The GIMP Gets Ready for 2.2 478
An anonymous contributor writes "As promised, this time it didn't take another 3 years for a new stable GIMP version to be released. 8 months after GIMP 2.0 hit the road, GIMP 2.2 is almost done. The GIMP developers released 2.2-pre2 today and unless any major problems show up, the GIMP 2.2.0 release is going to follow later this month. The GIMP Wiki has a comprehensive list of new features in GIMP 2.2 and here are some screenshots of the development version."
Re:Win32 (Score:3, Informative)
Clicky for Win32 goodness [sourceforge.net]
Re:Win32 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Can I not have so many floating boxes? (Score:5, Informative)
Then drag the tools you want into the tool window. You have all the tools in one window and your image in another. It's a far superior layout to that of PS.
Re:Bitching (Score:2, Informative)
Re:More than 24bpp support (Score:5, Informative)
Macro recording needs a major redesign of the PDB but there are plans to finally address this. Nothing promised because this is entirely a volunteers' project. New features are added if and only if someone's capable and willing to put some time and effort into it.
Taskbar Grouping (Score:5, Informative)
Now what would be nice if there was an equivalent window manager hint available for Win32. Perhaps there is, and all that's missing is support from the Win32 GTK+ backend?
Re:Can I not have so many floating boxes? (Score:5, Informative)
As of Gimp 2.0, you can "dock" pretty much any window or toolbar in pretty much any other. It's pretty handy for keeping your workspace clutter-free.
Re:Can I not have so many floating boxes? (Score:5, Informative)
This is not the default because we got a couple of angry bug reports when it used to be the default in the 1.3.x series. Now what's missing is an equivalent setting that works on Win32. Perhaps one of the
Re:Tiny-fu (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Three steps before GIMP is taken seriously. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Can I not have so many floating boxes? (Score:2, Informative)
Some things that do need changing about The GIMP are the filters and brush quality, which in general give very poor results compared to those in Photoshop. Also I'd really like layer styles (at least the stroke and overlay, and maybe drop shadow, the rest can pretty much go bugger themselves) and most importantly layer sets.
Working with an image that has 30 or 40 layers (which is really easy to do when texturing 3D models) is a huge PITA without the ability to sort them into sets.
As far as the interface war goes, I'm really inclined to side with GIMP now. Their brush editing panel is a lot easier to use than Photoshop's, which has tons of features but tends to get in the way unless you put it in that tabbed thing which makes it really difficult to use at all. With GIMP the panel just drops behind the editing window so you don't have to have it in the way, which works really well particularly with focus follows mouse and auto-raise, not to mention window shading.
I think it's time that the GIMP devels turn less toward new features and more toward really getting the quality behind the ones that they do have. Because Photoshop isn't advancing very quickly anymore and is past ripe for a take down. It's just a matter of someone stepping up to do it, though beating the Photoshop marketing and mindshare will always be tough.
Re:Tiny-fu (Score:4, Informative)
Transformation preview (Score:5, Informative)
GIMP 2.2 adds the often requested preview for transformations but actually Corrective mode is a lot more versatile and much easier to use especially when it comes to correcting perspective distortions.
Re:The new GTK file chooser? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Give us 16-bit color! (Score:4, Informative)
There is USM preview.
Re:GIMP on Windows vs Linux (Score:3, Informative)
There are two main reasons for this instability under windows. The first is the irregular fashion in which GTK fixes and enhancements are ported to windows-- usually at least several weeks and occasionally several months behind the linux verions typically due to testing cycles. The second is in the gimp dev cycle itself in that (and this seems common to most windows ports of OSS to windows) it's always down to one or two people to do the rather labor intensive and unrewarding task of setting up the windows binaries and installer and keeping it inline with whatever random crap MS & co. is doing this week from windupdate to prevent us from using free (speech) software. (ahem in our work enviornment... hey it pays the bills, ok? I only run *n[i|u]x at home, I swear.)
Frankly, you should count yourself lucky that somebody bothers, and that you don't have to build from source to get a working version on ANY platform, but specifically windows as its installtion cruft is most annoying, and windows users tend to be less patient with the build process.
GIMP user interface (Score:0, Informative)
Gimp user interface is the most horrible mess I've ever seen. The most horrible in the history of computers. Even the Konrad Zuze's computer had a better interface than the current GIMP one.
With every release GIMP seems to innovate the worst interface in computer history, ever. Deproving (anti-improving) it with every release. I'd better pay 100x more $$$ for photoshop than to use gimp.
People who seriously recommend usage of gimp for grapics work should have their heads checked. No. I'm not talking about features. GIMP has many novel and good features that even photoshop does not. But the user interface nulls and voids anything the gimp developers try. Anything beyong "Hello world" is a world of pain. What's with the window fetish. Gross. I know some people have foot fetish and stuff like that. I can somewhat understand that. But window fetish. I guess gimp developers don't get out much. No windows in the basement? Your daddy abused the windows in your room when you were a kid?
And code wise. Using C to write such an application. Hello, this is not the 80s anymore! Is anyone listening? Use C++ with proper encapsulation and interfaces (ignore the other OOP crap if you want to). GTK+ itself is a disgrace. I think GTK+ has set the free and open source movement back 20 years technology wise. What a waste.
And lastly, the GTK+ people have bad breath. How about a mint?
More advanced compositing (Score:2, Informative)
This has been planned for a long while, GEGL [gegl.org] is the library that is planned for this in GIMP, by introducing a new low level library for all the core image processing a smoother path towards higher bitdepths will also occur.
There is no opposition between a graph of operations / connectable blocks [gimp.org] and a layer tree [gimp.org].
CMYK support (Score:5, Informative)
A designer needs to be able to see out of gamut colour (colour that can not print on their output device / colour space), so they can adjust their image not to change too much when printed in CMYK. You see, the CMYK and RGB colour spaces do not both contain the same set of colours, so some RGB colours cannot be reproduced in CMK and vice versa. Additionally, some output devices have even more restricted colour spaces, such as a litho press for newsprint.
Having someone's blue shirt come out purple in print is an unpleasant experience that's to be avoided. CMYK support and colour management both help avoid this. If the blue-now-purple shirt is a full page advertisment, you'll care about this when the advertiser comes a-knocking.
In general, most colour adjustment for print should be done in RGB (it's easier to control colour in RGB) but previewed in CMYK so you can get a better idea of how it'll print. In the GIMP as things stand, you can't really see how your work will print.
Calibrating your display is only half the story. If you don't have proper ICC profiles for your output device (printer / press), then it does you relatively little good. If you do have a properly calibrated display and suitable output device profiles, plus tools capable of previewing your work according to the output profile, then you may stand a chance of getting decent quality, accurate colour in print.
CMYK support is a pre-requisite for press colour management support. CMYK by its self is helpful, especially with an out-of-gamut warning, but only really comes into its own when combined with colour management.
I think you'll find, frankly, that the majority of people who know what CMYK _is_ will have a legitimate need for support for it. Most people neither know nor care.
Re:Why? -- For slicing, obviously! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Three steps before GIMP is taken seriously. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Has JPEG import been fixed? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Very Nice (Score:1, Informative)
Gimp lacks cmyk support not because of patent issues, but because of the extensive changes that need to be done in the core. Gimp was originally designed for RGB and that proves to be a problem now, but GEGL is coming to solve this and pretty much every other design issue gimp has (ex. higher bit depths and layer effects)
Some cmyk conversion algorithms have patent issues, but that's not the point at the moment...
Re:Gimp shortcuts. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:GIMP on Windows vs Linux (Score:2, Informative)
You could download some plugins to make it look more like 'normal' windows programs.
http://registry.gimp.org/person?id=3891
There's 2 things missing in the windows version:
- Windows open/save dialog (blah gtk)
- 1 window for all windows (alt-tab, task-bar)
I heard in Gimp 3 it will be included by default.
CinePaint does this (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not an answer (Score:3, Informative)
If you think this is not intuitive enough, perhaps you should suggest a better way of doing it. You seem to have a lot of time on your hands, judging from the lengthy posts.
Re:Can I not have so many floating boxes? (Score:5, Informative)
The default Gimp layout is actaully the same as the default Photoshop layout under Mac. I personally do not like the Photoshop layout under MS Windows. If I maximize the image I am working on, all the other docked tool windows are always topmost and cover parts of the image. With Gimp, I have every tool window docked into one nice main tool panel. If I need to change a tool, I just alt+tab, select the tool and then alt+tab back to the maximized image with nothing covering the image.