull a Signal11 and mod that up from one of my other accounts.
  • Good point, we have to find someone to sift through the 80% of Slashdot men that are too skinny, too fat or too pale.

    Hey, has anyone registered amIaHotGeekorNot.com yet?
  • No, you misunderstand. I meant animating it to add real bootie action, heat and vibration!
  • 5'8". 150 pounds, running and cybex machines keep me a sleek sex machine!
  • But some prude at Slashdot keeps rejecting my Ask Slashdot: How to animate a Realdoll.

    Any ideas? Disney won't return my emails either.
  • Because it's very stable and in fact it's really more stable than gimp 1.02: I couldn't not make 1.1.25 crash yet while it was very easy to make 1.02 crash. So I think Gimp 1.2.0 has no reason to wait anymore! The 1.1.25 RPM package is available here:

    ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/Linux/distributions/mandrak e/7.2/i586/Mandrake/RPMS/gimp-1.1.25-13mdk.i586.rp m [sunet.se]

    and should install on most RPM based Linux distros on pentium and more machines.

  • Re:Windows using poser (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Real color graphics professionals use Macs.

    REAL color graphics professionals use a paintbrush and a real palette.

  • Who who Bi-directional text. I had such headaches doing hebrew stuff with script-fu a while back.

    The Cure of the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.

  • Dude, they have the gimp for windows. Use that.
  • Can anybody translate this into english? I can't figure out if it is VA Linux or GoldmanSachsMorganStanly or CS First Boston, or some unnamed third party, that is being accused of doing something wrong. Though it does sound like it is the underwriters, not VA Linux.

    Good question if SlashDot is showing a bias. If MicroSoft happened to do some deal with another company and that other company did something illegal that only benefited that company (ie it did not help MicroSoft) would that story get posted here?

  • A while ago the KDE people ported the GIMP to Qt, calling it KIMP. Because of the GPL not allowing linking with non-GPLed libraries, they were unable to distribute it. But now that Qt is GPLed, they could do so. I wonder if KDE is still interested in having a KDE-ized version of the GIMP?
  • a port to the mac?!!! gimp is killer on win32 - give adobe something to _really_ worry about.....
  • I've been using 1.1.26 for a while, and I've found it to be very stable. I work mostly with small images (around 256x256 maximum, for Half-Life texturing purposes), so do take that as a caveat. I think it's only crashed once, when a load filter got a bit confused as to what format a file was in, and attempted to create a ridiculously large image, making my PC run out of swap. Not something that's likely to happen, though, unless you like feeding incorrectly designated files into it...

    As for the program itself, it's quite an improvement over the 1.0 series. The user interface is a little more consistent, and there's now a menu button in the top left of image windows, in case you don't like the RISC OS-like context menu. It's a lot quicker and easier to change things like the brush and fill pattern, and the new drawing tools are pretty handy. It seems to have a lot greater support for graphics tablets, something I haven't been able to test since I don't have a graphics tablet...

    Anyway, it's well worth a download, and is a great set of improvements to an already great program.

    Oh, and here's that Half-Life stuff [man.ac.uk]. :-)

    Ford Prefect

  • The tree-based rendering pipeline is described in detail at the review [gimp.org] page that I pointed to earlier. In it, they state:

    What used to be a simple layer stack in GIMP 1.x, which is combined using layer modes (Normal, Combine, Difference, ...) will, with the help of GEGL, become a rendering pipeline which can be thought of as a tree of layers which is viewed from its root. The nodes of the tree are operators with an arbitrary number of inputs and outputs. These inputs and outputs access rectangular regions of pixel-data, the edges of the tree. Each edge (comparable to the layers we have now) can hold its data internally as pixels, vectors, text or whatever and only needs to provide a well-defined interface so it can be plugged into the rendering pipeline. A similar approach will be used for the operators: Simple functions like color corrections or blur filters as well as affine transformations and more complex effects are possible.

    So, the rendering pipeline becomes much harder to explain in simple terms. This new model, however, yields great flexibility and power. You can have an image that contains both pixel-based portions and vector scalable portions. These objects can then be modified at any time. So, unlike current GIMP, text could be added and then later changed. This is truly useful for speeding up many uses that people have for the GIMP, but it also makes for more new uses.

    --neutrino

  • They haven't patented color. They've patented a very specific system of color definitions. You can use any color in the world you'd like without their permission or okay. But if you go to your local printer and leaf through their color swatch book and say "i'd like this plate to be this exact color", then you're generally using Pantone colors.

    You generally only ever see pantone colors on print jobs of 1, 2 or 3 colors, because most of the specturm of colors can be recreated using 4 colors.

    They fill a niche. I hope i explained it adequately... Maybe their website [pantone.com] will offer a clearer explanation for you... :-)
  • I don't mean to bag on the GIMP. It's cool, but:

    Photoshop pros:

    1) I have spent years learning Photoshop. Whatever I need to do to an image, I can do it in Photoshop really, really quickly.

    When I use GIMP, I get frustrated alot "Damn it! In Photoshop I could just do x - y - z and I'd be done by now!"

    This, I guess, is a problem any new software must overcome when it enters a marketplace already dominated by one program.

    2) Photoshop has really nice text editing features, including being able to edit any text entered at any time.

    3) Photoshop's history feature has become indispensible for me.

    GIMP pros:

    1) Free
    2) Easy to write your own "plug ins"
    3) runs on linux

    Photoshop (and Diablo II) are pretty much the only reasons I ever use Windows at all. If there was a port of Photoshop for Linux, I would buy it in a heartbeat (even at $500+)

    This begs the question: Can a free software program of this complexity ever hope to overtake the proprietary "Industry Standard" ?

    IMHO, we can hope. GIMP is only at 1.2, and has been around a few scant years. Photoshop has been around 'forever' (any timespan over 5-8 years is forever in computer time) and is at 5.5 (going on 6?)

    Given the pace of software advances in popular open spource projects, there is definitly hope that GIMP can overtake Photoshop at some point.

    My office mate often touts GIMP. He (and myself) can be described as Linux zealots. But, when it really comes down to it, I use the best tool for the job. And often, that is Photoshop. (just as, often, the best tool is Linux)

    I wish GIMP good luck, and I DO use it regularly, when it's a quick change and I don't want to re-boot to windows. I look forward to the day when I don't have to re-boot at all.

    -geekd

  • > Or maybe GTK+ is already a distinct rpoduct from GNOME, thus we have no problem...

    It always has been. "GTK" was the toolkit the GNOME developers came up with for GNOME. When it was broken out to become an independent toolkit, it became "GTK+".

    GTK+ is "under heavy redesign", but that has nothing to do with The GIMP. They are simply upgrading it to support bi-directional text and lots of other goodies you expect in a modern GUI tookit.

    GNOME is based on GTK+, but they aren't getting blindsided by any changes to GTK+ driven by The GIMP. You fear a chain of causality where there is none.

    --
  • Does anyone know when The GIMP will support CYMK? This is the thing holding me back from replacing Photoshop 6.0 and my whole windows partition.

    Fawking Trolls! [slashdot.org]

  • We use Gimp at work for our advertising work in magazines in the UK.

    The lack of CMYK is a bit of a pain, but then again, I wouldn't have much of a clue about it anyway! :-)

    That means we work with 600dpi A4 images within the Gimp. We load them using the postscript filters provided by Ghostscript, which is the only program in the known universe that can load Postscript generated by Microsoft Publisher. We know for a fact that Quark can't.

    We do this on a laptop running Mandrake 7.1. With 64 Megs of RAM, 2 Gig of partition and a 266MHz PII processor. (HP Omnibook 4100). We also use Gimp for Windows for photo work for the adverts (version 1.1.28 I think for the latest ads) which is generally very stable. It has bugs, but not having to pay £500 for Photoshop, plus the time required to learn it is significant for an internet company.

    Yep, we don't use the best tools (Publisher is really bad, but we have it and it can be made to do most things). When a really good DTP program for Unix comes out that works, provides all the functionality (or a subset of) Quark and Publisher, then we will be migrating to that.

    Anyway, UK readers might have seen the adverts for our company in magazines like Practical Internet, Surfed, MacUser (once, and once only), EWEB, Internet Money, Essential Internet and a few more. Oh, the company - we register domain names at firevision.co.uk. Expanding soon to even more services... [end mini-ad]. We don't think that the lack of CYMK support has affected the outcome that much at all - but we aren't laying out an entire magazine where things like this become a lot more important.

    Maybe I should write an article on real business use of the Gimp...
  • There is as much likelyhood of CMYK being patented as RGB being patented. CMYK is merely using the primary colours Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and blacK as the inks that get mixed when you print. For additive colour (i.e. emitted light from a monitor rather than reflected light from a page), the primaries are Red, Green and Blue.

    The patents you're thinking of are the Pantone colours. Pantone came up with an 'index' of sorts of exact colours. You can buy swatch books of lots of little squares of the different 'Pantone' colours, and when you want to use that colour in your graphic, in the graphics software you specify 'Pantone colour #foo' rather than 44% Cyan, 36% Magenta, 89% Yellow, 20% blacK. This helps keep continuity between different printers (not office printers - big proper printers), and it allows you to envision EXACTLY how the colour will turn out in the final print without having to guess from the monitor.

    It's this database of colours and the matching system that Pantone has patents on (and I think they're pretty well deserved).
  • Gimp has re-editable type. It has had this feature for quite a while now. When you use the text tool, in the options palette, check the box 'enable dynamic text' or something like that. You can edit the text again just by clicking on it with the type tool.
  • Obviously you don't actually use the Gimp, because Gimp *can* write GIF images, it just can't use LZW compression in them.

    AFAIK, Unisys hasn't patented GIFs, just the LZW compression system that is used in most GIFs. Gimp writes GIF fine, except since it doesn't use LZW, Gimp's GIFs are usually a fair bit larger than GIFs from Photoshop etc.

  • Sadly enough I can see this being possible, given sufficiently powerful edge-detection routines (clothing region detection, sub-clothing body feature determination for nipple and breast shapes etc.). *shakes head* If you want celebrity fake nudes though, why not just look for them on all the bajillions of sites devoted to that? Of course, what with NutScrape being the pig that it is, you'll expend the same amount of cpu cycles either way[1]. Or just become a millionaire and offer the object of your desire a few hundred thousand dollars for a weekend o' carnal fun. "The only difference between an actor and a whore is that the actor sells their mind too." ~ some person whose name I'm forgetting

    [1] which naturally is going to lead some troll to propose building a beowulf cluster of 386s to use hot_grits.fu to render a naked N. Portman. Groan. Why do I think of these things?


    --

  • Very much of the Free codebase seems to be coming into a "final rethink" state, after having left a "better attempt" state -- and before that was, of course, the "initial (serious) attempt" state. It is like the good old saying that software is expected to become useful at its 3.0 release.

    Now, because Free software often uses release versions in the sense of ., and because most of these projects begin with 0 instead of 1 (which is often nothing but a honest thing to do), I happen to believe that, even though the version numbers are still smaller, lots of code reaches a "symbolic 3.0 release". Still with me? OK! :-)

    A few examples:
    Linux kernel: the Linux kernel has a history of major rewrites, but still a smaller history of API changes. One might argue that it had its "initial (serious" attempt" around 2.0, a first rethink around 2.2, and now yet another major rethink for 2.4, with Linus saying that they have now learned enough from the past to make the kernel structure workable, so it should be considered a "final rethink".
    GNOME: 1.0/ 1.2 "initial (serious) attempt", 1.4 "better attempt" and 2.0 "final rethink" (yes, I _do_ realize that 1.4 as well as 2.0 are future music for now, but there's good thoughts being done about this already.
    GTK+ follows about the same course, only it is a little bit further (has already got 2.0 alpha code). There is a good API rethink being done in 2.0.

    And now the GIMP. I applaud all this work, because I realize how much courage it takes to make these radical steps, and how _good_ it is that this work is being done. A lot of open source projects have a tendency to become lazy bloatware by a lack of strong leadership (and competition...). Take for example the comments concerning XFree86 that are on the rise again. (Note: this is not to even _suggest_ that the XFree86 team doesn't do a good job. I believe it could have been done better, but that it requires very special leadership skills to take the right decisions in such matters.)

    So, I wish you a lot of luck with the re-thinking!

    (P.S.: I heard rumours about GIMP 2.0 to have a cross-platform GUI library thingy. After reading this I don't believe much about it at all anymore. Anyway, I think it would be an odd move for the GIMP to move away from the GIMP toolkit! ;-) So if there is anything of truth in this story, my comment is that it seems a useless and confusing move, don't do it... :-)

    It's... It's...
  • Just start tracking the 1.1.x development series. I've been using the 1.1.2x series for a while now, and they've been exceedingly stable for me. I haven't tried 1.1.30 yet, but I'd imagine it works wonderfully. Of course, this requires a bit of work, too (compiling! Oh no! ;), but it's well worth it.
  • We will need to make a well-defined list of features and accept new features only after thoughtful discussion on the mailing-list.

    Translation: When is Adobe going to come out with Photoshop 6.0? We've run out of features to copy (CMYK support is too hard and it's not like Linux users need it to paste penguins on pictures of lingerie models) and the Open Source Movement certainly isn't coming up with any on its own.

    So, when are we getting a story on the SEC investigation of the VA Systems IPO?

  • if you want pics of nude men, considering that about 230,000 men are users here. We can all take nude pics of ourselves and post them somewhere, maybe even a Men of Slashdot calender to raise money for Athlon's, or the kids or something.

  • One over plugins (Score:3)

    by Sludge ( 1234 ) <[gro.dessot] [ta] [todhsals]> on Wednesday December 13, 2000 @11:17AM (#562266) Homepage

    I've been playing around with the design of a terrain engine. For those who don't know the basics of heightmap engines, the obvious thing to do is to have a grid of vertices. The height of the vertices is defined by a bitmap image, where each pixel's grayscale intensity represents the height of the vertex.

    The result is that a grayscale image can be created in The Gimp, and the output sent to my (and many other) terrain engines after saving a file. This is an unsatisfactory amount of feedback.

    I'd been doing some thinking about making a real terrain editor when it struck me that I would probably be recreating most of the tools and filters in The Gimp, but at a decidedly lower quality. I then realised that what I wanted to do is the opposite of plugins, additional filters, Perl-Fu and Script-Fu: I wanted to throw out the buffer where all the filters and tools are rendered to, and replace THAT with a plugin to the other end of The Gimp.

    I am interested in replacing the framebuffer in The Gimp with a AF_UNIX socket which transmits the framebuffer data over to another app, which would be in this case, my terrain. I would be able to paint modifications onto my terrain with all of The Gimp's tools.

    I'm pretty busy with my website [threewave.com] these days, as we just went live, but I'm definately interested in looking into the code for The Gimp soon enough to see if this is feasible.



  • Question... (Score:3)

    by redhog ( 15207 ) on Wednesday December 13, 2000 @12:06PM (#562267) Homepage
    Does this tree-based rendering thingy mean that it would be possible to implement a tree of layers, instaed as it is now a stack of layers, that is, that layers could be grouped into "meta-layers", to which the same things (like opacioty, mode, colour balance, etc) could be applied as to real layers? I have missed this feature in gimp.

    Perheaps it would allready be possible to implement (just a bit messy?). I don't know. I am a developer, but I have never looked at the gimp sources...

  • GIMP really needs an auto-nude script-fu (Score:3)

    by Hairy_Potter ( 219096 ) on Wednesday December 13, 2000 @10:34AM (#562268) Homepage
    Where you can take an image of a foxy female, and then have the script-fu trace her clothing, remove them and replace them with the appropriate flesh tones.

    You'd have to allow customization though, for nipple and aurolae size and color, as well as pubic hair color, shaping and or lack of.

    Once this gets done, though, I then need many screencaps of a certain George Lucas movie.

  • A whole new structure for Gimp? (Score:4)

    by _outcat_ ( 111636 ) on Wednesday December 13, 2000 @10:37AM (#562269) Homepage Journal
    Can you elucidate on this "whole new structure"? Or is not enough about it known yet? Taking a look at the information at

    http://plugins.gimp.org/gimp2/doc_components.html [gimp.org] it says:

    libgimpwidgets: core-independent widgets used e.g. to build libui widgets (similar to gimp 1.x's libgimpui)

    but I really cannot stand it when graphics programs change drastically and add "functionality" (on the level of the user interface) that replaces other things that I'm used to. For instance, I really liked PSP3. I really did. (OLD, old stuff we're talking about here.) But I coulddn't stand PSP4.

    I'm reasonably sure the GIMP guys are smart enough not to change things around too drastically, but it's a concern of mine, since I really enjoy working with and playing with The GIMP as it is. I don't want to have to update to a newer form that I really don't like to get the latest neat things.

    Just a concern of mine.

  • Re:A whole new structure for Gimp? (Score:5)

    by neutrino ( 11215 ) on Wednesday December 13, 2000 @11:18AM (#562270)
    The changes that are planned for 2.0 were discussed at Gimpcon this summer. There is a review [gimp.org] of the planned new features. For those who are too lazy to read the page, the following is a short rundown:
    • It will use the GEGL [mindspring.com], or Generic Graphics Library for pixel manipulatio
    • The rendering pipepline will be tree-based instead of a simple stack
    • The program itself will become much more modular in design -- Model View Controller
    • Plugins and app will communicate via CORBA
    • Generally more flexible -- possible integration with vector-based tools and video editing capabilities
    This is, as you can see, all backend work. Obviously, some changes will have to be made to the interface, but the result will be a vastly more powerful system. If they can successfully implement all of these ideas, then the GIMP would be, in many ways, the most technologically advanced image manipulation program in the world.

    Also, you should see the code as it stands in the 1.x series. It is obvious that the program has evolved to its current state and was not designed to this point.

    --neutrino

  • Where is GIMP going? (Score:5)

    by ajs ( 35943 ) <{ajs} {at} {ajs.com}> on Wednesday December 13, 2000 @12:28PM (#562271) Homepage Journal
    There's some pretty clear problems with the GIMP (to me) that point out one of the greatest weaknesses of open software development. Before I go on, thought I should say that I have contributed to the GIMP, and I think it's a great effort that should keep going.

    Ok, let's say you're developing an OS. You have a clear mandate for what an OS does based on decades of examples.

    On the other hand, if you're developing a photo-manipulation program, you don't have so clear a map. Once you've "done Photoshop", what else should photo-manipulation be? How does that apply to the extant (and future) UNIX(-like) desktops? How important is performance? How important is non-interactive use? How important is any new feature?

    Here's where I think the GIMP should go in the next 2-3 years, but others will disagree....
    • The UI and the photo-editing parts should be separated from eachother. The editing engine should be a library with a well-defined API between it and the UI so that others can slap a GNOME UI on it or a KDE UI or another Gtk+-only UI which uses a single window, etc.
    • All plugins should be re-catagorized and many re-written to fit smoothly into the new catagories. Perl, C, Scheme... it should not matter to the user.
    • Non-interactive use needs an overhaul. One of the most powerful features of the GIMP is being able to script your interaction with it, but most of what people want to do with this will require a single, stateful GIMP that can accept lots of requests at once (call it World Wide GIMP, if you will). This is not really what GIMP was designed for, so most people settle for using a library-based interaction with ImageMagick.
    I know that this list of wants is 180 degrees off of what a lot of people want, but that's sort of my point. It's really hard to figure out what community to serve in the Open Source world....

    I wish the folks at GIMP the best. If I ever have any more spare time, I'll go back to helping them out.

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