Gimp Hits 2.0 637
jf writes "Gimp 2.0 released! From gimp.org: "This release is a major event, marking the end of a three year development cycle by a group of volunteers and enthusiasts who have made this the most professional release of the GIMP ever. It is the first stable release that is officially supported not only on Unix-based operating systems, but also on Microsoft Windows and Macintosh OS X." Get it from ftp.gimp.org or from the mirror sites."
Excellent (Score:5, Interesting)
Fantastic! (Score:5, Interesting)
Before this I used to use photoshop for much of my work, and Gimp for areas where I either needed the software on a machine that did not warrant a photoshop license, or to deal with alpha layers properly (which photoshop is terrible for). Photoshop is great for printing based people, but has some major miss-features for computer graphics use.
Gimp 2.0 however is much better than photoshop IMHO for many many jobs, although it is still just a bit lacking in the automation-of-tasks area.
Congratulations and Thanks to all the people involved in this fantastic piece of software!
EXIF. (Score:2, Interesting)
you an option to save them when EXIF data were found
in the loaded image... Prior to 2.0, the EXIF data
where lost. I wonder how 2.0 behaves...
Got CMYK? (Score:2, Interesting)
Thanks for Playing!
It's pretty good! (Score:5, Interesting)
Finally they've added a menu onto each project window, but it is still lacking in one way, the number of entries on the window bar. Each tool dock creates its own entry which causes clutter. It should be possible to have one entry but who knows, maybe this isn't possible with current versions of GTK? Photoshop does this by having the dock windows within a container window.
Other minor niggles, the icons are much improved over v1.2 but I still find them a bit unclear. The knife icon for cropping resembles a brush and I don't really see how a drop of water represents Blur/Sharpen?
While I do like the new dock and the tabs, it's unusable if you resize the toolbox window into a very narrow strip. Meaning at the resolution I run at (1152x864) it takes up around a fifth of the screen width.
But it's much better than 1.2 anyway!!!
Re:Got CMYK? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll keep my Gimp thank!
And yes, I use this professionally, very porfessionally, I produce live television graphics systems. Photoshop has the most broken alpha support of anything out there!
Photoshop was designed for prepress use, and is broken for most other purposes.
Gimp 2.0, which I have been using in beta for some time, does everything better than photoshop, other than CMYK support (not an issue for anyone but prepress) and automation, which is a little more clunky. It more than makes up for these things in it's fineness of control for basic functions, and speed.
isn't this what bittorrent was created for? (Score:1, Interesting)
ScriptFu Recorder (Score:1, Interesting)
Website is much improved. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Got CMYK? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Missing the point of CMYK? (Score:4, Interesting)
Too late (Score:1, Interesting)
With Gimp 2.0, the interface stops sucking, and a lot of barriers fall away.
Re:Missing the point of CMYK? (Score:2, Interesting)
Now if only sane would get updated (Score:3, Interesting)
What about color calibration? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Excellent (Score:3, Interesting)
There are still tasks that I would like to do that are not possible in an intuitive fashion.
For instance, I frequently draw shapes (you know, circles, squares, rectangles, etc). In Fireworks, Sodipodi, and almost every other image creation/manipulation program I have used, this is a very simple task, and very easy to figure out how to do (click on icon, click on canvas, drag mouse, release button--bingo!).
In GIMP, I still don't know how to do this. I probably never will. Why not? Because this is a task that I use a lot, and if a program is going to make me work for that, then I don't want to use that program.
Sorry, but the UI is not that much better (at least on the windows version).
I will probably get flamed for saying this, and get called an idiot for not knowing how to do this, or told that that's not what the gimp is for, but I don't care--it is a tool that doesn't do what I expect--especially after seeing site's "made with gimp" logos and all their fancy stuff.
Yeah it looks cool, but I could do all that in fireworks much faster than the time it would take me to learn how to make a square in GIMP.
As a note-- I really like sodipodi much better. There are certain things it can't do, but in terms of fire it up and go, sodipodi wins hands down.
that's all i've got.
Cinepaint is for frame by frame image correction (Score:1, Interesting)
CinePaint has deep paint (32 bit per channel), for the movie industry this is a killer feature and they just cannot afford to wait for the GIMP to sort out GEGL and add it, they have work to do and they need it now.
CinePaint also has good support for the specialised file formats that the movie industry needs and the GIMP does not yet have those features.
CinePaint has a clear userbase and clear goals, and it knows exactly what priorities it has and if others find CinePaint useful too so much the better but it is upfront about the fact that it is not for everyone. CinePaint will be around for a very long time because it aims to do one thing well.
The GIMP just doesnt' have that same clarity of focus and direction. Exactly who is the GIMP designed for, the benifit of its own developers it seems.
Re:What about color calibration? (Score:4, Interesting)
"GIMP 2.0 comes with a color proof display filter that uses ICC color profiles to simulate a proof on your monitor. Support for such filters is new in 2.0 and for the future it is planned to integrate display filter modules better into the workflow."
Re:Got CMYK? (Score:1, Interesting)
Cooperation can take lots of forms: reporting bugs, writing documentation, providing constructive criticism, advocacy, writing specifications, coding, and so on. Okay, you may not want to code, but if you use CMYK a lot, how about writing a clear summary why you need CMYK and sending that to a gimp mailing list? It might inspire someone else to code it. That is a useful contribution. If you're a CMYK expert wht not write a specification of what is required to get CMYK support into gimp? What about sketching out the user interface that would be required for CMYK and sending that to a gimp mailing list?
Re:This sounds like a good time for you (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Photoshop still rocks it (Score:3, Interesting)
I think photoshop elements is pretty good and it doesn't trash the gimp to compare the two.
I have a canon scanner and it came free with photoshop elements which works on my mac. I don't know if gimp could invoke the canon scanner driver.
By the way, don't blow $99 on photoshop element because it comes free with canon scanners like the lide-50 which I believe is $99. It might even come with cheaper scanners, but I don't know.
It's almost as powerful as photoshop (I don't know what the differences really are), and it could complement the gimp.
It has some interesting features for beginners... dialogs to help correct certain problems with images and so forth.
Actually, I noticed the gimp can read
Re:Excellent (Score:5, Interesting)
If you really can't figure out how to draw a rectangle in the GIMP, I'm guessing you've never used Photoshop or any other similar image manipulation program. You probably want to read up a bit, there's plenty of books, online tutorials etc.
Anyway, the answer to your question: 1. Make a selection with the desired shape. 2. Fill the selection with the desired color.
Re:Sweet! (Score:1, Interesting)
You don't just throw a person in a car and expect them to drive down the highway at a hundred and twenty MPH--and survive, do you?
Of course, you've never bothered to look at a man page, or used the built in help for a unix command, eh? Especially when you're doing something critical?
Likewise, Gimp is a powerful utility, and to the average person (especially the non-graphically inclined), it's about as good to them as Greek.
Re:Photoshop still rocks it (Score:2, Interesting)
I personaly work in a professional setting and I use Photoshop on a daily basis and Know it like the back of my hand, But I personaly prefer GIMP's effets filters to the base effect filters that come with Photoshop (currantly using PS7).
When working in a fast paced high number of images situation though GIMP can't compete and that's when the $600.00 price tag becomes acceptable. If you don't need the features offered by Photoshop over GIMP, by all means use the GIMP, don't wast your money on something you won't use.
Maybe it is the subject itself that is difficult. (Score:2, Interesting)
I found it hard to find the relevant menus in Gimp. But I also found it hard to find the relevant window to change something in Photoshop, where you have lots of opened tool windows, which most of the time don't do anything because you haven't selected anything relevant. Maybe image manipulation and drawing really requires a lot of skills to create an interface which does the easy stuff but also allows complex manipulations.
The only program I came to terms with was IRIS Showcase, but that is mostly a vector/object program. I liked the way you could group/raise/lower parts of the graphics. It sure was quicker than dragging all those layers around in Photoshop with the mouse.
Also what happened to Paintshop ?
Re:Excellent (Score:3, Interesting)
Dunno about Perl, but with PHP-GTK [php.net], I've been able to do this for over a year with PHP. Combined with the Ion Cube [ioncube.com] compiler, I've been writing cross-platform Windows/Linux/OSX programs for quite a while.
Re:Free of Floating Window (Score:3, Interesting)
I disagree. I prefer it. I think the "window within a window" style that microsoft often employs is cumbersome. I want to be able to put a window anywhere on the screen that I want to put it. It's much more managable. I guess when using windows it could get confusing if you have multiple apps open, and the gimp windows are scattered around. With Linux though I keep my apps spread out over multiple virtual workspaces so it's not an issue.
Re:Windows? (Score:3, Interesting)
Damn, you're right:
The procedure entry point XML_SetDoctypeDeclHandler could not be located in the dynamic link library xmlparse.dll
Does GIMP have a Bugzilla somewhere?
Digital Photo tutorials (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Alpha works great in Photoshop 8.0 (Score:1, Interesting)
your Cyan Magenta Yellow and black inks,. you also need to know the exact properties of how these inks mix, and interact with the paper used. Unless you have this information, sRGB is more exact, and should be what a professional printshop should want.
The conversion to CMYK should never be done before the stage of the process where you have this exact information, preferrably recently corrected profiles for the printer,..
No 48 bit support !!! (Score:3, Interesting)
There is talk about having gimp support it in the future, but it's a big undertaking. Sorry to sound like a troll, but in the meanwhile Gimp will be little more than a toy.
48 bit RGB is supported natively by the PNG and TIFF images formats and many RAW files created by almost every recent scanner or digital camera. It's a shame to have hardware which creates images you cannot fully use.
Re:Free of Floating Window (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Alpha works great in Photoshop 8.0 (Score:3, Interesting)
Because real professionals have lots of time and money to spend upgrading.
Here the real world lots of people live with older software because they are too busy to upgrade or because management refuses to pay for the upgrade. If your job is producing print media, especially photographic work, regular upgrades to PhotoShop are something you probably plan for. If your job is producing television content it's probably not so high on your list of requirements, especially if you've got something that basically works now.
Bwuhuhahahahahahahahaha. Nice elitism. It might come as a shock to you that there are people across the world doing exactly this sort of printed work who just don't worry about it. These same people are often working on cruddy monitors that have never been color calibrated to match their output devices. Yet millions of newsletters, flyers, and newspapers manage to get printed and sold despite imperfect color reproduction. Yes, large magazine and big companies have exacting color standards, but there is a huge undercurrent of small-time publications that just don't care. The bread and butter work of print shops is small runs of publications for local businesses. These local businesses don't really understand color correction and CMYK, yet they manage to get output that is good enough for their needs.
Maybe you're in a situation where you need the power of PhotoShop, but don't forget, you are in a minority.