The GIMP Project has released GIMP 2.6.0. Among some UI-based changes and additional fixes, it comes the long promised integration of the GEGL library. The promise of 16 bit per-pixel non-destructive editing goes back to 2002, but it’s at last here. This means that GIMP is now ready for prosumer (and in some cases even professional) photographer’s usage, and this can only be big news and a big win for the F/OSS movement. GEGL will also help in future releases with proper support of CMYK. UPDATE: I guess things are not as good as the release notes want us to think. GEGL was turned “on” in the Color menu as per instructions, but I still got a no-support message for high depth TIFF pictures. If GIMP can’t read existing 16bpp pictures, the feature I earlier gave them so much credit for, is useless.
GIMP 2.6.0 Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
The GIMP is awesome software. The developers can be very proud of their work.
While being a quite prominent open-source project, GIMP also always had a quite small developing community. This is mostly the work of people you can count with the fingers of one hand.
Given that, the achievements made with GIMP are even more impressive. I really hope they find more interested developers in the future.
The Gimp community seems on a roll. After their new website, which looks great, GEGL started growing, and now it’s starting to be integrated into Gimp too.
At the moment, I can’t think of a freeware* picture editor, except for Paint.NET maybe, which can rival Gimp (actually, Gimp is better than Paint.NET for most tasks).
* I’m including the Free Software Gimp as freeware because this is Gimp’s main attraction to average people, freedom as in “free beer”
Edited 2008-10-01 22:56 UTC
The one other contender would be Krita, wouldn’t it?
http://www.koffice.org/krita/
With KOffice 2.0 (now in beta release) Krita 2.0 will gain significant capability, and also the ability to run on Windows.
It doesn’t seem that far off to me, though I’m not really familiar with this application area.
Don’t forget Cinepaint. It looks similar to Gimp but is more advanced, rich in features and used in industrial Studios like Dreamworks
Good point. I didn’t know about Cinepaint. It looks as though it solves GIMP’s lack of support for more than 8 bits per channel, but that it doesn’t solve GIMPs GUI issues.
http://www.cinepaint.org/about.html
Shame about the GUI though:
http://www.cinepaint.org/pix/linux/index.html
Anyway, the more solutions the better, I believe. This way, more people are likely to find what they want. It is also more valuable counterpoint to the FUDsters who would still to this day try to claim that “you can’t do professional photo editing on Linux”.
Don’t tell me about Cinepaint! Rowe promised the new generation Cinepaint in days/weeks and it tool YEARS to release something that is far from usable…
Cinepaint was used in professional environments like Dreamworks (I mean, “FilmGimp” was…) and so in a time where not many applications supported hi depth channel file formats (at this point, it was no more than a GIMP fork with better file format support and file sequence support… but that’s about it). But almost every single professional application support these formats (Cineon, DPX, OpenEXR, etc) these days. CinePaint is forgotten in professional environments, as a victim of ostracism and lies.
Rest in pieces CinePaint…
Cinepaint is GIMP. Its what GIMP 2.x should have been, imo, but the developers of GIMP wanted to go another direction, so the project (formally filmgimp) was forked and the name was changed, but at its core its still gimp 1.x.
I’ve (tried to) use Cinepaint quite a bit and I would hardly call it more advanced and feature rich than Gimp. The only thing it really has going for it is that it can handle more than 8 bits pr channel and supports file formats commonly used in the movie industry. Beyond that it lags behind Gimp in almost every way.
Cinepaint is a dead end. They’ve forked the GIMP and added 16bbp and 32bbp support. But they have no concept other that that. GIMP’s GEGL approach is much more sane and structured. And even it took years to get GEGL (and BABL, for the matter) to the levels they are today, GIMP/GEGL are a solid foundation to work on.
Freeware is proprietary software. GIMP is not proprietary. Therefore, GIMP is not freeware. If you want to say GIMP is available free of charge, just say it is free of charge, “price: $0”, costless or even just free (as in price). Or anything with that meaning. The fact that some clueless people do not care about the difference does not justify or excuse lying. Truth is truth, whether some people care about it or not.
This may come as a shock to you but regular users couldn’t care less about software freedom especially when the product is not very good.
Most would pay or risk pirating a commercial product rather than using something that kind of meets their needs.
Making this type of observations makes you look like a fanatic.
As for GIMP, I’m really glad that they started to change the UI. Now if they only changed the name, too.
Edited 2008-10-02 07:39 UTC
You either did not read or did not understand my post.
What I said was that even if there are people who don’t care that you’re lying, it does not change the fact that you’re lying. Also, it does not justify or excuse it. GIMP is not freeware, because it is free software, and free software is the exact opposite of freeware. Again, the fact that there are some people who do not care is absolutely irrelevant. When I’m right and you are not, there is no way around it – you do not change a lie into truth by saying “there are some people who do not care”. Truth is truth, a lie is a lie, no matter how many people care. There is nothing fanatical about it.
It’s not that SOME people do not care, it’s that MOST people don’t care. And those who DO care know what GIMP is and what the original poster wanted to say.
He did not want to undermine GIMP or free (as in speech) software, in fact he was praising it.
Also I’m sick of people acusing other people of lying. A lie is a “a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive”. In my world making someone a liar is an insult.
I don’t understand what is your motivation to insult people you don’t know over the difference between freeware and free software.
You either did not read or did not understand my post.
When my dog is white and you come to me and say “your dog is black”, it does not matter what your motivation is. You may be joking, you may be blind, you may be a chronic liar. But you would certainly be wrong. When I say “my dog is not black, my dog is white” and you say “but nobody knows your dog – there are six billion people on earth and they do not care about your dog! And in fact I am a good person with good intentions because people prefer black dogs these days, so I’m just helping to make your dog more popular!”, you would certainly be right that most people don’t know my dog and don’t care. You might even be right about people’s preferences. But, you would still be wrong about my dog’s colour – even if the world did not care about my dog and preferred black dogs, my dog would not suddenly turn black.
Now, the original poster knows that GIMP is not freeware, but chooses to call it freeware, because some people do not care about the difference. Again, a lie is a lie. A person who knowingly spreads wrong information is called a liar. That’s not an insult, that’s an accurate description. The fact that you take it as an offense is your problem, not mine. Truth is truth, I don’t take it personally. I am right, you are not and that’s all there is to it.
Strange, I thought GIMP was under GPL, meaning that it from legal point of view actually is propriatory. (Sombody owns it, and licenses to us through GPL)
I think, what you meant to say, is that GIMP is free software, where free means free as in free speach. What makes it free is that GPL allows you to:
-use the software for any purpose.
-study and modify the software.
-copy the software
-modify the software, and release the modifications to the public
The nice thing about free software licenses is that they uses copyright law to expand the rights of others rather than limit them.
“Proprietary software is computer software on which the producer has set restrictions on use, private modification, copying, or republishing. Similar terms include “closed-source software” and “non-free software”.
Proprietors may enforce restrictions by technical means, such as by restricting source code access, or by legal means, such as through copyright and patents.”
…
“Proprietary software includes freeware and shareware.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software
The fact that the proprietor can set restrictions on how his property may be used is the basis for free software.
It is the nature of the restrictions, that determines if the software free or not. And yes, GPL contains restrictions. If you don’t think that is the case, just ask Microsoft why they often are reluctant to incorporate GPL:ed code in their software.
If you should have an opposite to propriatory software a better candidate would be public domain software. You can use things in the public domain as you see fit, including incorporating it in your own work without e.g. asking somebody for permission, or paying any licensing fees. Then you can release the result under whatever licence you want.
This is why I think it is a bad idea to talk about propriatory vs free software. Doing that sort of indirectly implies that GPL (and other free software licenses) is less valid than e.g. an EULA from Microsoft. In both cases it is the owner of the software that tells us under what conditions the software may be used, copied, etc.
GPL does not set restrictions on use. That’s why it’s not considered a proprietary software license. Free software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction. Unlike freeware, which is proprietary.
That’s a stretch.
The only real restriction in the GPL is on redistribution in that you must publish your changes on request. You don’t need permission from anybody to do anything with it other than re-license it.
All the other legalities are to try and prevent people from exploiting loopholes.
You’ll only run into trouble with the GPL if you’re trying to turn code licensed under it into proprietary software. Period.
Your first assumption is incorrect. Freeware merely defines the software as being available at no cost in itself. Free software, OTOH, does not define the price of the software itself, but some freedom-related aspects.
So, “freeware” and “free software” are not opposites, but orthogonal. GIMP happens to be both.
Freeware, in the 21st century, universally means non-free, closed-source software. Originaly, some 20-30 years ago, freeware could mean any software that was available for free, but since the arrival of Free Software and Open Source in the 1990’s, freeware always refers to proprietary, closed-source, non-free, binary-only software that sets restrictions on its use (like, you cannot decompile, modify it etc.) Free software, on the other hand, gives you right to use the software for any purpose, unlike freeware.
GIMP is not freeware, GIMP is free software. You can also call it open-source software, because GPL is both a free sofwtare license and an open-source license. But is is not a freeware license. GPL was made by the Free Software Foundation and the Free Software Foundation explicitly says it has nothing in common with freeware.
Wrong again. See e.g.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeware#Criteria
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/freeware
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/freeware
Edited 2008-10-02 12:54 UTC
Freeware means exactly that: software that is free of charge.
It does not mean proprietary software, it can be and maybe often is proprietary, but it doesn’t have to be.
So I think it’s nonsense that you want to make him call it free of charge, “price: $0”, costless or free (as in price)?
Depends on your definition on *better*: some tasks which I was never able to find how to do in Gimp, I managed to do them in 5 minutes with Paint.NET.
[I didn’t read any doc these two applications and I don’t *want* to]
So for the casual user, I consider Paint.NET as clearly better (note that the versions of Gimp I’ve tried were old), a professional willing to read documentation may have a different view.
This release didn’t entirely integrate GEGL, it seems the developers want to do this change over slowly. Supposedly it will offer totally non-destructive photo-editing, not to mention the possibility of dumping the layers paradigm for a node based paradigm. If gimp integrates all the functionality that GEGL makes possible, it will become an incredible image editing app.
I’m already looking forward to 2.8, and I’ve barely looked at 2.6 yet.
This looks so awesome. I don’t know why people pay money for Adobe Photoshop. From what I’ve seen of GIMP, it can do everything that Photoshop can – and it can easily be extended via scripts. I think with the 16bit support – it’s going to give Photoshop a run for it’s money. I know a lot of artist who won’t switch to Linux because they don’t have Photoshop on Linux. Maybe this will change their mind.
GIMP is a great program, but it’s not a Photoshop replacement and probably never will be. That’s not what it’s meant to be, though most of its users wish it were. It does more than most other free editors out there, and I personally think it is superior to PSP, but for a pro photographer it will eventually fall short of their needs.
For amateur photographers and other users though, it’s just what the doctor ordered: Free, highly functional and as you said, highly expandable.
Actually, if GIMP would support the whole arsenal of features in GEGL it would become much more powerful than Photoshop in many areas. Unfortunately getting there takes quite some time because the lack of full-time GIMP developers.
GIMP is great. For a very lightweight image editor I use ImageJ. Runs on java. I use it for my computer vision tasks a lot.
GIMP is fine for creating items that are only going to be viewed on the web or are not in color.
But as soon as you go to print in color? It doesn’t matter if its inkjet, laser, or offset press, it’s got to be shifted to a CMYK color profile, or “miscolored” RGB with an understanding to how the colors will shift or it won’t print the desired colors.
Clients (and creators) care very much about the color accuracy.
For example, where I work we have an Official Shade of Scarlet that must be used on publications. We have a hex code for the web, a Pantone number for the printer, a CMYK profile for the printer and graphic artists, and an RGB profile to use in Word. The RGB color looks maroon on screen, but prints the Official Shade of Scarlet on the model and brand of color laser printer we have in our building. But if you try printing it on another printer? There’s no gurantee of correct color due to how that printer model handles RGB –> CMYK.
And if you print out and distribute something that’s not the Official Shade of Scarlet (because, Scarlet, Crimson, they’re both reds, so what’s the big deal?) and get caught? Be prepared for several irate phone calls from the people in the Big Chairs.
Without proper CMYK support, GIMP is a wicked keen toy, not a professional level tool.
Reading some recent gimp mailing lists it appears that Gimp’s 32bpp support is not exactly complete. Some parts of Gimp’s core don’t work with it (not talking about plugins). Hmm…
What you have to understand, Eugenia, is that even though this is called 2.6.0 that doesn’t mean that Gimp 2.6 is here. Gimp 2.6 won’t be here until 2.6.1 is released in 6 months. No one ever claimed that Gimp 2.6.0 was going to be Gimp 2.6, so it makes no sense to complain about missing functionality. But just wait until 2.6.1 comes out! After that, I don’t think their will be any future for that *other* image editor.
Edited 2008-10-01 23:47 UTC
Right.
Huh? 2.6.0 is a (subversion of) 2.6 by definition. And if that’s not enough, then how about all the 2.6:s sprinkled around everywhere (e.g., in the release notes of 2.6.0 and in the splash window)?
Or is there some weird, hidden meaning in what you wrote that I just don’t get?
I think the “joke” is a reference to the release of KDE 4.0 when it wasn’t really very near being a feature complete implementation of KDE4.
There is some parallel to justify this … for example the article mentions that at this time of release of GIMP 2.6.0, the underlying GEGL engine doesn’t proplerly support cmyk as yet. Full cmyk support will be a feature of GIMP 2.6.+something.
This is the way of it with free software, however. “Release early, release often” is the catchcry.
This is however a very different paradigm than the release of commercial software, where you are trying to charge people real money to buy a software application, and then charge them again when they want to upgrade to a newer version. In that scenario, “release early, release often” (with early releases not being feature complete) actually would equate to “rip-off”.
However, the point is that the GIMP program, like KDE4, is not commercial software, it is free software. Enjoy the new features now for no charge, and get an even more complete feature set as they are developed a bit later on, also for no charge.
So the intended sarcasm rather misses the point, wouldn’t you say?
KDE 4.1.1 is out now, and it is quite stable and now has feature parity (more or less) with KDE 3.5.x.
They should have stuck with the developer release tree numbering and call it Gimp 2.5.5.
Personally I’d prefer the (old?) Linux model with versions x.y.z and all odd y were unstable/dev and even y were stable/maintenance mode.
Then it’d still be 0.2.x.
By any minuscule chance, aren’t you some kind of politician ? You’d fit right in.
DON’T TAS^H^H^H CASHEW ME, BRO!
Haha, Mr. Aaron Seigo Jr. 🙂
A naming convention without any sense. 2.6.0 is not 2.6? Why? They should use 2.5.9X or any kind of release to do the alphas/betas. Otherwise users can get very confused.
I can’t mod you up as I’ve posted, but I liked very much your parody of KDE’s numbering brain deadness.
Now that the GIMP team is finally making releases that target many of the common criticisms of the GIMP what will be left for people to complain about other than the fact that it isn’t released by Adobe? I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough.
Don’t forget the folks that say that The GIMP will never be a good application because of the name.
The name probably could use a change.
The interface is still a mess (at least the worked on it this time instead of adding feature on top of it). The 3 floating independent windows is a dead end, tiled environement like blender and now inkscape offer a much better experiences. The way menu are organized is also one of my complaint about The Gimp. It is sometime hard to find feature and naming is not always perfect. The color profile handling was also a problem with the past release, RGB and grayscale are good for computer, but not for printing (and the fact the the color mode is not located in the color menu is one of the good example of the deficient menu layout). It is the combination of all these little things that prevent me from using/liking Gimp. I really hope that someone will stand up and do the “moving things around” job someday, yes it will make old user frustrated, but it will attract much more. They should look at how Inkscape do things, the way they deal with feature organization on screen and try to “copy” it. Inkscape had cloned the interface of gimp long time ago (it was called sodipody back then) but they saw that it was deficient and rewritten it.
That’s an opinion of course, not fact, it may depend on your taste.
GIMP’s interface is improved, but still a bit of a mess. Krita’s GUI interface is OK though, AFAIK. I haven’t heard of any complaints about that.
Both of these are of late becoming very capable free software raster image editing programs.
This won’t stop complaints coming from everywhere that “there is no decent applications software for desktop Linux”. Those complaints will be utterly unfounded and ill-informed … but that won’t stop them coming.
In fact, as these applications, and others like them, get more and more capable, and they move past what is available for Windows at reasonable pricing, then you can assume that the unwarranted dismissing of free software desktop applications such as these two will become ever more shrill, over ever more trivial points.
How about the fact that almost none of GEGL’s nice features are included (yet)? E.g., there still seems to be no way to use more than a puny 8 bits/channel (and destructively), which makes it unsuitable for any serious image editing, because of the huge number of rounding errors that will accumulate, causing nasty banding and “holes” in the color gamut.
So if that is important to you, at this time use Krita instead.
http://www.koffice.org/krita/
“Krita supports many managed colorspaces, like rgb, grayscale, cmyk, lab, ycbcr and lms, in 8 and 16 bits per channel. Some colorspaces even support 32 bits per channel! ”
“Krita can import RAW images in 8 and 16 bits per channel and load and save the usual image formats: tiff, png, jpeg. Other image formats, like xcf, can be imported and sometimes exported through the GraphicsMagick import/export plugin, but are not fully supported.”
Of course I have krita installed, but this article was about GIMP.
But since you brought it up… I’ve found Krita to behave a bit oddly (read: buggy) at times. E.g., if I create a “16-bit float/channel” RGB image the white background is shown as gray, and if I paint with a yellow brush it comes out as black with a blue outline. And no matter how deep my color space is, the RGB palette is still using only 8 bit integer values, and the HSV palette similarly.
I haven’t actually tried this … as I say this isn’t an application area that I am familiar with.
I can only go on what I have read, such as this:
http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/6459/1/
… which seems to indicate to me anyway that there isn’t a problem, and that Krita is really the only way to go if you are looking for a free software raster graphics applications with extensive support for useable colour spaces.
I was hoping that GIMP 2.6 would become the second option, but apparently, and somewhat disappointingly, it seems as if GIMP 2.6 isn’t there yet.
So, for now, if you want that capability in a free software raster graphics editor, then AFAIK Krita is your only choice.
Have you tried Krita from KOffice 2.0 (beta only as yet)under KDE 4.1.1? Apparently it has quite a bit of extended capability.
I don’t mean to pick on you, but this seems to be the attitude of the majority of the FOSS brigade.
We may not understand the problem area, we may not understand what you actually need, but this FOSS program looks good on paper and we’re sure as hell going to recommend it to you.
What can I say? We have a number of journalists who have reviewed Krita and taken have the trouble to write review articles for publishing on the web, who all report that Krita has great support for a number of colourspaces for 8 and 16 bits per channel and, for some spaces, even 32 bits per channel, and OTOH we have one random poster on OSNews who makes a vague claim that it was a bit weird when he/she tried it.
I haven’t verified myself, and I stated as much … but I did come up with free software which has been independently reviewed and stated by the reviewers to have the requested capability. Why all the negativity? Why would posters say, for example … “I can’t think of any free software other than GIMP and Paint.Net” (the latter which is not even free software).
So all that I did was point out that there is a free software alternative to GIMP, and that it does appear to have all of the capability that people are asking for in such an application, and that it has been rated very well in independent reviews.
Surely it is worth checking out, rather than whinging at me because I am not an expert in this application area?
What is the point in just ignoring Krita and pretending that it doesn’t exist at all? (Speculation: other than trying desperately to keep alive the oft-stated claim that you can’t do professional photo editing on Linux, and that you need to spend oodles of dosh on Windows and Photoshop and lock yourself in to that platform. “The GIMP program has a useless UI” is almost a fervent mantra on many discussion forums. Reply by saying: “well OK, if you don’t like it, then don’t use the GIMP then, use Krita instead” … dead silence).
Edited 2008-10-02 06:50 UTC
I know you had the best of intentions when recommending Krita and that you’ve probably read a lot of reviews on the internet talking about how good it is.
That said, you’ve even said that this is not an area that you’re familiar with, and judging by the length of the article you’ve pointed him to, I’m guessing the author of that article isn’t too familiar with the field either. The OP has tried it, and it doesn’t work for him.
People who need real CMYK support do not find anything in the FOSS world that meets their need. The majority of professionals (and serious amateurs) find that they need the features in Photoshop. CMYK being very important if you ever print your work.
Nobody is trying to ignore GIMP or Krita. It just doesn’t meet the needs of professionals and enthusiasts. There’s no point in bringing up short reviews in Linux focused sites that praise these applications since the reviewers do not have the knowledge or expertise to sensibly talk about the subject.
The best thing for these FOSS projects to do is to sit down and talk to professionals and find out exactly what they need.
The state of play, some time ago, according to photography professionals interested in this exact question, was that Krita had all of the requirements ON PAPER but that it just wasn’t stable enough yet.
http://jcornuz.wordpress.com/2007/10/08/krita-the-kontender/
That was in 2007. Using Ubuntu or OpenSuse 10.3. It is 2008 people, and OpenSuSe is at 11.1 beta already.
Now that KDE 4.0 has been and gone, KDE 4.1.1 is here and far more stable, Qt is at version 4.4 and Krita 2.0 is in beta … it is time that this was looked at again.
Krita should be far more stable now, and better performing, especially if someone would install it on a KDE platform instead of trying to run it under GNOME.
After all, Krita does have, ON PAPER, according to the photography professionals, all of the right stuff. It had the right stuff a year ago or more. All that was needed, a year ago, was to get it running smoothly. That should be well & truly solved by now. Krita has since added significant functionality as well.
Do you photographers all mean to tell me that everyone who is interested in this is too busy being disappointed in GIMP 2.6 to have even tried an up-to-date version of Krita under KDE 4.1.1?
Edited 2008-10-02 13:53 UTC
And how are us photographers supposed to try it? Windows download links are broken/nonexistent. Mac OS X packages require the developer tools to be installed and have to be compiled from source through fink.
Why can’t somebody in the Krita project make binaries for the popular operating systems? Is it any surprise Photoshop is king?
You are _not_ supposed to be trying Krita 2.0beta1 unless you want to actively help us improve it. It is not ready for a comparison to anything else, even 1.6, although someone with experience in developing applications will easily see that it will be great, once it is done.
As for windows: the team of volunteers working on a Windows port is so small that they have a lot of lag, especially since they have to produce the packages for two different compilers with different problems. However, at my previous job I used krita2 myself under windows for work — and it did the job.
Right now, I’m working on getting Krita to compile on OSX, because my work laptop runs that and I want to hack on the train. It’s a bit of a struggle, especially since I’m not too familiar with the platform. But the small team of KDE-OSX people — again, two, maybe three people are working on that, are busy preparing new, more up-to-date packages. And I’ve hear a whisper that a macports port of koffice will be ready real soon now.
Yes, you need to install the developer tools for that and use the command line, which you wouldn’t need for the new packages, but that’s the reality right now.
And as for photoshop — I couldn’t care less. My target audience in working on Krita are:
1. artists in the open source community, not amateurs with an illegal copy of Photoshop or pro photographers on Windows or OS X.
2. developers interested in working on a featureful raster paint application where there’s lots of fun to be had coding cool stuff.
Boudewijn
This is probably the greatest news of the year graphics software wise. That many fewer reasons for proprietary software.
I just installed it on Windows because of the free Windows XP that came on my eee 1000 H. It looks nice. It is nice to have a cross-platform free photo editing application. I can edit and save in Linux or switch to a Windows XP window and edit in Windows. Good stuff. The Menu organization and UI is cleaner, less cluttered.
Edited 2008-10-01 23:44 UTC
I’ve been really impressed with Gimp on Windows in the past few years, it’s a wonderful alternative to PSP and Photoshop for most editing needs. I keep it on a USB stick along with a bunch of other F/OSS and freeware for family and friends to pass around.
Oh, and by the way, XP wasn’t “free” on your eeePC, it was just preinstalled. You still paid for it as a bundle with the computer, though probably not as much as if you’d bought it separately.
Oh, and by the way, XP wasn’t “free” on your eeePC, it was just preinstalled. You still paid for it as a bundle with the computer, though probably not as much as if you’d bought it separately.
This is untrue. The Xandros only version was exactly the same price. I researched it carefully. This fact has annoyed a lot of Linux users since it appears MS is giving it away to keep market share.
Not that I give a rat’s, but it’s more likely that they are selling it for the same price as xandros, which is not “free as in beer” or as in “Freedom Fries.” And aren’t the windows and linux versions also differentiated by hardware?
Nope, the Linux version comes with a SSD while the Windows version comes with a standard drive. So, Asus is making up the $100 or so price difference by giving out a much cheaper hard drive and then “pricing” them the same.
From the summary:
If GIMP can’t read existing 16bpp pictures, the feature I earlier gave them so much credit for, is useless.
Useless? It’s never been useless, it’s always been a great editor for those of us who aren’t pros but still need something more than xpaint. Saying a program is suddenly useless because a new feature didn’t work as advertised is pure idiocy; all the previous functions are still there and working as they did before. It may have been more correct to say that it still doesn’t meet your specific needs.
Keep in mind you aren’t writing in your personal blog here, this is a news website that is read by thousands of enthusiasts from all over the computing spectrum. A little decorum goes a long way.
I am talking about the SPECIFIC feature, not for the whole app. Their release notes LET YOU BELIEVE (unless they go and change the text back), that if you turn “on” GEGL, you will have some 16bpp. Instead, while INTERNALLY some operations might happen in 32bpp, the importing of 16bpp images is still done in 8 bpp. This makes the feature indeed, USELESS. Because, ALL pro/prosumer photographers will want to import in 16bpp+, so this feature is just going down the drain for them.
Okay, I see now that I misread what you wrote. You were indeed speaking of the specific feature. My sincerest apologies, Eugenia.
Not all Photographers Eugenia. Since 95% of digital photographers shoot in jpeg format, which is ONLY 8 bit anyways, 16 bit is worthless, unless you want to save as a 16 bit tiff file from the original 8 bit jpeg file.
Very few cameras offer TIFF as a shooting format (Nikon D3 is the only one that I can think of). Most (at least DSLRs) offer RAW and various shades of JPEGs. And it’s with those that you might want or desire 16 bit capability. Even though, most people shooting RAW will probably convert to jpeg anyways just for ease of convenience. Few will convert from RAW to PSD or TIFF, and probably will convert to an 8 bit lossless variant anyways. Well, that’s my belief 😉
I shoot in RAW and use 16 bit TIFFS in Adobe RGB colour space, using either Canon’s DPP or Capture One Pro. But then, I’m a serious amateur 🙂
Dave
Please read the article more carefully. I am talking about prosumer and professionals. These people shoot RAW, and EVEN if you shoot JPEG, you STILL need 16bpp, otherwise you lose quality as you edit.
I HATE people who THINKS I’m TOO STUPID to understand the IMPORTANT PARTS of the MESSAGE and decide to WRITE IN CAPITALS those parts.
Using caps is a way to convey stress in a typed sentence as you would if you were speaking (loudness, pitch, length, etc). Italics and asterisks are also commonly used to do the same thing. It has nothing to do with you being stupid; it’s a natural part of the Enlgish language.
It’s called EMPHASIS and it’s a NORMAL part of speech. There are many of us that are just plain used to using caps for emphasis even though there’s bold and italic available, because we grew up with terminals and typewriters.
Pros wouldn’t touch the GIMP. Whether you like it or not, Photoshop is the standard, and people like to use the standard. Let’s look at Paintshop Pro – not a lot of pros use it, despite its vast features and cheaper price than Photoshop.
The vast majority of people think that images taken with their 5mp camera phone are great. These types will never use advanced photo editing software. More serious amateurs tend to still shooot JPEG, at least from my experience on POTN for the past 3 years. I encouraged a Welsh friend to move to RAW, and to use Photoshop etc, and to be far more critical of his miages, and his images have improved a lot – most ordinary (read large portion of the population) would never even bother.
If such a small percentage of photographers need Photoshop, then most surely they don’t need 16 bit per channel etc. I guarantee that in most cases, your ordinary person could not tell the difference between a 8 bit JPEG at medium quality, and a high quality 16 bit TIFF. Ordinary people do not pixel peep.
Dave
That’s not the issue. 8 bits/channel is almost always fine for the final image, even among professionals. However, what pretty much everyone needs is that the image processor use a higher bit-depth while working with the image. Otherwise those rounding errors after every filter/adjustment will quickly add up. In some images “ordinary” people won’t notice it, but in other images there can be quite nasty banding or color errors that are ugly, annoying and obvious to most people.
Banding is rare from my experience. I know what you’re saying, but it’s just not common. You’re more inclined to see digital noise, or moiré effects from poor AA filters in front of the chip than anything else. I’m used to working with Canon CMOS, so there usualy isn’t moiré, and noise is usually pretty damn good. If you pixel peep, then yes, you’ll notice differences, but who really pixel peeps?
It always makes me laugh at how these photo agencies pixel peep ad infinitum, and yet in most cases, the images are printed in a magazine of less than A4 size, where in reality, you don’t need “superb” IQ from the image. Most agencies will in fact demand that the final file is usually greater than 50mb in size, if it isn’t, no matter how good it is, they usually don’t/won’t accept it.
Dave
I have no idea what you’re getting at. Neither the noise nor the moiré caused by the camera’s processor has anything to do with image processing applications.
Photos obviously don’t suffer from excessive banding as I described it when they are fresh off the camera (but they do have noise, often lots of it (which actually makes any possible banding even less visible), and in some very rare cases moiré). But again, anything that happens inside the camera has nothing to do with GIMP or any other image processing application, and is therefore irrelevant to this topic.
huh? What world are you living in? Noiseware…Neat Image are both image editing software applications, that deal with noise. Both can integrate with Photoshop. Capture One pro has a de-moire tool. Whether you like it or not, both noise and moire are present, to some degree, in some images (depending on the camera at hand). And they need to be dealt with in PP. Oh, and banding does occur as well, let’s look at the Canon EOS 1D (still a highly used camera, despite its age). Underexpose a RAW image, and then rescue it in the RAW processing software, and quite often both banding, and excessive Chrominance noise will be visible. Badly from my experience.
How do you figure that anything that goes on inside the camera is irrelevant to the GIMP? It’s a photo editing tool. The final image is a result of what goes on in the camera. Ergo, it’s logical to realise that the photo editing software does manipulate what the camera has already done.
Oh, and if you’re shooting RAW, the camera’s processor doesn’t do an awful lot, other than some noise reduction and moire reduction in chip. True, if you shoot jpeg, then yes, it does more.
Dave
Those are not the photographers who will want Photoshop like features in GIMP. As a serious amateur photographer, you’d know that.
No. For me Important progress towards high bit-depth and non-destructive editing in GIMP has been made. means that in a future you’ll have 16bpp editing, not “now you can fully edit your images in 16bpp”.
It’s 32bit floating point, which is very different from 32bits.
I say meaning that the interal processing is being done in 32bit floating point linear light RGBA doesn’t mean what you say it means. And beating the poor fellas for something they didn’t even say, well it’s a bit too much.
You’re correct. It would have to be 64bit floating point linear light RGBA for 16 bits per channel to even exist.
So what? It’s not their fault that you came to the wrong conclusion. Nowhere does it say that the GIMP can import 16bpp images or even work with them. It even says the default is 8bit and it is pretty obvious that the 16bpp is not yet ready for end users. You know, that’s why GEGL is not on by default and that’s why it doesnt say “GIMP can now import and work 16bpp images” anywhere in the announcement.
Edited 2008-10-02 11:46 UTC
I beg to differ. Whilst useless is a bit harsh, GIMP is very limited imho. It is getting better, but is a very slow process. I am surprised that the GIMP only has a few developers though, especially since how many people use it.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have Krita and GIMP developers working on the one project, combining their resources?
An 8 bit colour depth really limits colour accuracy, at least. CMYK isn’t probably used by the amateur that much, most photo labs will do the print in RGB (usually sRGB) mode anyways.
Personally, I’d rather just buy a copy of Photoshop Elements (or Photoshop itself) and run under WINE. Sure, it’s not free, but it is better.
Dave
So you think having both of them is worse than having only one of them? You think that if it would be only one application it will be twice as good? Think again. It doesn’t work like that.
What would we recommend to people that don’t like Gimp if Krita would not exist. Look at Inkscape. If the developers would not have forked Sodipodi, there would not be any Inkscape today. Only Sodipodi, perhaps a bit more improved, but no revolutionary stuff.
Not really no, since I doubt they’d get any more done. Even sssuming you could get them to agree on a language and GUI toolkit (which would be a fairly non-trivial task), there are still some fundamental differences in how they approach the underlying problem. What’s nice with two projects is we, the end users, get see both approaches and chose the one that works best. If they where to combine their efforts one of the approaches would have to be scrapped and who is to say that the approach that was kept would be the best one in all cases. I’m equally glad there exists commercial alternatives to Photoshop for exactly the same reason.
And anyway this is Open Source, which means that resources are being combined already, even with two seperate projects. The Gimp and Krita crowd are free to steal algorithms and concepts from each other and I have no doubt they do. Also if you look at the source code for both projects you’ll see that both projects use the same third party code to do all kinds of things (thanks again to the whole Open Source thing), so there really is far less re-inventing of wheels than one might think.
And finally Krita has a secondary goal beyond simply being an image editor, and that is KDE and Koffice integration, which is something which sets it appart from gimp beyond any editing features. That for me is reason enough for Krita to be ‘allowed’ to exist.
Krita had more than just integration with KDE in mind. In fact Krita was orignially created as a natural painting type application and it is still a major focus. A lot of effort has gone into supporting features found in high end tablets.
I think when people say print they mean printing out many copies at once. I use Lulu.com to print my books and they want it in RGB. The print-on-demand uses a different process than when you print in large quantities. I don’t know whether you would consider that professional or not. Most people don’t make much money making books until or unless they are famous. But they can be sold with royalties on Lulu.com.
Heh.
2.6 paves the way to an even better Gimp, I’m really happy about it, thank you gimp devs for giving me all this for free!
My RAW workflow is a bit hindered by doing all work in RawTherapee first and then working with 8bit files, but it did it most of the time and I can’t complain about the results, maybe I’m missing the obvious but 8bit editing did the trick for me this time being. It will get better with 16bit or even 32bit, but I really don’t understand all this whining going on here. Well, maybe I’m no pro but my clients like my work which can be found here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/benjamin_lebsanft/
All done with ‘lousy’ GIMP…
Beautiful work, Benjamin.
As they say, “bad workmen always blame their tools”.
Edited 2008-10-02 14:31 UTC
I see that the way your workflow works, you have no problem using 8bit images (as you’re doing the most of the conversion from higher than 8 bit before entering GIMP…), but some people need to work with more than that… read as, several people won’t have the same needs nor the same workflow as yours.
(beautiful work between… but doesn’t really add that much to this discussion… mostly because you’re using other tools to bypass GIMP’s limitations)
The Gimp is otherwise a great program, but people have been telling Gimp developers that they need 16bpp to do professional photography. Why are they just listening now?
I realize that it’s a huge change in the codebase, but can not Cine-Paint/Film-Gimp do 16-bit rendering? How could a branch of the Gimp accomplish what the core could or WOULD not?
This is one of the most overstated things wanted with GIMP, professionals are not going to switch purely on this. It’s the same with CMYK, your average desktop user(Which is what GIMP is aimed at) really doesn’t need this, but colour profiles have been available in GIMP for agers which seem to be strangely missed by the same people who call them selfs “professionals” wanting this feature.
Yes, >8 bitdepth isn’t going to make professional automatically switch, but even as an armature, art-photography person, having increased bit-depth makes the difference between burned highlights and crushed blacks, and a good photo.
I hereby attack the very thing you are doing: Not a problem; let Gimp remain a tool only suitable for web graphics and family snapshots; keep all your treasured memories in proprietary raw formats, and keep a 8-bit working copy.
*cough* DNG *cough*
Or convert them to 16 bit PNG/TIFF for long term storage. They’re larger but at least you’re guaranteed to be able to read 50 years down the line.
Hi,
I was being sarcastic, about using proprietary formats.
Edited 2008-10-02 21:25 UTC
Gimp might be starting to move in the right direction but things like adjustment layers, CYMK, and 16/32 bit colors per channel have been in Photoshop for several years and other F/OSS raster image editors have these features already.
is this the version with the single window GUI
Alas, no. The development release notes had this to say about window-management changes:
In other words, there’s no change if you’re on KDE or Windows or etc.
CMYK is slowly becoming irrelevant in graphic/designer workflow. More and more printing shops *prefer* to get files in ECI-RGB/AdobeRGB and make separation in situ.
16-bit *is* an obstacle in acceptance though.
I agree. So many people have been clamouring for CMYK, and I suspect most don’t even know why they’d need it, except that “it’s necessary for professionals”.
Colour separation is a lossy conversion, you want it to be done whenever you need CMYK – meaning when you’re actually going to print it. Better leave it to the printers.
Embedded profiles, sRGB, etc coupled with high bit depths (if your capturing device supports it) is more important. Another feature the graphic people I work with value greatly is adjustment layers.
From what I understand, all of these are coming or already there in the GIMP.