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The Sad State of High Bit Depth GIMP Color Management

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Re: The Sad State of High Bit Depth GIMP Color Management

#2
Every time people defend the GIMP for having a terrible user experience (just take it as a lemma; it's been debated to death elsewhere and would just clutter up the joint), they seem to inevitably trot out "But but but the GIMP is for serious image manipulation and photo work!".

You had one job, GIMP. One job.

:(

Re: The Sad State of High Bit Depth GIMP Color Management

#4

It's been how many years? And it's still 8-bit? Maybe the GIMP needs a fork. I like it, but it's a bit crap.

That's what the CinePaint fork (originally Film Gimp) is, support for high-resolution, high-bit-depth images for "deep painting" of film assets.

Re: The Sad State of High Bit Depth GIMP Color Management

#5

It's been how many years? And it's still 8-bit? Maybe the GIMP needs a fork. I like it, but it's a bit crap.

The problem does not seem to be GIMP if I understand the article correct, but the GEGL code (or the developer of it) which it relies on.

Re: The Sad State of High Bit Depth GIMP Color Management

#6
I had been waiting for a Photoshop / GIMP replacement for years, it seems that the GIMP developers dug themselves in a hole a while back with babl and GEGL and a number of good alternatives have cropped up in the meantime. My first problem with GEGL is that it seems to be the only way to reliably crash GIMP, and my second problem is that it doesn't serve to make any discernible workflow easier.

A nice workflow for photo editing involves conversion to 16-bit Lab, layers with various blending modes, and transfer curves. Due to the size of Lab, 8 bits are not enough and cause noticeable banding. Photoshop could do this back in the late 90s. According to this article, GIMP developers think the workflow is "wrong".

It's a good thing that we have Krita.

Re: The Sad State of High Bit Depth GIMP Color Management

#7
post #5

It's been how many years? And it's still 8-bit? Maybe the GIMP needs a fork. I like it, but it's a bit crap.

The problem does not seem to be GIMP if I understand the article correct, but the GEGL code (or the developer of it) which it relies on.

GEGL and Gimp are pretty much joined at the hip. While they're in name separate projects, they're very much developed for one another.

Re: The Sad State of High Bit Depth GIMP Color Management

#9
Only tangetially related, but is there any good way of working with color profiles and different color spaces at all in open-source software? I recently had to prepare a PDF with playing cards for printing. I was supposed to ship a PDF in CMYK with ISO Coated v2 300% (ECI). Source images from which the PDF was generated were SVG, thus sRGB. I tried using ghostscript to convert to CMYK and apply the color profile. The conversion to CMYK apparently worked, however, they told me that there are some places that have more than 300 % color. I searched all weekend for something that could use the color profile, work in CMYK and maybe something else that could actually show me where colors went out of gamut.

Somehow all that seems to only be possible using Adobe software, which makes it quite hard to supply printers with good input when restricting yourself to open-source software. Or maybe I missed a lot of things and didn't search hard enough; also possible.

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