Slashdot Log In
GIMP 2.4 Released
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Oct 24, 2007 06:09 PM
from the bring-out-the-gimp dept.
from the bring-out-the-gimp dept.
Enselic writes "After almost three years since the release of GIMP 2.2, the GIMP developers have just announced the release of GIMP 2.4. The release notes speak of scalable bitmap brushes, redesigned rectangle/ellipse selection tools, redesigned crop tool, a new foreground selection tool, a new align tool, reorganized menu layouts, improved zoomed in/zoomed out image display quality, improved printing and color management support and a new perspective clone tool."
Related Stories
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
What about... (Score:5, Interesting)
patents (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:patents (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:patents (Score:5, Insightful)
European Union: 500,000,000
Japan: 127,000,000
Russia: 143,000,000
Ukraine: 46,000,000
And throw in Canada: 33,000,000
and Australia: 21,000,000
Those total about 800,000,000 people.
America: 300,000,000
Of the ones who do care, the majority are not in America. Of any one country sure, but that doesn't really matter. Companies and people buy software. And anyway, even if there aren't as many advertising agencies in those other places (and I would think there would be comparable numbers) the overwhelming population advantage of the other industrial countries still says you are very likely wrong.
And then there are the up and comers like India. Even if only a fraction of their population can be considered at an 'industrial level' (recognizing that there are still areas of poverty and ignorance), given the population size, that still represents a lot of people who care. And as their country gets more advanced that will only increase. So for arguments sake let's add another say 250,000,000 million people to draw from. I'd include China, but they would probably just pirate whatever someone else made anyway.
And like I said, the rest of the world is rising economically while the U.S.A. seems to be shrinking. Probably due to stupidity like software patents and over emphasis on stock holders profits instead of long term growth of companies (short term gain instead of long term steady performance... a tortoise and the hare algorithm
Re:patents (Score:5, Informative)
Oh please. That is not and never has been the problem. The problem is that the program was initially created with the assumption that all images would be 8-bit RGB, and then a huge amount of code was built on top of that silly assumption.
Yes, you can run into IP issues with things like Pantone, DIC, Toyo, or a particular set of CMYK transforms, etc, but that has nothing to do with the limitations of the GIMP. There are plenty of other image editors that have no problem doing color space conversions or dealing with >8-bit images because they were written by programmers who actually listen to graphics professionals.
Re:patents (Score:4, Funny)
Re:patents (Score:5, Informative)
No, that's not the problem.
The Gimp developers do intend to bring CMYK to the app, but the underlying graphics engine is based around 8bpp RGB. Rather than hack the old engine to work with CMYK and higher bit depths, they decided to build the future Gimp on a generic graphical library called GEGL [gegl.org]. That meant waiting until GEGL had a stable API and worked well enough to be better than the existing 8bpp engine in production use.
GEGL will most likely be in 2.6, along with the new MMIWorks-designed UI UI [gimp.org]
Re:patents (Score:5, Insightful)
The answer is unfortunately very simple: not enough contributions. The number of active GIMP and GEGL developers is probably much smaller than you think.
Most developers work on GEGL during their spare time and this is not always easy. When you only have a handful of active developers and they can only spend a few hours per week on improving the code or discussing enhancements, it is difficult to do everything quickly. Also, there was a gap of several years during which almost nobody worked on GEGL.
I think that if only a few percent of the people who complain about GIMP or GEGL would try to start contributing to the projects, then GIMP would have had perfect support for 16 bits per color channel since several years. Note that there are many ways to contribute [gimp.org] and there is room for everybody. Besides programmers who help with the code, the contributions to the documentation, translations, bug reports, web site and tutorials are always appreciated.
Re:patents (Score:5, Informative)
Re:SIOX ! (Score:4, Insightful)
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/index.html [adobe.com]
I know if I was just starting which one I would try first. (And I mean try very very hard)
I hate to bring in price as a selling point but that's almost two weeks (after tax) wage for me.
Software freedom is better. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why stress software freedom? I want the social solidarity that you only get in freedom; I want to be independent from masters and make sure my computer only obeys me. I'd rather have less functional or powerful free software than a more powerful or reliable proprietary program because I can hire people to improve the free program or I can ask the community to help me improve the free program. I can't free Photoshop. The catch here is that most people haven't been taught to value their software freedom, so they don't know to look for it and they haven't been taught to think of the consequences when their freedom is absent. I aim to change this by teaching people to value freedom for its own sake. I hope you will too.
Re:Software freedom is better. (Score:4, Insightful)
It also is intentionally perverted when compared to the industry standard, Photoshop. If it worked similarly, the market share would probably be higher even with the whole "free" price tag.
Hell, I strive to use open-source software whenever I can, and quite frankly the GIMP is useless for me. Why not make the software work better, then proselytize when you have something worth bragging about? Take Linux for example--I have used Linux since about 1998, but it was only when I first tried Ubuntu 5.10 that I felt comfortable recommending it to others as a primary operating system, because at that point it had reached a stage where it was useful.
(And a side note: Most people I know would still shoot themselves in the foot before using something called "The Gimp" in a professional environment.)
Re:Software freedom is better. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hopeless battle? (Score:5, Insightful)
We had *nothing* 10 years ago.
Some people simply don't understand the dynamics of open software and how the cumulative improvements are not lost and will eventually get you where you need to be.
Re:What about... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What about... (Score:5, Informative)
Since printing presses print with CMYK and not RGB, and CMYK is not equivalent to RGB, it makes perfect sense to use the same colour space, and hence it doesn't make sense to adopt a tool that can't do that.
Re:What about... (Score:5, Funny)
Most important thing (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Most important thing (Score:5, Informative)
The download link can be found here.
http://www.gimpshop.com/download.shtml [gimpshop.com]
Re:Most important thing (Score:5, Interesting)
You might be surprised to learn that some GIMP developers and Krita developers have been talking with each other for a while.
While the interface used by Krita is interesting, it is not suitable for everybody. In particular, several artists and graphics professionals using GIMP want to be able to use their dual-screen setups in the most efficient way, by distributing the image windows and the docks (with the tool options and other tabs) freely over both screens. This is difficult to do when everything is embedded inside a single large window.
The current GIMP user interface is far from ideal and all developers know that. But it is not so easy to redesign it without breaking some of the features that some users came to rely on. Some major improvements to the user interface are planned for future versions, though.
Re:Most important thing (Score:4, Insightful)
but seriously, when they're trying to enter the market dominated by a few programs with that same gui and behavior, they should replicate it.
But then there is this other group of people who will complain that GIMP is just being a PhotoShop wannabe and not innovating. If one wants something that acts Just Like PhotoShop then the thing to do is suck it up and buy PhotoShop.Re:Most important thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, but it's already not innovating. It's just not innovating with a crappy UI, as opposed to not innovating with a good UI.
BTW, a good UI doesn't (necessarily) mean Photoshop. Paint.NET for Windows has a pretty damned good UI, and it's not much like Photoshop at all.
Re:Most important thing (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Most important thing (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Most important thing (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Most important thing (Score:5, Interesting)
I can tell you some things that drive me nuts in GIMP 2.2. (I haven't tried 2.4 yet.)
The Layers dialog has two modes for deciding which image's layers it'll tell you about: Either you have to explicitly select it from a drop-down, or have it auto-switch to the last image which had focus. Either way, more often than not, it seems to have the wrong image selected for me. Why?
If I'm hopping back and forth between images, say, cutting things from one and pasting them in the other, the drop-down selection will be wrong almost 100% of the time, simply because I'm hopping back and forth between images. So even though I've raised the imagine I'm interested in, and perhaps pasted something into it (which I now need to go anchor to a layer), the layers dialog points at the image I cut from, not the image I'm pasting into. So what about automatic mode?
That one sucks too. I have my window manager set to "focus follows mouse." I have only so much screen real estate. In all likelihood, the image I cut from or yet some other image lies on the path between the image I pasted in, and the layers dialog. In some cases, it can be next to impossible to move from the image I'm working with and the layers dialog without brushing past another image--thereby causing the layers dialog to select the wrong image. Again, it loses.
What I really want is the layers dialog to pick up the image I most recently interacted with. Gaining focus does not count as interaction. I should have to click something (even dead-air) or press a key to send an event into a given image's window before the layers dialog switches over to that image.
If you want to rename a layer in Gimp, you can double click its name in the layers dialog and start typing. So far, so good. BUT, if you don't hit [Enter], but instead just move along and click elsewhere, it'll revert your edit. This makes editing a large number of names really tedious and error prone.
(I've got a few other pet peeves with the layers dialog, such as lacking a way to select a layer AND make it the only visible layer in one go, or locking subgroups of layers together for motion rather than only having a global "lock together", or selecting groups of layers to act on simultaneously with a filter, or raising/lowering layers as a group, but I'll stop there.)
If your image is smaller than the image window, you can over-stroke an image, which is great. You can even do point-to-point strokes with both endpoints outside the image. This is fairly handy. You can't do this, though, if the image is greater than or equal to the visible area. There's no overstroke zone around the image. You either have to zoom out, or make an oversized canvas to center your image in.
Ok, suppose I go the oversized canvas route... oversized by how much? It really depends on how zoomed in or out you are. In reality, the amount of overstroke zone you need remains fairly fixed regardless of zoom level, so this isn't really an ideal solution.
If a given layer has a lot of "thin" structures in a sea of transparency, the move tool often grabs the layer behind rather than the layer intended, even if the intended layer is the currently active layer. GIMP should "fuzz" the opaque areas out a little bit to make them more grabbable, because chances are that's what the user wishes to move. I don't remember a time when I accidentally grabbed a layer that was too high on the Z-ordering. I curse endlessly when I grab the layer below the one I wanted though, and that happens regularly.
If I click on a tool and move away too quickly, the tool gets a highlight box around it, but doesn't actually get se
Re:Most important thing (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting. Have you tried WinImages (if you're working under Windows)? It addresses all those issues, and many more. The UI is not like Photoshop's or the Gimp's, and is demonstrably more efficient in terms of what gets done per UI interaction count.
Sounds like you're a real layers fan; WinImages has more layering power than anything else out there, hands down. 70+ blend modes, non-destructive geometric edits including scaling and rotation and a lot more.
I know this because I wrote a lot of it. ;-)
Re:Most important thing (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Most important thing (Score:5, Informative)
Despite popular belief, Photoshop's panels aren't stuck inside of the parent window. You can do exactly as you described in Photoshop, and it's been that way for at least two years.
Re:Most important thing (Score:5, Interesting)
Photoshop is also one of the few apps where the "Menus at the top" scheme makes sense virtually all the time. There are cases in which I don't like it, but for applications like Photoshop or the GIMP, which commonly manage several windows at once, there is absolutely no doubt that Apple's windowing paradigm is the best of the bunch. It certainly accounts for a good portion of Apple's dominance in the creative design industry dating back to the 90s.
I believe that recent versions of PS gained the ability to pop the canvas and pallets out of the main "root" window on Windows. You've still got the root window hanging out somewhere with the menubar in it, but you don't actually need to have anything in it. It's not optimal, but it's a limitation of the OS more than anything else.
(Disclaimer: I'm not suggesting Apple's got the best scheme overall. There are certainly situations where Windows or X are clearly more efficient, and there are a lot of aspects of the OS X GUI that "bug" me. My "ideal" GUI would probably be some combination of Windows 2000, Mac OSX, and Xfce)
Re:Most important thing (Score:5, Informative)
---
Did the Ancient Egyptians play stone, papyrus, scimitar?
---
Re:Most important thing (Score:5, Insightful)
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that the earth is populated entirely by whiny photoshop fanboys.
This isn't the case.
Re:Most important thing (Score:5, Interesting)
Photoshop is going to soon suffer the same problem that i see for IBM. Open source is really starting to gain momentum. My fellow art nerds and I are all poor. We can't afford to go out and buy expensive software like photoshop; so what do we do? We go out and buy a wacom, get ourselves a copy of the GIMP and go to work. When we start getting ourselves into decision making positions, what are we going to choose? A very expensive and (imho) difficult to use piece of software like photoshop? Or a very familiar, and 100% free piece of software like the gimp?
Similarly, IBM has really shot themselves in the foot with the OS/400 platform. Here you have a a really really rock solid piece of software, arguably one of the most stable operating system/platforms in existence today, but you have a problem. If I wanted to go out and learn OS/400, I mean REALLY learn it (the way that i can with Linux/BSD) I wouldn't be able to. It is FARRRR to expensive for a hobbyist like myselft to get into.
Now ask yourself, if I, or my equally poor nerd brethren, go out into the job market and are tasked with building a database for whoever we start working for, what are we going to choose? Are we going to go with the familiar, very capable, and very FREE database called MySQL or Postgres (running on top of a *nix of course)? Or are we going to opt for a very cumbersum (I mean this from the perspective of somebody who has never developed on it before, it might be very elegant for all i know) very expensive, and VERY unfamiliar database such as DB2 (which is what runs on OS/400).
Both IBM and adobe have shot themselves in the foot in this regard. Today's hobbyists are tomorrows decision makers, and they are going to choose what they are accustomed to.
Re:Most important thing (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't care. If your budget doesn't have a minimum of six zeros on the end of it, IBM is entirely disinterested in your existence.
IBM big iron is designed for those people who cannot use anything else. They have no competition. It doesn't matter if you prefer mysql or whatever - it cannot handle those kinds of loads, because it can't scale up to clusters of hundreds of thousands of CPUs. You, as a person who uses things like mysql, probably have no conception that those kinds of loads even exist. There are probably only a few hundred users in the world who need it. Nonetheless, their problems are real and have to be solved. IBM mainframe hardware is the only way to do it, so they pay a premium measured in millions. We are talking about problems that cannot be solved without filling an entire BUILDING with hardware. Most of them are related to the financial industry, who have to be able to process all the transactions in the world in real time, and where any failure of the system would cause irreparable damage to the world economy. This is up in the space where a system failure really could throw large countries into a recession overnight, so it absolutely has to be missile-proof.
This is not a consumer industry. Hobbyists are irrelevant. The consumer industry will always continue to grow and occupy most of the world, but it is never going to be able to supply those few hundred at the top, and there is always going to be a need for IBM (or somebody very similar to them) to service their needs. And there's nothing wrong with that.
needs better tablet support (Score:4, Interesting)
Other than that, gimp is awesome - and almost everything you can think of is available as a plugin - I've already tried the new context-sensitive resizing plugin (context-sensitive resizing has been mentioned a few months ago on
Re:needs better tablet support ... inkscape? (Score:4, Interesting)
I haven't, but I love the app. They've made considerable advances in the last couple of releases. I know there's a tutorial by a guy who draws and shades comics using it. Also that you can simplify lines or using some (built in python) scripts add jitter or add jitter as you draw.
If you've not tried it recently it's worth a punt.
I'm using Slackware 12 and installed the development release via autopackage (http://inkscape.org/download/?lang=en).
Why bother reading? (Score:5, Insightful)
GIMP has an unprofessional name! Waaaaaaaaaaah!
GIMP only does 8-bit color! Waaaaaaaaaaah!
GIMP isn't UI identical to PhotoShop on every menu 3 levels deep! Waaaaaaaaaaaah!
GIMP manages windows sucky! Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
Does not! Does too! Does not!.................
Fake! (Score:4, Funny)
No more GIMP vs Photoshop, please! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:GIMP 2.3? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:GIMP 2.3? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:GIMP 2.3? (Score:5, Informative)
The stable GIMP releases have even numbers. The last stable release before 2.4.x was GIMP 2.2.x, starting with 2.2.0 released in December 2004. So that was almost three years ago. There were several bug-fix releases in the meantime, up to 2.2.17.
The unstable 2.3.x releases ended with the last versions becoming release candidates for 2.4.
Adjustment layers (Score:5, Interesting)
Adjustment layers. If you're not familiar with the adjustment layers that Photoshop 5 software introduced, they're layers that copy pixels from layers below them and run a filter on them, and they automatically update when the layers below them are changed. It's been said that GIMP is one of the best Photoshop 3/4 clones around.
Re:Adjustment layers (Score:5, Funny)
Except Photoshop 3 supported CMYK.
Re:Adjustment layers (Score:5, Funny)
> Except Photoshop 3 supported CMYK.
He wasn't talking about Photoshop 3. He was talking about Photoshop 0.75. That has a lot less features...
Re:Layers? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ask artists, not geeks (Score:4, Insightful)
Artists are not the only people who ever use Gimp. Many users only use it to crop/resize images and maybe tweak the color balance a little bit. In other words, make artists your primary target, but don't ignore geeks' opinion, either.
Here's why: just because Photoshop is the "industry leader" doesn't mean it's perfect - nor does it mean that the UI is perfect. What it means is simply this: it's the "industry leader".
Gimp UI is actually pretty well thought out and is highly customizable. You can learn the UI inside and out in a day, even if you're really lazy/slow.
As with many other open sourced projects, the developers don't follow the same common path, but instead spread out into their areas of interest. A perfect solution would be if some company used Gimp as a base and polished it to suit the most demanding users. Just like what CrossOver Office does with Wine.
Re:Awesome new features! (Score:5, Insightful)
The GIMP, on the other hand, is a comparatively simple tool, though still very useful and quite versatile in its own right. It is what us amateurs use because the pro tools are overkill and/or too expensive. It also happens to be free, in more than one sense of the word, which makes it ideal for its target audience. For example, I do web graphics sometimes. Why in the world would I spend close to US$500 for something that is rarely used and would be overkill to boot? I'd rather use my free image program with more tools in its toolkit than I would ever need for that task.
This is why I will never understand the PS vs. GIMP debate. GIMP will never be a Photoshop killer because there is no need for a Photoshop killer. Those who need the power of Photoshop will buy it (or steal it), those who don't will use GIMP or another simple tool.
You have no idea what you are talking about (Score:5, Insightful)
This is wrong. CMYK has FOUR dimensions. It is completely impossible to represent it in a 3 dimensional space. You claim is like saying that if I put finer graduations on a ruler, it can suddenly measure 2 dimensions rather than one!
The converters you talk about (and incidentally are in Gimp already, and in printer drivers when you send them rgb colors) map the 3-D space into the 4-D space. But they cannot fill the 4-D space, any more than you could fill a room with a piece of paper (while keeping the paper's shape a non-fractal). Thus there are CMYK colors that are not output. This has NOTHING to do with color resolution. No useful RGB->CMYK converter will produce both CMY=0,K=1 and CMY=1,K=1 output. Even if the CMYK device was 1 bit per ink and thus only capable of printing 16 different colors, you could not represent all those 16 possibilities with 24, or even 48, or 96 bits, or an infinite number of bits of rgb!
In reality the highest quality CMYK printing devices available have much less than 8 bit resolution in how much ink they lay down (once you take into account errors in ink delivery and spread). The resolution is so low that the volume represented by the RGB->CMYK conversion is over-sampled by many times when the source is 8 bit rgb. So actually 16 bits does not help one tiny bit in the area you are asking for.
The reason for more than 8 bits is for processing in the digital realm. For instance if your picture is 1/4 as bright as you want it, and you multiply by 4, then you lose two bits of resolution (as the bottom 2 will be zero). If your screen shows 8 bits and the original was 8 bits, you have effectively reduced your screen to 6 bits. If the original was 16 bits (and your screen was showing the top 8 bits) then after the multiply your screen is still showing an 8 bit image (the top 8 bits of the remaining 14). (that is not real accurate, a correct program with knowledge of sRGB would do something more complex and you would lose more than 2 bits at the bright end, less at the dark end).
Also more than 8 bits should absolutely use 16 bit half float data. 16 bit integers is a total waste of effort. Float data has the advantage that it is not clamped (this eliminates gamut limitations), and that a vastly larger range of useful data. Even 16 bit data would start to lose resolution on an 8 bit screen if multiplied by more than 256 (actually somewhat larger if sRGB is correctly followed). But 16-bit float would allow a multplication by 65540 or so before there would be loss. The only reason for 16-bit integers was that older computers could not do float fast enough, but this is not a problem now, modern graphics cards even take half-float data directly.
Re:You have no idea what you are talking about (Score:5, Informative)
There are other advantages of 16+ bits. 8-bit RGB images are usually in sRGB space, which means that the luminance of a pixel is not proportional to the pixel value, but rather something like the 2.2'th power except for a small range near zero. That is convenient for encoding a large contrast range in just 256 values, but sucks for operations that are inherently linear operators on the luminance, such as background substraction and blurring. With 16+ bits, all operations can be done in linear space without loss of resolution at the darker colors.