Re: [Gimp-user] Re: Nobody does it better
Sven Neumann wrote: Hi, Tom Williams [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Suh-weet One feature I would like to see added is the ability to select regions of the screen when taking a screenshot, like PrintKey on Windows can. The CVS version does that already. Suh-weet! Ship it! :D Peace... Tom ___ Gimp-user mailing list Gimp-user@lists.xcf.berkeley.edu http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user
RE: [Gimp-user] Re: Nobody does it better
On Thu, 12 May 2005, Kalle Ounapuu wrote: Date: Thu, 12 May 2005 10:30:00 -0400 From: Kalle Ounapuu [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Tom Williams [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: gimp-user@lists.xcf.berkeley.edu Subject: RE: [Gimp-user] Re: Nobody does it better Here are some things I found I couldn't do with PhotoShop Elements and I'm sure someone will correct me if they are possible with the full-blown PhotoShop: *) Take screenshots. I often take screenshots of Gimp or other apps, if not the desktop. The cool thing about doing it *within* the graphics app is I can immediately scale, resize, or otherwise manipulate the image without having to use one app to take the screenshot and another to do the manipulation. On my PC with Photoshop I simply press Print Screen on my keyboard, go into Photoshop, make a new image and ctrl+v to paste the screenshot. When making a new image (e.g. File/New), the screenshot dimensions are automatically detected. If I didn't have this basic PRNT SCREEN capability working, or I wanted a more automation with multiple screenshots, I would probably use HyperSnap DX or some other screenshot program. I'd be surprised if Adobe Photoshop Elements didn't work the same as its big brother, in most cases is does. I'd be inclinded to say it is six of one half dozen of the other and in my opinion it is difficult to say which approach is better. I plan on keeping an old version of the GIMP around for a very long time, and the extra feature that allowed you to take screenshots excluding window decorations is one of the reasons for that (sure I could read the XWD man page but why would I want to?). (I'm also hoping Glade will add functionality to batch convert Glade files to PNG screenshots which would significantly change the way I do things and save me a whole lot of effort when it comes to taking screenshots.) Screenshots is one of those features where Adobe have passed off the job to the Operating System which keeps things relatively simple. The GIMP offers a few extra features but I think it is difficult to say that one approach is inherently better. (The developers of the gnome screenshot applet has command line options to take only the current window and add a delay but they are still considering how best to present that information to users in a simple straightforward way.) Seems like a lot of GIMP users are interested in taking screenshots and sharpening them... what gives? =) I try and use a flat low colour theme sharp looking theme for screenshots and save as PNG. Jpeg is almost always the wrong file format for screenshots particularly ones with any text in them. If you are taking a screenshot that contains a photograph and your theme uses a lot of colours gradients and no text you might just be able to get a reasonable result but you have already made it very difficult to get compact screenshots with that of setup. I expect that users are trying to sharpen screenshots to compensate for the inappropriate condiditions when taking the screenshot. Sven pointed out that the GIMP has support for MIDI devices which as far as I can tell is not something Adobe Photoshop supports, however I wouldn't like to assume that the MIDI support provided by the Operating system doesn't take care of this somehow. Given their supposedly Neutral Point of view the Wikipedia article on the GIMP is terribly unbalanced, and I hope someone will take the positives brought up in this conversation and maybe add them to the article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_GIMP (Later I will try and respond to the points Carol made but it was not clear what she meant and I am particularly short of time today.) Sincerely Alan Horkan Inkscape http://inkscape.org Abiword http://www.abisource.com Dia http://gnome.org/projects/dia/ Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/ ___ Gimp-user mailing list Gimp-user@lists.xcf.berkeley.edu http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user
[Gimp-user] Re: Nobody does it better
Alan Horkan wrote: [please trim the subject line in your responses] Ok. :) I think most users are frustrated by the gimp and less frustrated by photoshop and the easiest way for them to express that is to make simple comparisons rather than being able to suggest better ways to do things. Yeah, this makes sense. :) What can the GNU Image Manipulation Program do that Adobe Photoshop cannot do? Please do tell. I have recently pointed out that the gimp allows you to have files with multiple layers in Indexed Mode and photoshop does not. I would like to be able to expand on this list of things I know the gimp can do better. I would very sincerely be interested to know other things you can do with the GNU Image manipulation program that cannot be done with other software, particuarly things that cannot be done in Adobe Photoshop. Some have already posted some features Gimp has PhotoShop doesn't and/or things Gimp does PhotoShop can't do or can't do as well. I haven't spent a lot of time using PhotoShop and I installed a trial version of PhotoShop Elements to check it out. I don't know how elements differs from the full-blown version of PhotoShop. Here are some things I found I couldn't do with PhotoShop Elements and I'm sure someone will correct me if they are possible with the full-blown PhotoShop: *) Take screenshots. I often take screenshots of Gimp or other apps, if not the desktop. The cool thing about doing it *within* the graphics app is I can immediately scale, resize, or otherwise manipulate the image without having to use one app to take the screenshot and another to do the manipulation. *) Have a finer granularity of control over sharpening images. With PS Elements, I could keep clicking the sharpen more menu option to sharpen the image I had loaded. With Gimp, I can dial-in the precise amount of sharpening I want using the sharpen filter. I didn't think to compare the number or types of sharpening filters that came with Gimp vs PS Elements. *) The ability to perform manipulations on multiple images at once. I was running an effects filter on a rather large image while I had 3 or 4 other images loaded. I'm running on a Pentium II 350MHz machine w/ 256MB of RAM and given my application mix, I had at least double that (if not more) allocated, meaning I was definitely using swap. I'm running on Linux. This one filter was taking its time to run, given the size of the image, and I was able to start other filters and work on the other images while that first filter was running. I was also scanning images while running the filter, etc. I don't know what kind of simultaneous multi-image processing capabilities PS has. I didn't think to try this with PS Elements, unfortunately. Those are three things I have personal experience with, at least with Gimp. :) Peace... Tom ___ Gimp-user mailing list Gimp-user@lists.xcf.berkeley.edu http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user
Re: [Gimp-user] Re: Nobody does it better [was Re: when even free advertising fails]
On Wed, May 11, 2005 at 11:28:39PM +0100, Alan Horkan wrote: On Wed, 11 May 2005, Olivier Ripoll wrote: * The availability of three scripting languages, one of them being actually easy to understand (guess which ;) ) I recognise how usefult this functionality is and I make use of it myself but sorry to be pessimistic, compared to using command line tool or the automation tools in Photoshop and the ability to record Actions/Macros/Scripts in Photoshop I cannot consider this an outstanding feature of the gimp. I had to learn the various scripting languages but even to people who already know the languages I cannot imagine that is easier than saving a list of actions from the Undo history or any similar Macro Recorder. it is a strength that photoshop users have, to only be able to write for one app. those poor unfortunate gimp users who can write for several applications after going through that grueling task of learning a syntax. gimp will never be as good as photoshop and gimp-users simply will never be very strong since they can spread their knowledge around to so many things. gah! python and perl both work directly at the os level!! when will we learn! carol ___ Gimp-user mailing list Gimp-user@lists.xcf.berkeley.edu http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user
RE: [Gimp-user] Re: Nobody does it better
Here are some things I found I couldn't do with PhotoShop Elements and I'm sure someone will correct me if they are possible with the full-blown PhotoShop: *) Take screenshots. I often take screenshots of Gimp or other apps, if not the desktop. The cool thing about doing it *within* the graphics app is I can immediately scale, resize, or otherwise manipulate the image without having to use one app to take the screenshot and another to do the manipulation. On my PC with Photoshop I simply press Print Screen on my keyboard, go into Photoshop, make a new image and ctrl+v to paste the screenshot. When making a new image (e.g. File/New), the screenshot dimensions are automatically detected. If I didn't have this basic PRNT SCREEN capability working, or I wanted a more automation with multiple screenshots, I would probably use HyperSnap DX or some other screenshot program. Seems like a lot of GIMP users are interested in taking screenshots and sharpening them... what gives? =) *) Have a finer granularity of control over sharpening images. With PS Elements, I could keep clicking the sharpen more menu option to sharpen the image I had loaded. With Gimp, I can dial-in the precise amount of sharpening I want using the sharpen filter. I didn't think to compare the number or types of sharpening filters that came with Gimp vs PS Elements. Photoshop's Sharpen filters do need updating. They have been like that for years I think. It's strange that you get no dialog when doing the basic Sharpen. It just runs with whatever defaults it has. ___ Gimp-user mailing list Gimp-user@lists.xcf.berkeley.edu http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user
[Gimp-user] Re: Nobody does it better [was Re: when even free advertising fails]
Alan Horkan wrote: [please trim the subject line in your responses] What can the GNU Image Manipulation Program do that Adobe Photoshop cannot do? Please do tell. I have recently pointed out that the gimp allows you to have files with multiple layers in Indexed Mode and photoshop does not. I would like to be able to expand on this list of things I know the gimp can do better. Hi Alan, * There is the possibility to use Gimp as a server like for http://www.flamingtext.com/ http://cooltext.com/ I guess this will not be considered a big plus untill google introduces some similar tool. * The availability of three scripting languages, one of them being actually easy to understand (guess which ;) ) * I seem to remember that it was mentionned that Gimp can load some pictures with large dimensions (like 1*N N being very large) while PS fails (I am not talking about N*M, where N and M are big here). I think a scientific person add raised this point last year. * The recent possibility to use gimp without interface. * The possibility to use it on *nix systems. This is useful for companies using linux farms. * 64 bits ready ! Sure, some of the points apply to niche markets. But CYMK is mostly useless for most personal use (web, home printing) and so also relates to some small market share (same for 16bits per channels and floating points). Best regards, Olivier. I would very sincerely be interested to know other things you can do with the GNU Image manipulation program that cannot be done with other software, particuarly things that cannot be done in Adobe Photoshop. No need to go into the obvious well known issues of price, and Free Software which although important have been discussed to death many times before and are usually given as the best reasons for using the gimp (they are very good reasons). - Alan H. ___ Gimp-user mailing list Gimp-user@lists.xcf.berkeley.edu http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user
Re: [Gimp-user] Re: Nobody does it better [was Re: when even free advertising fails]
On Wed, 11 May 2005, Olivier Ripoll wrote: Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 10:50:34 +0200 From: Olivier Ripoll [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: gimp-user@lists.xcf.berkeley.edu Subject: [Gimp-user] Re: Nobody does it better [was Re: when even free advertising fails] Alan Horkan wrote: [please trim the subject line in your responses] What can the GNU Image Manipulation Program do that Adobe Photoshop cannot do? Please do tell. I have recently pointed out that the gimp allows you to have files with multiple layers in Indexed Mode and photoshop does not. I would like to be able to expand on this list of things I know the gimp can do better. Hi Alan, * There is the possibility to use Gimp as a server like for http://www.flamingtext.com/ http://cooltext.com/ I guess this will not be considered a big plus untill google introduces some similar tool. Running the gimp headless is definately a big deal, thanks for reminding me of this functionality. * The availability of three scripting languages, one of them being actually easy to understand (guess which ;) ) I recognise how usefult this functionality is and I make use of it myself but sorry to be pessimistic, compared to using command line tool or the automation tools in Photoshop and the ability to record Actions/Macros/Scripts in Photoshop I cannot consider this an outstanding feature of the gimp. I had to learn the various scripting languages but even to people who already know the languages I cannot imagine that is easier than saving a list of actions from the Undo history or any similar Macro Recorder. * I seem to remember that it was mentionned that Gimp can load some pictures with large dimensions (like 1*N N being very large) while PS fails (I am not talking about N*M, where N and M are big here). I think a scientific person add raised this point last year. Good point. With the right configuration the tile based architecture allows user to manipulate some very large files. * The recent possibility to use gimp without interface. This seems almost the same as running it as server. * The possibility to use it on *nix systems. This is useful for companies using linux farms. This is already well known and I was hoping people would concentrate on user level features and maybe try and make direct comparisons and give reasons to use the gimp on platforms that also have Photoshop available. * 64 bits ready ! Based on comments Sven has made I am not sure how much difference it would really make, but again with the source code freely available there is a lot more potential. Sure, some of the points apply to niche markets. But CYMK is mostly useless for most personal use (web, home printing) and so also relates to some small market share (same for 16bits per channels and floating points). With the recent take-over of Macromedia by Adobe I took a closer look at Macromedia Fireworks. The gimp makes many things possible but fireworks deliberately focusses on particularly tasks and streamlines the process of creating certain types of graphics. There is not much a talented artists cannot do with mspaint, what is important is how convenient and easy a program makes it achieve common tasks, at least in my not so humble opinion. Best regards, Olivier. Thanks for the information, sometimes it is all too easy to forget exactly what the strengths of the gimp are. Sincerely Alan Horkan ___ Gimp-user mailing list Gimp-user@lists.xcf.berkeley.edu http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user
