First Preview of GIMP 2.0 Ready for Testing 563
molnarcs writes "The first preview of GIMP-2.0 is available. It can be installed side-by-side with GIMP 1.2 - so there is no need to uninstall 1.2 to test it. According to this README, some parts (gimp-perl and GAP) were removed from the main package, and will be released as separate modules. Use the mirrors listed on the homepage to download the source code. (Also available for FreeBSD via ports)." Apparently the GIMP is finally adding CYMK support, for those of you working in the print world.
Difficult to use or? (Score:5, Interesting)
I haven't used image manipulation programs and would like to learn the basics. There are courses for Photoshop. Would it help me to take one of them?
Re:Difficult to use or? (Score:5, Interesting)
GIMP is a powerful program, I'll give it that. With the addition of CMYK you can expect some graphics folks that have been waiting to move to jump ship, but it still needs some serious work on the user interface before I expect it will become as main stream as PS or PSP.
They fixed the interface (mostly)! (Score:5, Interesting)
toolboxes are now dockable with the main toolbox, so you just have one toolbox window, and a window for the image. Also, the image window has a menu bar now.
Windows version? (Score:3, Interesting)
(and no, don't even think about saying "upgrade to linux" or something similar - some of us have to stick with the platform, some of us simply prefer it, and in no way are you going to get people to switch to Linux because it is the only thing that runs the GIMP)
If you don't mind me asking... (Score:3, Interesting)
What happens if you try to copy money with Photoshop CS?
The reason I ask is, we just bought a $25,000 Canon color printer. It might print some fairly realistic -looking- money, but it wouldn't fool anyone if they touched it, even if they had the right paper.
Our copier salesperson told us a story, that sounded like an urban legend, it went like this:
"A few years back, we sold 5 color copiers to some Arab guys in the Detroit area. They paid for them in cash, didn't want a service contract, and wanted them delivered to some abandoned warehouse. At first our VP of sales didn't want to do it, but we stood to make so much money on the deal it wasn't funny. So we did it.
Apparently, they were using them to make counterfeit money! We talked to Canon and they have a anti-counterfeitting chip inside, where if you put a $20 bill on the glass, it will lock the machine up, and notify the local Secret Service office. A half an hour later, the feds are at your door!
In theory, wouldn't you be able to buy some real printing equipment for the price of a couple high-dollar color lasers?
Re:The problem with gimp... (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, 1.3 and 2.0 have tabbed control boxes making the UI compact, intuitive and flexible, one can even shove all one's little boxes into a single window vertically with the new interface and it will be the same aweful interface that you seem to like with photoshop.
Re:Difficult to use or? (Score:4, Interesting)
They actually look a bit different but follow the same basic concept. The "tools" you get are mostly the same, their location and symbols may differ and the holy war about wether the windows are "docked" inside a framewindows or free floating is mostly a question of taste.
Therefore if you are quite at home with a modern dekstop PC you will soon feel comfortably with both systems.
So, to answer your question I would say that Gimp is easier for newbies and pretty hard for Photoshop-hardliners who have become very used to Photoshop and all its quirks.
Have you ever seen a Graphicdesigner use Photoshop on a Mac? Honestly its impressive (for me at least). They move thru the menus like a sleepwalker. Of course they would have a hard time to learn something new.
My hint: If youre a cheap (like me) with a decent knowledge of modern GUIs get TheGimp and see if it suits you. I like it and use it for all my picture edit needs!
cu,
Lispy
Help Me Out GIMPers (Score:4, Interesting)
It nice, but it can be an enormous resource hog. it also likes to occasionally lose all of the styles i've loaded or created myself.
anybody out there using both that can tell me how they differ in terms of performance or ease of use? photoshop can be damned cryptic sometimes.
also, i can read the specs all day, so if your answer is "RTFS" or "photoshop suXX0rz" then you can just shove it. I'm asking more about perceived differences.
i've got mandrake at home, so i COULD load it up there and play with it, but i HATE taking my work home. anyone using it on windows? don't flame me, i don't have a choice here
gimp is too complicated for me... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Help Me Out GIMPers (Score:5, Interesting)
I've used them both ... neither is what I would call easy, but power and ease of use don't go together. As for performance, way back when it was GIMP 0.something we ran a test on photoediting. The same digital image was edited with the GIMP and with PhotoShop to crop, remove flaws, and enhance. We couldn't tell which one had been processed by which program, so the compoany switched ot GIMP and saved a bundle.
Re:The problem with gimp... (Score:1, Interesting)
Window in window is really a horrible user interface, either you maximize the main window, and lose the whole point in multitasking and having a window system, or you resize it, making the space left for the inner windows so small, that they are useless.
But of course, Photoshop users who look at the Gimp want it to be exactly like Photoshop, before they will even consider it - just like Windows fans want Linux to be exactly like Windows before they will consider it.
The Gimp developers should NOT listen to those that wants everything to be like Photoshop, because that would alienate the people who already like The Gimp because it doesn't have the horrible window in window interface.
Re:The problem with gimp... (Score:3, Interesting)
But for those of you who like menus along the top - they're there in 1.3; for those of you who want to combine control windows - you can do this too, switching between controls with tabs. Really, from what I've used of it so far, it seems you can customise the UI pretty much any which way.
I'm still itching for gimp-2.2 or whenever they finally put high-resolution colour models back in. 8 bits per channel is a real limitation for use with scanned film: you have to be so much more careful to get the scan settings correct than if gimp could actually cope with the whole 48bpp scan.
whats wrong with software? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The problem with gimp... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm very happy that Gimp did not follow photoshop too closely on that point.
sorry to bring this up every time there's a gimp (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ready for printing? Don't think so. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Difficult to use or? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Ready for printing? Don't think so. (Score:3, Interesting)
"Made with GIMP" Galleries? (Score:1, Interesting)
I keep hearing and reading about how great the GIMP is, but I've yet to see any online galleries of GIMP made stuff that looks really professional.
Most of what I found is either very basic like a fuzzy edged Tux, or some simple text effects and gradients or art that looks it was made in Deluxe Paint in an Amiga circa 1990.
For all the junk talked about Corel Draw in the professional graphics world, Corel backed up their product with some amazing world class galleries and showcases or Corel generated art. Is there any really good collections of "Made with GIMP" art in the web?
Anonymous Joe
SVG Support?! (Score:3, Interesting)
Am I seeing this correctly? (screenshot #6 [golem.de] Does The GIMP 2.0 support SVG [w3.org]? HALLELUJAH!!! That's fantastic! I Googled around and found this article [google.com] (translated from German).
This is wonderful, but a bit strange. I once inquired around about why The GIMP was so lacking in vector art tools. Why wasn't there a tool for making basic shapes, for instance? The answer I found (by Googling around) was that The GIMP is based on the old Unix philosphy, which focuses on small, reusable components. Designing in this way made components highly portable, and separated the work of creating a GUI from the core work. The GIMP did not support vector art because that was the job of a vector art authoring tool. The GIMP was a rastor image manipulation tool. This answer didn't satisfy me, because the GIMP itself is a huge conglomerate of tools, some of which are hardly related. The GIMP is the GUI wrapper which coordinates all of the little components (which are individually accessible through script-fu). So why insist that it was only for rastor image manipulations?
OpenOffice.org [openoffice.org] Draw can import/export SVG, but I don't like the interface very well. I prefer the spartan interface of a text editor for SVG. :) But I'd be willing ot try a GIMP tool.
There was a GNU project (which apparently failed) that was trying to create a vector art authoring tool. I can't remember the name of it.
Re:The problem with gimp... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'll be honest, even if I were using GIMP in X11, and I had a viewport separated for specifically that purpose, I think I'd still prefer MDI. Part of that is that I'm used to it, but the value of my familiarity is that by this point, I've wrapped my head around the desktop-within-a-desktop metaphor, and I no longer have any troubles with it.
When I look at GIMP, I see multiple windows. For reference, my conception of a "window" is an independent process. So what I see is a process that seems to have no function except to provide little toolbar buttons. Independently, I see a process that has no function other than to list layers in some image. I see a process apparently devoted to displaying an image, and modifying it with the mouse (but within the scope of that process, there's no way to change what function the mouse performs).
In short, there's nothing subconsciously telling me that the Gimp windows are all connected; that the things I do in one will affect the state of another. Obviously I know it consciously (if from nothing else than the window icons), but it's not a fundamental realization... I always have to think about it.
Contrast Photoshop. I have a big window, with clearly defined boundaries (even if those boundaries are the maximized size of the screen). This window gets a little neuron in my head saying "here is photoshop... it's all in here". Within that window, I get image windows, which look like normal Windows XP windows. That's okay, I can tell by the fact that they're images that they're within the scope of Photoshop; and the each-window-is-a-separate-conceptual-process metaphor holds; from my perspective as the user, each image is a separate process. I don't interdependently work on two images at the same time. Then, also within the main Photoshop window, I have toolbar windows. These are not separate processes, because I'm not "processing" them. Instead, I conceive of them as subsidiary functions to Photoshop. So that little neuron telling me "Here is Photoshop" wants me to look for things that clearly "belong" to that window. So, Human-Computer Interaction experts aside, the different window decorations for the tool windows actually help me structure my workspace in my head.
Furthermore, some of the debate in that bug report had to do with the proper location and context of the menus. When I'm using a graphics editor, and I want to blur an image, what I'm really saying is "I want the program I'm using to blur the image". In Photoshop's context, the menu item for doing that "belongs" to the big Photoshop window, so my conception is accurate. In GIMP, the metaphor seems to be saying "I want this image to blur itself." Since I see Photoshop (or the GIMP) as a program, and the image as a static document, I can see the former performing an action on something else, but the latter cannot take action.
So that's my justification of MDI. It correctly extends the metaphors I have in my head to the behavior of the program. The (valid) question you should ask is, would those metaphors have developed naturally, or did my extensive use of Photoshop force me to adopt them in order to trace an outline of logic around my behaviors. I'm honestly not sure. But the metaphors don't seem illogical. They don't seem like they're really inconsistent with the actual roles of files and programs that have been established in other systems (examples: in a preferences dialog, the settings don't "change" themselves, they are changed by the program. In a word processing document, the document does not check its own spelling, the word processor checks it). So I think it's entirely possible that MDI is just a natural adaptation to the real role structures that we had conceived for our applications.
Re:Difficult to use or? (Score:2, Interesting)
Now I have to say that I'm sure some people are going to prefer Photoshop. I just never got use to it. A former co-worker of mine just loved Photoshop, but I always thought he was weird.
It wouldn't hurt to take a course, but the fact that there are courses should tell you about how difficult Photoshop is.
Font copyright (Score:3, Interesting)
where're all the DIP tools like 2D FFT and convolution matrix?
I agree. After having done some of that 2D FFT crack in a college image manipulation course that used MATLAB, I want some more in GIMP as well.
Text - can't they store vector data as well so that on comps without those fonts i can still safely resize based on vector data?
In theory, Photoshop could turn text outlines into an Illustrator vector layer, but it'd probably violate many font packages' EULAs. Vector data is copyrighted, and an embedding license (for use in e.g. PDFs) often costs extra. Remember that in this case, Adobe sells licenses for both programs and fonts, making it as schizophrenic as Sony Electronics vs. Sony Music.