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."
What about... (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Grabbing my copy before it gets slashdotted (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Layers? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
patents (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Most important thing (Score:3, Interesting)
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).
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, 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.
Meh (Score:2, Interesting)
My beef is that as of the present day Linux utterly blows when it comes to anything that fits the bill of a Photoshop style of application. And I say Photoshop because quiet frankly its the dominate player for what it does.
I will admit however that I am a little surprised at Krita. If any OSS application has me wishing that it has good fortunes its Krita. Better then 8bit support and the UI is a SDI not a MDI like gimp. One thing I've never liked about gimp is that when you click on a window that belongs to gimp all the other windows don't come forward as well on the desktop. If there is an option for this I would gladly welcome to hear where it is.
I don't personally use gimp. I either use Photoshop 7 running under Crossover Office or Krita. However the times I have played with the filters etc I couldn't help but notice some of them are mind numbingly slow and work in weird amount of passes. I went and looked through the source code for some of the filters and I must say some of them are writen with performance not in mind. I write plugins for a film compositing application that works strictly in float. Import a jpg and it is converted to float for working in the compositor. Working with 2k film plates and huge compositing trees I work at the speed gimp idles at. If I wasn't so busy with work, personal life and my own plugins for the compositing application I use, I would probably pick up gimps source code and fix all the slowness that the current filters work at. Its a shame really. Why an 8bit applications filters go so slow you can actually watch the application doing the work is beyond me.
So in the end I'm cheering for Krita. It's already got greater then 8bit support, a great looking UI, and its part of KDE so hopefully it has some backing. Gimp is an ok tool and I'm sure some people have put there hearts into it. But that doesn't mean that it just isn't up to par for where it should be. Gimp isn't some year or two old application, it has been around a while yet its progress moves at a snails pace. For the average Joe gimp is ok and probably is all they need. For us power users on the other hand we are still waiting for a decent fully featured image manipulation application for Linux. I could care less about the year of the desktop, just give me a bloody image tool I can use for all things on Linux.
Re:Layers? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Most important thing (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, my biggest complaint about the Gimp (v2.2 on the Mac), and the biggest single time-waster, is that it doesn't remember many user settings. For example, I open the program, go to open an image, it's forgotten - again - where I was (in my image directory, where else?) when I closed the program. Time to navigate the filesystem tree... again... I go to scale an image, and it's forgotten I want bicubic, that I want percent, not pixels - and this is inside the very same session. A whole bunch of UI interactions ensue that are entirely unnecessary.
Well, that and the "window isn't active, and so ignores your mouse operation and simply activates, instead" issue, but that's not strictly the Gimp's fault, or at least, that's my impression. Lots of programs have that problem on the Mac.
Well, I look forward to 2.4. Hopefully usability has been looked into.
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:What about... (Score:2, Interesting)
At a very basic level, your monitor produces colors with an additive scheme (where the base color is black and you add light to produce colors) and print uses a subtractive scheme (where the base color is white and you add colors to prevent reflection of various other colors). There are colors which one gamut can produce that the other cannot.
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)
Will this improve windows releases? (Score:2, Interesting)
However, I had to set up a windows 2000 box for myself at work, due to some specific tools that I need that I don't have time currently to get running in anything else. As I also needed image manipulation software on there, I figured why not save the $400 cost of photoshop and install GIMP instead. Being as I use it often enough in FreeBSD, I figured it should be familiar...
However, I then realized that the windows distribution of GIMP is in some ways less complete than what I got from the FreeBSD packages version. Namely, if you don't manually install the prerequisite libraries in windows, you don't get support for some common image formats (PNG and GIF, IIRC).
I suspect there is a reason why this is so, but it would be nice if they could resolve it. I have installed photoshop on windows boxes before, and never had to install anything for those formats to open.
Otherwise, I will say I very much love having GIMP 2.2 on my windows box, and I'll up it to 2.4 when I get a chance later on. But this little catch did make it exceedingly difficult to explain to a colleague how to install it on her machine (she "came up" with a copy of photoshop instead).
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:What about... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not a graphic designer, so I'm not quite sure what all these phrases mean. Can you provide any more specifics as to what it is missing?
Common practice. (Score:3, Interesting)
For example: The Linux kernel. I'm running 2.6.22. The 2 is most likely incrementing normally, since there was a 1.0.0 release, that was considered "stable", or as much as it can be. The 22 also increments normally, I think -- though I may be wrong about that.
But I did upgrade directly from 2.4 to 2.6. This is because Linux 2.5 was a development branch. Highly unstable, but it went on for quite awhile, with the most essential parts backported to 2.4. When it was stable enough, 2.6 was released, starting with 2.6.0_rc1 (I think) -- but 2.4 is still maintained, maybe even 2.2 (or did they finally drop that?)
Re:What about... (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, I wonder why there are no CMYK TFT monitors? One layer of CMY that sets colour, and a K layer behind that for brightness.
Re:patents (Score:4, Interesting)
U.S. population: 0.3 billion
Re:What about... (Score:3, Interesting)
Not necessarily. I'm a photographer (or so I'd like to believe). I work in RGB, LAB and, very occasionally, CMYK. Dan Margulis [amazon.com] makes a pretty strong case for using all three color spaces on a routine basis. He also points out that using CMYK for professional level printing is complicated and difficult - a complexity that would be compounded by a photographer or graphics editor having to get used to whatever quirks a GIMP CMYK implementation would bring.
So, for GIMP to replace Photoshop for professional level applications will take a long, long time. And for professionals, the price tag for Photoshop is just a drop in the bucket.
I may look into this release myself since the lack of color profiles and layers has been the big hindrance for what I do. I'd still miss using LAB though...
Re:16 bit RGB support is more important than CMYK (Score:1, Interesting)
Top menus suck (Score:1, Interesting)
If you ask me, if would be much more convenient to allow the user to place the menu bar where they see fit, or at least allow the user to access it with a command-click or something. This is definitely a feature that they should have kept from NeXT.
dom
Re:Software freedom is better. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Most important thing (Score:4, Interesting)
Windows' problem is not a technical one. IIRC, Windows 98 "properly" supported multi-monitor displays out of the box, and the support subsequently improved in Win2k and XP. I used to use Windows in a Multi-Monitor configuration all the time, and agree that it's about on par (if not superior) to Apple these days. There were also various extensions that ATI and nVidia added with their drivers that made the experience a bit smoother (ie. they did a better job of "remembering" where windows are supposed should be placed if an application is quit and re-opened).
Windows' problem is a conceptual one. The whole concept of "root" windows is arguably the Operating System's greatest limitation. Office did away with it in 2000 IIRC, and just gave each document its own window and item on the taskbar. Windows' metaphor of a document originally assumed that a given document will only ever need to interact with documents of the same type within the same application, hence the root windows. Apple took a more "multimedia" approach, giving us applications like ClarisWorks, which is still more or less unparalleled in its ability to seamlessly integrate dissimilar media types and sources into a single document. History has more or less proven that Apple's approach was the better of the two, and the whole "one app does it all" paradigm (ie. Microsoft Works) fell into obscurity.
I'd also peg this as the reason why Apple does drag-and-drop between applications SO much better. Microsoft's system of inter-application objects never really worked properly -- try embedding a not-officially-supported media file into powerpoint, and you'll see what I mean. Apple (and Quicktime especially) handle this much better -- if you install the proper (FOSS!) codec [perian.org], you can seamlessly embed Flash (FLV) videos into any application that supports the Quicktime framework, which is virtually all of them -- iMovie, Final Cut, iTunes, Keynote, etc.....
Since then, Microsoft's been tweaking their "Window" metaphor to more closely match Apple's, and have been largely successful with it. However, vestiges of the "old way" are still seen in Applications like Photoshop. Because of the menubar issue, Adobe can't efficiently port Photoshop to Windows without ditching the root window (even though the technical limitations requiring the window were removed years ago). In order to do so, each canvas would require its own menubar, which would be hideously impractical unless the number of menu options were significantly reduced so that they'd fit (which wouldn't necessarily a bad thing in its own right).
As is its nature, X has of course had this capability since its inception, but like virtually every other aspect of X, it's so difficult to use and configure, it hardly ever gets used.
Multi-monitor support is one of the coolest and tragically underused technologies out there, and it's useful across the board -- have your source open on one monitor while writing a paper on the other, edit video on one monitor and preview on the other, canvas on one monitor - pallete on the other, code on one monitor, web preview on the other, presentation on one monitor, lecture notes on the other, and the list goes on and on and on.
Big honking LCDs are dirt-cheap these days, and the productivity increase you'll see by adding an extra monitor (or just having one big high-res monitor) are incredible. I've been cursing the heavens for the past few months, as I've been stuck on a tiny 12" 1024x768 PowerBook for the past few months -- great machine, but I find myself considerably less productive without a big screen (or more than one)
Re:What about... (Score:4, Interesting)
If you hadn't posted that, I would have had to post about my idea for representing each pixel as a 256-bit floating point number representing the wavelength of light it emitted, and watching the CMYK proponents squirm and splutter when told their preferred colour space was unable to handle infra-red and ultra-violet. Hell, if you kept enough bits for the exponent, there's no reason why it couldn't reach comfortably into MW radio!
Beside which, at the end of the day it's just an AND-OR transform. RGB is about ORing colours, CMYK is about ANDing colours (cyan reflects blue OR green, magenta reflects red OR blue, yellow reflects red OR green and black doesn't reflect anything; cyan and yellow mixed together reflect [blue OR green] AND [red OR green] = green.) CMYK support isn't the real issue, any more than religion is the real issue in Northern Ireland -- if the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England re-merged, the Paddies would still be fighting over something.