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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

#11

Post by unhammer »

For some context and differing opinions, see the rather long discussion thread on gimp-devel that prompted this article:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.gimp.devel/26058

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.gimp.devel/26068

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.gimp.devel/26078

From glancing over it, it seems to me like Elle Stone wants GIMP to make a rather radical shift to Do The Right Thing, while Øyvind Kolås (Pippin) values making small improvements one step at a time to avoid breaking current functionality.

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

#12

Post by dr_zoidberg »

chris_wot wrote: post #8

I'm afraid that this rather sounds like a bunch of developers who cannot take valid criticism. This is rather sad. It's sad when I see this in other projects, like Gnome.

I agree, the only time I tried to submit a bug report to them I got a snarky response from one dev and a ban from another.

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

#13

Post by dr_zoidberg »

vitovito wrote: post #4
AlyssaRowan wrote: post #3

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.

Is CinePaint still under development? From the sourceforge site it seems as if it was abandoned. Also, CinePaint doesn't run on Windows, which in my case is a deal breaker...

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

#15

Post by rho_away »

dr_zoidberg wrote: post #12
chris_wot wrote: post #8

I'm afraid that this rather sounds like a bunch of developers who cannot take valid criticism. This is rather sad. It's sad when I see this in other projects, like Gnome.

I agree, the only time I tried to submit a bug report to them I got a snarky response from one dev and a ban from another.

If you're going to claim something like that, best to link to the issue in question.

(Like, 99% of the time someone complaining about being unfairly banned was being a total asshole.)

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

#17

Post by Sprint »

dietrichepp wrote: post #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 ph…

Krita is awesome. But, and I know this will sound weird to many people, I am now so familiar with GIMP's UI and workflow, that I find changing difficult.

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

#18

Post by mschaef »

I have a great deal of historical fondness for GIMP, dating back to the Spencer Kimball/Peter Mattis Gimp 0.5x. One of their last contributions to GIMP before moving on was to develop GTK as a part of the non-Motif GIMP 0.9x series. Gimp thus acted as a natural rallying point for would-be Gnome developers as they reacted to KDE's choice of the non-open-source-at-the-time QT toolkit. Gimp really has been very important to the open source GUI landscape....

That makes it all the more sad that Gimp development seems to have stalled, relative to other open source imaging packages. Gimp was 8bpp in 1995 and 19 years later Gimp is still 8bpp. I had had a great deal of hope for the GEGL architecture, but these days I get the distinct impression that the project picked an architecture that was beyond the ability of the available developers to complete in a reasonable amount of time. Krita, Paint.NET, and the GIMP-based Cinepaint are all existance proofs that it's possible to implement high color depth image editing in open source in less than 20 years.

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

#19

Post by StevePerkins »

mschaef wrote: post #18

I have a great deal of historical fondness for GIMP, dating back to the Spencer Kimball/Peter Mattis Gimp 0.5x. One of their last contributions to GIMP before moving on was to develop GTK as a part of the non-Motif GIMP 0.9x series. Gimp thus acted as a natural rallying point for would-be Gnome developers as they reacted to KDE's choice of the non-open-source-at-the-time QT toolkit. Gimp really has been very importan…

Thanks for that. I'm a fairly casual user of GIMP, using it just to tweak graphics for web pages rather than "serious" creative design work. I use GIMP simply because I wasn't aware that any other acceptable open-source Photoshop-alternatives even exist.

How would you compare Krita, Paint.NET, and the Cinepaint fork for untrained web graphic users?

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