Re: gimp

[Steve Holdoway]

Christopher Sawtell wrote:
On Mon, 16 May 2005 18:27, Volker Kuhlmann wrote:
 

Total poppycock.
     

What you write? ;)
   

No. 
 

That, like hundreds of other facilities, is available as an external
plugin.
     

Having to hunt around the internet to add basic functionality to a core
work tool is unprofessional.
   

You don't "hunt around the Internet" in order to install the extentions. You 
go to the defined repository. It's at: http://registry.gimp.org

There are many hundreds of extention plugins, and if more of them were 
included in the basic distribution file you'd be whinging about bloated 
downloads.

 

The major disadvantages are that gimp has is that the colours are only 8
bits per channel. This puts it out of contention for high quality
pre-press work.
     

See, also not good enough for professionals ;)
   

It all depends on what the professional does.
For web work the gimp is fully competitive with the closed source stuff.
For high end pre-press glossy magazine work it isn't, but it is not intended 
for that use.

 

Where you will see that the gimp has been accepted by the movie industry
with alacrity.
     

The movie industry... television, sounds like low-resolution and bad
picture quality to me, comparing with photography here of course.
   

FilmGimp / CinePaint / Glasgow all of which are improved derivative works of 
the gimp all use 32 bit colour resolution.

 

Btw the user interface has improved no end in gimp 2. And some of the
colour tools are superb! Adjusting colours by draggable curves was last
available in xv 10 years ago.
   

draggable curves have been in gimp for many years.
The other gimp disadvantage is that in order to get the breadth of 
functionality they wanted in the limited time available, the original authors 
used a special interpretive language for most of the implementation. This 
made gimp unbearably slow on big ( print ) images. Now that gigahertz 
machines are the norm this serious is no longer the problem it was when the 
gimp was first released 10 years ago.

--
C. S.
 

Just as an aside... I did a lot of work a long while ago on the image 
processing systems for the bodyscanner for Philips Medical Systems. A 
'linear' scale to be seen with the naked eye going from black to white 
can be made up of about 110 steps - after that the adjacent steps become 
indistinguishable. That scale went through a lot of reds to get that 
many discrete colours.

So when people tell me that 2^24 colours isn't enough, then I just 
wonder how big a toy they really want. The eyes just aren't up to it.

Steve