91–100 of 108 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having an attitude of "It's good enough" is probably why GIMP has made such a small amount of progress in recent years.
Indeed. And having progress per se is what proprietary software like Photoshop has to do in order to sell more licenses. Why would you buy the most recent CS version if Photoshop 6 was certainly good enough? The logic is different. GIMP does not have to evolve in order to survive. It's open and if you need it doing something it doesn't, you can hire a developer to do it. The fact nobody does it is because it's good e…
And what it's used for isn't the listed things because it can't do them. Blub in a sense perhaps.
The photoshopessentails links below will obviously illustrate a difference (but not one that is very striking considering the destructive editing applied) - its a classic dynamic range compress/expand to show the benefits of higher quantization levels. Obviously that will degrade an image. Nobody, I suspect, is willing to show a side by side comparison of an image showing ordinary editing with rounding errors that make the slightest different to the image.
Most output is computer screens anyway where there is so much more impacting the image than rounding errors in editing stage. When you print an image that also introduces its own set of transforms, some have the benefit of making much that is visible on the screen (like moderate chroma noise) largely go away.
I dislike GIMP because it lacks the polish and sophistication of Photoshop but good photographs are good photographs, regardless of rounding errors in adjustment layers. When you look back at the last century of images, how many of those photos do you say would be improved had they more resolution, or less banding or whatever technical nonsense metric you want to apply.
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No, that doesn't actually do anything to solve the underlying problem. Stacking five adjustment layers has the same accuracy problems as doing the same five operations sequentially. It may let you tweak them without roundtripping through further loss but the loss is already significant by that point.
Er, theoretically, no. I don't know what Photoshop's implementation is, but computing the cumulative effect of the adjustment layers will result in less error than applying them in sequence. That's part of why GEGL is being written. [Edit] I'm referring to the fact that fixed-precision arithmetic loses (well, stochastically speaking) precision with each operation. You can condense the layer effects and apply the 8-bi…
The UI is a huge problem. Whomever thought it was a good idea to make the tool window always on top with no way to minimize it, and no menus, needs to step away from working on UIs.
The 8-bit color limitation issue is well-known and has been for a long time. The solution is GEGL ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEGL ), which has been under development for a (very) long time now and is partially implemented in GIMP 2.6, the latest stable version. It is a problem, but it's important to put it into perspective: almost all monitors display 32-bit color (EDIT: or less) anyway, so if you're doing work t…
>> almost all monitors display 32-bit color anyway Actually, I was surprised to find out that this is not the case. "The inexpensive twisted nematic display is the most common consumer display type." "Also, most TN panels represent colors using only 6 bits per RGB color, or 18 bit in total, and are unable to display the 16.7 million color shades (24-bit truecolor) that are available from graphics cards." http://en.wi…
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Agh. Here's me still thinking it's still 2010. Yeah, unfortunately things really haven't changed since the review: we're still on the same major version (2.6) that we were when the review was published. (Hence the comment at the end about development seeming to have slowed a ton.)
Yes. I used GIMP exclusively between 1999 and about 2009. There was always something coming in the next version that would fix GIMP. Color profiling, single window, better text tools, etc. They never did. GIMP doesn't even bother subscribing to GNOME's HIG. It's cast adrift in the world of Linux, and after a decade of using it I'm now happily on Pixelmator on OS X.
There are several good alternatives to GIMP depending on what you're doing. GIMP is probably the best for traditional photo editing, but there seems to be more programs oriented toward illustration. In particular, I like Krita. I don't really know what the deal is with the low development interest in GIMP. I think maybe it's that Photoshop's professional niche generally isn't comprised of big fan of computers in the…
I don't really know what the deal is with the low development interest in GIMP. I think maybe it's that Photoshop's professional niche... ...use what they're used to; they're hostile to any change from the start. I don't know about the developers and why more people aren't interested in helping out (though I suspect for a lot of people its a mixture of the difficulties of getting established in a large codebase and t…
This probably doesn't help GIMP any, but I suspect it's because very few people want to hop on such a clearly troubled project. Only two core devs left? A long history of neglect and moving in the wrong direction?
I can bet if, say, Pixelmator went OSS right now, there'd be a sea of devs fighting to add features to it.
Most devs don't want to walk into a major, legacy project just to pick up the pieces, most of us would rather join something that has a solid base where the maintainers have a decent idea of what the product needs.
I would be curious to see similar posts for Octave and OpenOffice. I am really happy that they exist but "inadequate" would be a fair word to describe both. Comparing of course with Matlab and MS Office .