GIMP 2.4 Released 596
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."
GIMP 2.3? (Score:3, Insightful)
Most important thing (Score:4, Insightful)
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!.................
Ask artists, not geeks (Score:1, Insightful)
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: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:Ask artists, not geeks (Score:3, Insightful)
If you ask a Photoshop user, you will mostly get answers that suggest to copy Photoshop. GIMP is not trying to be a clone of Photoshop.
On the other hand, if you ask artists who have not been involved too much with Photoshop or graphics professionals who are able to dissociate the desired functionality from one implementation that they already know, then you can get a set of very useful ideas that can bring GIMP forward without being a copycat. Especially if these interviews and analysis of the user interaction are performed by experienced interaction architects.
And this is exactly what has been started for GIMP... Several professional artists, photographers and designers have been interviewed. Some of this analysis has already led to a redesign of the rectangle selection tool and crop tool in GIMP 2.4. Further changes will find their way into future GIMP versions.
If you want a program that behaves like Photoshop, then please use Photoshop. I am happy to point people towards Photoshop when it is obvious that what they need is Photoshop. But if you want a Free Software program that can be used for high-end photo manipulation and that is easily extensible with plug-ins and scripts in various languages, then maybe GIMP is the right choice for you. Different people have different needs, and GIMP does not try to please everybody.
Re:patents (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Most important thing (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
No more GIMP vs Photoshop, please! (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:patents (Score:1, Insightful)
http://cue.yellowmagic.info/softwares/separate.html [yellowmagic.info]
Re:Most important thing (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What about... (Score:2, Insightful)
GIMP needs to be better than Photoshop for those people to use it, not equivalent(because they feel a little safe with Photoshop).
Re:patents (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Now corrects barrel distortion! (Score:3, Insightful)
This will definitely streamline my photo editing, as I had to go to panotools and hugin to correct the barrel distortion in my point-and-shoot cameras, but the gimp for color correction, cropping, etc. The improved color menu layout and cropping tools will be great (I always hated that alternate-diagonals cropping system it had before).
The 16 bit color and CMYK, I couldn't give half a crap about. I mean, what proportion of gimp users need that stuff anyway? One percent? Half a percent? I think most gimp detractors just like panning something for the sake of it.
Signed,
A GIMP user for years.
Re:Software freedom is better. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Layers? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.)
Not CMYK, Something Simpler (Score:2, Insightful)
I know GIMP isn't supposed to be everything to everyone, so it's not fair to say "Well program X can do it, so why can't GIMP?!?!?"* But seriously, should it be this hard to make a freaking circle?
Re:patents (Score:4, Insightful)
in our metro newspaper there is not one job opening in photography that does not include expertise in Photoshop as a requirement.
these shops have no interest in a program that increases their legal exposure. no interest in a program that can't deliver basic functionality and live within the law.
Re:What about... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Most important thing (Score:2, Insightful)
That's great. Now all we need is an expert UI designer. Hell, at this point I think I'd even settle for a novice UI designer.
Seriously. Enough with the thousands of icon sets and makeovers. FOSS projects like The GIMP need to seriously recruit (or listen to) UI designers.
Re:Software freedom is better. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:But is GEGL like Spore? Or more like DNF? (Score:3, Insightful)
No, they never said that about 2.0. 2.0 was focused on revitalizing GIMP development, restructuring and modularizing its rather messy internals, plus a few features.
A few people theorized about GEGL in 2.2, but no one with a clue ever really expected it. 2.2 did add some nice new features, but it was still primarily about fixing the code up -- largely so that potential contributors wouldn't take one look at it and run screaming.
GEGL *was* expected to be in 2.4. Various things took longer than expected, though, and the developers decided it was better to release another version without GEGL to get some of the features they had in the works out there, and to avoid delaying 2.4 for another year or so.
GEGL is not only expected for 2.6, but GEGL integration is the primary goal for 2.6. Sven Neumann recently said that 2.6 may well turn out to be functionally almost identical to 2.4, the only difference being the fact that GEGL is used as the internal graphics representation. If you don't know who Sven is, suffice it to say that he's a guy whose opinion carries a lot of weight in the GIMP developer community.
Time will tell, but between the vastly cleaned-up and modularized internals, and the power and simplicity of GEGL, I expect GIMP development to really take off after 2.6. Most of the code is now improved to the point that a reasonably competent developer can dig into it and start making productive changes very quickly, and GEGL will make doing really cool stuff very easy, which should encourage its use as a test environment for people doing innovative things with graphics. The new XML-based file format that comes along with GEGL should facilitate all sorts of other little tools, too -- you'll be able to reimplement most of Imagemagick with XSLT if you want. All of this should not only make GIMP development easier and faster but should *also* increase the GIMP developer population.
Or not. But I think things are going to get much more interesting in GIMP-land after GEGL is integrated.
Re:Software freedom is better. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:patents (Score:3, Insightful)
Crap I must have violated those a bunch of times when I bought my first color printer and had to write software to drive it
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.
Spelling nazi warning (Score:2, Insightful)
I think you mean "faze [reference.com]", unless you're worried about the price tag synchronizing you with a waveform.
(Sorry--you just happened to overflow my patience counter for this mistake.)
Re:patents (Score:1, 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:Software freedom is better. (Score:3, Insightful)
How much do I have to donate in order to get Photoshop-compatible CMYK?
How much do I have to donate in order to get them to change that fucking name?
I'm guessing it's more than the cost of Photoshop.
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.
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: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.
The GUI is perfectly fine..... (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem you are referring to is familiarity with another UI (in this case Photoshop's one), this problem is not intrinsic to the GIMP, the developers can't do much about people unwilling to try new things, nor should they.
People happy with other tools should keep using those tools, people trying to use a new tool (for whatever reason compelling them to do so, perhaps a different set of features, or in this case perhaps about legitimate concerns with openness of the source code, or the price) should at least make an effort to understand the idiosyncrasies of a new tool (sorry, but 10 minutes of biased assessment is not good enough).
This problem is normally overcomed by abundant, easy to understand documentation, you would have a point if you were highlighting this problem.
Re:Software freedom is better. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:What about... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What about... (Score:2, Insightful)
As for the user interface, think about this: Reverse gear on a Ford is to the right and towards you. Reverse gear on a Vauxhall is to the left and away from you. And here's the thing: People get used to this and manage to move between cars without problems. You could get used to the GIMP's user interface if you could be bothered. In fact, if you understood the abstract concepts (like when the gear lever is in reverse, the car moves the other way) you probably wouldn't notice the user interface.
Re:Most important thing (Score:3, Insightful)
2) The concept of a "mainwindow" has never existed in Mac OS, even going back to the 80s. Every document gets its own window, and there is a permanent menubar for whatever application is in focus at the top of the screen. This is probably the single most distinctive aspect of Mac OS. As long as one of the documents is in focus, the whole application is in focus (X11 is perhaps vaguely similar in this regard)
3) When Photoshop loses focus (ie. you're working in something that is distinctively NOT Photoshop), the pallets disappear, but any open documents stay visible. This is standard behavior for all Mac OS applications -- even MS Word hides its toolbars when it loses focus. Think about it -- why would you want to see another application's tool pallets when you're not working in it? Restoring focus restores the pallets to their previous location.
Re:patents (Score:4, Insightful)
It isn't just advertising and it isn't just print.
You are irrelevant to the commercial artist and designer anywhere in the world if you can't match Photoshop point-for-point.
In January 2003, the Scottish Parliament debated a petition...to refer to the blue in the Scottish flag (saltire) as 'Pantone 300'. Countries such as Canada and South Korea and organizations such as the FIA have also chosen to refer to specific Pantone colors to use when producing flags. U.S. States including Texas have set legislated the PMS colors of their flags. Pantone [wikipedia.org]
Re:patents (Score:1, Insightful)
Guy 1: Why doesn't GIMP do CMYK?
Guy 2: CMYK is patented.
Guy 3: Why doesn't someone implement CMYK anyway?
Guy 4: Professionals won't use a patent-infringing product.
Guy 5: I'm a professional and I don't care; why should others?
Guy 6: Because GIMP doesn't do CMYK.
And every one modded interesting, informative, or insightful. I love Slashdot.
Re:You have no idea what you are talking about (Score:3, Insightful)
I Am Not An Idiot. I work with CMYK color all day every day. 4 color DI presses. Wide format digital ink jet. (4 and 7 color). Short run toner-based crap. I have profiled every device in this shop, most of them several times over. I have done the same for other shops on contract. I know color.
Your talk of integer math vs. half-float math is irrelevant in the real printing world. 16-bit ICC profiles are expressed in unsigned integers. 16-bit RGB images are store as unsigned integers. Whatever math you use to get there, you end up at an integer representation.
Did you catch the part about "cube-hypercube" conversion in my post? That's the same as saying 3D-4D. (duh!)
As to your comment about printing devices, that's true enough for presses, but not true at all for ink jet. Presses are sloppy, even the best of them. Small errors blend in. You can't see them anymore. Modern ink jet is so precise that small errors become very evident. Stippling from shadows to highlights. Uneven gradiants. Loss of detail in shadows. Move into the 7 channel HIFI color world (CMYK+ RGB, OG, GB, etc.), and you really notice the limitations.
In the end, you and I are talking apples and oranges. There are two different processes here at work: The math which generates the Lab CMYK tables, and the conversion of a given Lab color to CMYK (In this case it is RGB -> LAB -> CMYK). The former is not 3D-4D at all. The latter is.
It is the Lab -> CMYK conversion that is from a 3 coordinate system to a 4 coordinate system. Because the profile would be so large as to be unusable if it contained a value for every possible Lab combination, interpolation must be done. It is that interpolation where the 3D-4D math comes in, and it is there that the precision problem is introduced. It is for this reason that when doing CMYK-CMYK conversions, device link profiles are the preferred method, since there is no intermediate conversion to LAB, and 4D-4D math is less prone to errors.
The math which generates the LAB -> CMYK conversion LUT is another animal entirely. This is not cube-hypercube, because the problem is separated into two separate operations. The color component of any given pixel is separated from from the grayscale component. A black generation method is then applied whereby a certain amount of CMY is replaced with K. Here is where the finesse comes in the production of color profiles. RBG images have no black generation method. Black is black is black. CMYK images throw this out the window. It is your black generation curve that is going to give you that added contrast and detail that is device dependent.
Using four channels does give you a finer degree of control. The same image expressed in 8-bit RGB lacks this precision, and it lacks it in a manner that is visible to the naked eye. Again, this is because of gamut. Your typical CMYK image does not not map to the full gamut of a given RGB color space. In an 8-bit space, a CMYK image does not get to use all 256 steps in any given channel. As I said at the beginning, 16-bit precision eliminates most of these issues. Precision errors are relegated to noise. Gamut compression becomes irrelevant. Are you listening now?