GIMP 2.4 Released

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."

Re:GIMP 2.3?

[ScislaC]

2.3 was the devel branch leading up to 2.4

No 16bit support

[Anonymous Coward]

No 16bit per pixel support unfortunately. Cinepaint has added that, but Cinepaint is not as good for what gimp does. So the whole thing is kinda bad.

Re:GIMP 2.3?

[moderatorrater]

I'm guessing they have the unix version numbering, where even numbers are release, odd numbers are development.

Re:Most important thing

[jklappenbach]

I don't know about Paintshop, but there's a Photoshop-esque makeover for GIMP called Gimpshop. It has a couple of rough edges, but it's a testament to the modularity of design that a self-declared novice developer could take the existing GIMP framework and remake it in PS's image.

The download link can be found here.

http://www.gimpshop.com/download.shtml [gimpshop.com]

Re:GIMP 2.3?

[Raphael]

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.

Re:I use photoshop v5 from 2000

[aussersterne]

It's still better than Gimp. And I keep trying Gimp because I have to use windows if I want to use Photoshop.

Crossover Office has run Photoshop (through PS7, which I routinely use, *alongside* GIMP) in Linux for something like six or seven years now. That people still say "I have to use Windows if I want to run Photoshop" is beyond me.

Re:Grabbing my copy before it gets slashdotted

[szyzyg]

WEll now it loads by 48bpp images without warning me that it's converting them to 24bpp images... and it converts them anyway. so a step back if anything in this department.

Tools are much improved.

[je ne sais quoi]

I've been using this in the debian unstable repo for a few weeks now and I've found the redesigns are both intuitive and useful. I especially like the new selection tool, it's much easier to select an area and then change the selection after you realized you didn't hit the right pixel. Kudos to the GIMP team!!

P.S. Although the GTK2 (i.e. GIMP Tool Kit) file picker is still slow as molasses in directories with large numbers of files. I had to hack firefox to get it to use it's native file picker once again because I got tired of waiting 30 seconds or more each time I wanted to save a file.

Re:Layers?

[machineghost]

Sorry all, I meant layer styles, those incredibly useful things that let you add various effects like outlines and shadows and then adjust them dynamically later. My brain was somewhere else when I wrote the original post.

Re:Most important thing

[Hennell]

If you have actual ideas for the GIMP UI go mention them at http://gimp-brainstorm.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com] rather then just complaining here. They are aware the UI is generally disliked, they just need the best ideas of how to change it.
---
Did the Ancient Egyptians play stone, papyrus, scimitar?
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SIOX !

[DrYak]

On the other hand, Gimp 2.4 has SIOX [siox.org] builtin [siox.org], the single best tool for manipulating photographs.

(For those who don't know : you make a coarse free-hand circle around your object, then you scribble on the object, and SIOX takes care to extract the object from the surrounding).

Re:Ask artists, not geeks

[Raphael]

high-end photo manipulation

"High-end"? Without the ability to work in, or convert to, a printable color space, or without full support for ICC profiles? I'm not sure what your definition of "high-end" is.

Did you have a look at the release notes [gimp.org] linked from the article? Did you see the section titled "Color Management and Soft-proofing"? There is even an extra page of the release notes that focuses only on color management in GIMP 2.4 [gimp.org].

In case you did not read it, GIMP 2.4 does support ICC profiles and allows you to convert images to the appropriate color spaces. You can also identify the areas using colors that are outside your printable gamut, etc. It looks like GIMP is able to do more than you think.

Re:Most important thing

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"For instance, I can keep the image full-screen on one monitor while using the editing tools on a second monitor. I'd like to see a single-window app like Photoshop do that!"

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:What about...

[Sir_Kurt]

CYMK (cyan magenta yellow black)IS a different colorspace model from rgb (red green blue) It is used in the print industry. These would be the color of the inks used to print ....everything. When mixed together, these colors will give a wider range of possible colors than Red Green Blue. Basically, if you are into graphic design you deal with CYMK for anything that will end up on paper.

Re:Awesome new features!

[Anonymous Coward]

Running photoshop under Linux is not supported. That is a problem for many.

Re:patents

[drgonzo59]

It's not just converting from one coordinate system to another that is tricky, it's what do you do with the mismatched and non-existing colors in the other color space.

Re:What about...

[wishmechaos]

LCDs do not 'add colour': it's a substractive process. You start with white light, which contains every colour possible, and you filter it to only let through the colours you want to display (IE, if you put a red filter in front of a while light, you only let red pass, while blocking green and blue)

Re:GIMP 2.3?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the word you are looking for is 'linux'. The even/odd numbering convention is not used by any of the *BSDs, or by Solaris, or by plenty of unix targetted software projects.

Re:patents

[NMerriam]

A lot of the key algorithms, particularly for color space conversion, are patented. Guess who holds a bunch of those patents?

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.

16 bit RGB support is more important than CMYK

[Teilo]

The digital color world is slowly but steadily shifting to an RGB workflow. The one thing that has impeded this move is the use of 8-bit color, which effectively means mapping a 32-bit color space to a 24-bit space. This mapping is a cube-hypercube mapping done via an ICC colorspace conversion. The cube-hypercube mapping is subject to error. This error is trivialized once the RGB colorspace is in 16-bit. Then the conversion is 48-bit to 32-bit, relegating conversion errors to noise that is below the threshold of vision, or even of the output devices.

Furthermore, RGB colorspaces almost always have a wider gamut than standard CMYK colorspaces such as ISO, SWOP, and GRACoL. Here again, the 8-bit problem comes into play. When RGB color is converted to a standard CMYK colorspace, the conversion is not really even 24->32 bit, since part of the RGB space is outside the gamut of the CMYK colorspace. Effectively, this means that instead of getting a 256-step gradation in any given channel, you get a smaller gradation, sometimes (for instance in the case of Adobe98 RGB -> SWOP) a MUCH smaller gradation. This leads to stepping problems in gradiants and a loss of detail in images, particularly in shadows. Once more, the move to 16-bit RGB color eliminates these problems.

So, here's the point: By working in a 16-bit RGB color space, one can effectively do anything that they could in a CMYK colorspace. (Yes, the extra channel is nice for color correction, but not necessary). The final step, conversion to CMYK, has already been implemented in at least two open source engines: ArgyleCMS and LCMS. The conversion to CMYK in an RGB workflow, is the final step. (Unless, of course, you are printing to a lightjet, lamba, etc). The CMYK colorspace that would be used is the colorspace of the output device.

In professional color, this is not even an issue, for the most part, since most modern RIPs do this conversion for you. 16-bit color support is now starting to become universal in the RIP world. As that happens, the Gimp becomes a viable tool for professional color work.

Re:Not CMYK, Something Simpler

[As_I_Please]

Those are some awful, needlessly complicated directions directions for drawing a circle.

1) Use the ellipse drawing tool while holding down Shift to define the circle.
2) Under the Select menu, choose "To Path"
3) Under the Edit menu choose "Stroke Path..." where you can define line width, brush style, etc.

You could replace steps 2 and 3 with Edit -> Stroke Selection, but converting to a path results in a smoother line.

Still to complex? You only need to get the location and size of the circle right once. Then you can experiment with line, color, etc. with the stroke menu.

Re:Software freedom is better.

[Lumpy]

speaking of which....

http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/stable.html [sourceforge.net] is where you get the windows version. do not get suckered by the asshats that "sell" wingimp for an insane price.

Get the real thing from sourceforge.

That way your windows friends can have it as well, it's another step in breaking their addiction.

Re:Not CMYK, Something Simpler

[ozmanjusri]

You can follow these directions

Last updated: Monday, 28-Jan-2002 01:00:05 CST

Um, no thanks...

Re:Meh

[Rutulian]

Like many will say where is greater then 8bit support, where are the layer filters and so on. I won't lie for the average joe and minor tasks gimp is probably just fine.

Well, since you are about the tenth person to ask this, which gets brought up in every forum where Gimp is mentioned, I'll reply with the same answer that has been repeated time and again, but doesn't seem to stick....

GEGL [wikipedia.org] is going to be the new image processing backend for Gimp. It will provide deep color support, more color spaces, and other niceties that will make things like adjustment layers easier to implement. Gegl has been slow to develop. It was decided that the work on Gimp 2.4 should be finished before shifting to Gegl. Now that 2.4 is out, the developers will be focusing on transitioning to Gegl for the Gimp 2.6 release.

There. Now, can we stop asking about this?

Re:What about...

[fbjon]

That's the precision of you're talking about, not range. The range in a colour space comes from which specific colours you are mixing. Losing colour when converting from one space to another is a consequence of the spaces not overlapping perfectly, i.e. some colours exist in one space but are completely outside another space (as in: no amount of mixing, bit depth and trickery will ever display that color).

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...

[Planesdragon]

In order of effectiveness vs. expense:

1: Proofs. A good graphics design shop will have a printer with commercial-level print quality, with, ideally, chemically identical ink and paper to what their usual print shop will use (offset vs. fully digital.)

2: Very careful color matching. Photoshop can match colors exactly to a PANTOME color wheel, which is a selection of swatches of how a particular color will look.

3: Fake it. Design with the expectation that "red" will range anywhere from almost-pink to almost-magenta, or whichever variety yo can get. You know, like how web designers sometimes limit themselves to "web-safe" colors.

4: Don't bother. Go with black and white only, and don't mess with color. Make a design that relies more on contrast and design than color shading, thus leaving you both more flexible in your arrangements, and more tolerant of varying print quality.

Re:Common practice.

[poopdeville]

The practice has been abandoned for the kernel. The problem was that backporting 2.5 developments to 2.4 wasn't much less work than writing 2.5 in the first place. This process change is a big reason why they put so much effort into finding the "right" distributed version control system.

Re:patents

[sgtron]

The paper I shoot for doesn't require squat. Just shoot pictures. If they're good, they use them. We have editors that use Photoshop to crop, resize and color correct if necessary. But. If they wanted to use the gimp they could do that too. No one holds a gun to their head and says use Photoshop. It's just the "industry standard", but if you can do the job with different tools then go for it.

Re:patents

[ozmanjusri]

What part of "patent" do you not understand?

No, that's not the problem.

CMYK and spot colors by themselves are not patent encumberd. They are actually part of the open published standards for Postscript and PDF. Anyone saying anything different is clueless or spreading FUD and/or openly demonstrating their ignorance of the fact.

http://rants.scribus.net/2006/06/03/why-no-cmyk-in-gimp-is-a-good-thing-now/ [scribus.net]

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:What about...

[beoba]

No. CMYK are subtractive colors, RGB are additive colors.

With a piece of paper, you're reflecting light off the paper, and some of that is absorbed by the paper or by ink. The colors of the ink are determined using CMYK, because it measures absorption.

On a display, you're blasting light at the user in the desired colors, which are specified using RGB. This is additive color, because it measures emission.

Re:Most important thing

[LunarCrisis]

Oh, you mean like this [gimp.org]?

Re:Most important thing

[LunarCrisis]

Gimp's UI makes more sense on a XWindows system where you can set the individual sections of the UI to stay on top. For instance, I can keep the image full-screen on one monitor while using the editing tools on a second monitor. I'd like to see a single-window app like Photoshop do that!

Photoshop does this pretty well on my Mac :)

Photoshop isn't a single-window app on Mac.

Re:GIMP 2.3?

[scotch]

Or even linux anymore.

Re:Ask artists, not geeks

[noewun]

In case you did not read it, GIMP 2.4 does support ICC profiles and allows you to convert images to the appropriate color spaces. You can also identify the areas using colors that are outside your printable gamut, etc. It looks like GIMP is able to do more than you think.

I said "printable" color space and "full support" for ICC profiles. Given that GIMP doesn't support CMYK, how do you intend to print the files? And I have read about the GIMP's ICC support. It doesn't match Photoshop's.

CMYK color spaces in TheGimp

[thtrgremlin]

there is a CYMK plugin for the gimp called separate+ @

http://cue.yellowmagic.info/softwares/separate.html [yellowmagic.info]

it is, as many solo projects, has always been in beta, but it worked well for me (though I am not really a graphic artist).

And as screwed up as the whole patent system is, you still can't patent something like CYMK because it is something fundamental to nature. What would be patentable would be the process. Two things can have the same end result as long as they don't use the same method, unless of course that method is fundamental to nature.

So yeah and stuff. Enjoy.

What I really want to see in TheGimp is a Python script recording tool! Since the toolkit itself is the fundamental part of the program with a graphical front-end, shouldn't a macro recorder be insanely simple to implement?

Thank you GIMP!

[Max_W]

I like GIMP http://www.gimp.org/ [gimp.org] and use it a lot. My work requires treating several hundred photos per day. GIMP adds to a photo some magic. No other soft does it to my knowledge. Thank you guys. Thank you Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis. Thank you Jernej Simoni for Windows installer http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/stable.html [sourceforge.net]

Re:Ask artists, not geeks

[BigSven]

You can create CMYK TIFF files with GIMP (Separate plug-in [yellowmagic.info]), doing a color separation based on the printer's ICC profile Shouldn't that be enough to get your work printed?

Re:Still no white-balance function

[BigSven]

GIMP has had this since version 2.2. Go to the Levels dialog, select the gray color-picker and use it to select an area that is supposed to be some shade of gray.

Re:Software freedom is better.

[Anonymous Coward]

You can donate less to help organizing Gimp related conferences, so you and Gimp developers can share some time, sometimes a beer is more valuable than money to motivate someone to implement something.

http://www.gimp.org/donating/ [gimp.org]

Re:You have no idea what you are talking about

[hankwang]

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).

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.

Re:What about...

[slurry47]

We design outside the range of what our RGB monitors can display. The monitor just gives us a rough idea of what we're going to get. We go by the CMYK values and Pantone chip books. Pantone colors are specific, specially mixed colors -- not halftoned like CMYK. Color correction is a huge issue to say the least.

Re:Now corrects barrel distortion!

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't use layers much do you? Try to start compositing a more complex image, use any of the choices of blend modes available, and notice the clipping and banding that you start getting with 8bpc. Then there's 32bpc, i'm sure that would seem excessive, but that's enough to deal with a vaste exposure latitude/dynamic range. The purpose of this? To create HDR images, to use them for image based illumination in 3d renderers. Another possibility? To compress the dynamic range back to a smaller dynamic range to get rid of backlight situations and dark shadows (google for tone mapping operators, like pfstmo).
Then there's film scanners, i mean slide/negative scanners. You might be able to scan at >8bpc but all that tonal range will just be discarded somehow, when scaling the data to 8bpc range.
You won't notice, or need any of this, for icons, even for web design work, but for everything else, being limited to 8bpc RGB is an extremely severe limitation. Notice that there are other colorspaces as well, HLS, HSV, CIE LAB, etc...
As much as i apretiate gimp, which i do, after all these years, i'm beginning to realize that gimp users won't see >8bpc anytime soon, and by soon, in the next 10 years or so. I hope i'm wrong...