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The Gimp GUI Graphics Technology

The GIMP Now Has a Working Single-Window Mode 403

An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix is reporting that The GIMP now has a working single-window mode, a long desired feature by the open-source graphics community to be more competitive with Adobe Photoshop. There's also a number of other user highlights in the new GIMP 2.7.3 release. The GPLv3 graphics software can be downloaded at GIMP.org."
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The GIMP Now Has a Working Single-Window Mode

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  • NOOOOO!!!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by MightyYar ( 622222 ) on Tuesday August 23, 2011 @09:37AM (#37178348)

    I just learned the old interface! :)

    • by tepples ( 727027 )
      It's not clear from the summary or even the article whether the new single-window mode can be turned off. Nor is it clear whether I can try GIMP 2.7.3 (development channel) for Windows on the same system as my existing 2.6.11 (stable channel) installations.
    • Don't worry, all the controls are in the window, leaving you a 150 by 150 pixel region to view your image.

  • by Pecisk ( 688001 ) on Tuesday August 23, 2011 @09:41AM (#37178412)

    Use it with care, as it is development release with rather large rewrites and therefore not suitable for production use. For this release I honestly don't care about single window mode as I'm not Windows drone - GEGL improvements and usage, new text entry mode, and lot of other small improvements interests me more.

    Official release in fall/spring (as far as I understood).

    • by isopropanol ( 1936936 ) on Tuesday August 23, 2011 @09:50AM (#37178542) Journal

      Still no 16 bit per pixel images (it can import them, but not work in 16 bit).

    • by mwvdlee ( 775178 ) on Tuesday August 23, 2011 @09:55AM (#37178612) Homepage

      For this release I honestly don't care about single window mode as I'm not Windows drone

      Only Windows can do single window mode? Linux always has either none or multiple windows?
      Otherwise how would caring about single window mode require one to be a Windows drone?

      I for one think it's nice to be able to have the screen focused on a single purpose without a distracting background or icons and windows you might accidentally click. Particularly the visually distraction of it all. Ever noticed how Photoshop has a very dull and gray interface?

      • Only Windows can do single window mode?

        Of course programs on other operating systems could do "single window mode" (i.e. MDI). However normally only programs on Windows do.

        Linux always has either none or multiple windows?

        "Single window mode" here means MDI, i.e. having a single main window with subwindows instead of multiple independent windows.

        I for one think it's nice to be able to have the screen focused on a single purpose without a distracting background or icons and windows you might accidentally clic

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        On Linux, the multiple-window thing is manageable - you just throw the Gimp windows on a separate desktop (maybe set the desktop background to something dull and grey, if you like). If you have it on the same desktop as other applications, you're going to have problems, because it's very easy to have some of the Gimp's windows at the front, while others are hidden behind other windows. You could work around that by making some of the windows always-on-top. It still sucks, but at least you can actually use t

      • by Hatta ( 162192 ) on Tuesday August 23, 2011 @12:56PM (#37181384) Journal

        Otherwise how would caring about single window mode require one to be a Windows drone?

        The only reason to require single window mode is if your window manager is broken. If you're on UNIX, you can just get a wm that works. If you're on windows, you're screwed.

        I for one think it's nice to be able to have the screen focused on a single purpose without a distracting background or icons and windows you might accidentally click.

        So dedicate a virtual desktop to the multiple window version of the GIMP and maximize the image. You don't have to see anything you don't want to see.

  • by MSojka ( 83577 ) on Tuesday August 23, 2011 @09:48AM (#37178516)

    Wake me up when I can finally use 16, 32 or 64 bits per channel, and the channels aren't restricted to RGBA or integers ...

    • by 0123456 ( 636235 ) on Tuesday August 23, 2011 @10:05AM (#37178770)

      While that would be nice, by far the worst thing about Gimp is the UI. It may be OK on a desktop with a big screen but I was trying to edit an image on my laptop recently and with all the windows splattered everywhere, most of them forcing themselves to the front all the time because, my God, the font window is so much more important than the image I'm trying to edit, I ended up with about a quarter of the screen available for editing.

      I'm really hoping that this is an improvement.

      • I'm not so sure single-window is an improvement on small screens. I remember much frustration while using Inkscape on a netbook a while ago, because its single window didn't fit in my resolution, and my window manager had strange ways of dealing with that.

        With a Gimp-like UI I would just have move the toolbars to another desktop and switched between desktops with a keyboard shortcut.

        • by Desler ( 1608317 )

          I'm not so sure single-window is an improvement on small screens.

          Not with the way Duh Gimp people implemented it, that's for sure. All they did was take the lazy route of smashing the formerly floating windows into a single window. That's really not the way to have done it. The single window mode also needed a subsequent REDESIGN of the UI. The UI now just looks like a cluttered mess.

    • by vlm ( 69642 ) on Tuesday August 23, 2011 @10:06AM (#37178784)

      Wake me up when I can finally use 16, 32 or 64 bits per channel, and the channels aren't restricted to RGBA or integers ...

      Overkill slightly? Power dynamic range from single photon starlight to laser eye damage is only about 100 dB... You can't buy 64 bit A/D converters, unless you're talking about some kind of marketing thing where you have 4 16 bit A/D in the same box. LCD monitors are very low contrast, just barely above 20 dB, paper and ink's only about 10 dB.

      There does not seem to be a practical input or output technology that can use more than 16 bits. 8 bits is probably too low. I would advocate for 16 bit, but 32 is as pointless as using scientific notation for each channel.

      • by dada21 ( 163177 ) <adam.dada@gmail.com> on Tuesday August 23, 2011 @10:18AM (#37178986) Homepage Journal

        16bits per channel is really important.

        I own some print shops, we take artist original prints and paintings and produce reproductions, a la Giclée. We scan as high res as possible, with as many bits per color channel as possible.

        Since no scanner is eprfectly color accurate, we do some post production work in Photoshop. 8bits per channel does bring some loss to saturation, contrast and gradients during post production. 16 bits per channel lessens these effects.

        Do we use 32 bits? Almost never, but it does come in handy in *rare* instances. Recently we had to scan a painting with metallic inks. 32 bits per channel actually allowed us to properly map the metallic colors to our metalic ink on our printer.

        • by QuasiSteve ( 2042606 ) on Tuesday August 23, 2011 @10:23AM (#37179068)

          32bit per channel isn't out of the realm of sanity - think computer graphics.

          But 64bit? That's pushing it more than a little.
          http://www.anyhere.com/gward/hdrenc/hdr_encodings.html [anyhere.com]

          Maybe if you wanted to capture in a single scene the darkest material ever made, in the shadow of a nuclear explosion.

          • It's not just about dynamic range, it's also about manipulating the image without degrading it due to rounding errors.

            • It's not just about dynamic range, it's also about manipulating the image without degrading it due to rounding errors.

              Indeed. And this is why many scientific images are converted to the FITS [wikipedia.org] format before processing. FITS files allow floating point representations of images, and support multiple image planes, such as multispectral images, as well as simple photometric and spectral measurements. Obviously, there need be no loss of precision in manipulating images with float or double datatypes. Software such as NASA fv [nasa.gov] will render FITS images as well as is possible with your hardware. However, they are not properly handled

          • 32Bit per channel ought to be enough for anybody.

      • That's not true, having extra bits per channel doesn't expand the dynamic range, it does however give you more values in that range than you would otherwise have. Most of the extra values end up corresponding to things that would be unrecoverable because they're too dark to be registered.

    • True, and lets not forget to add:

      Non-destructive editing.
      a 10x increase in speed of the basic engine (which will be needed for non-destructive editing)
      A macro recorder to easily record repetitive operations.
      photo-shop like history operations

      A single window mode is not the most important thing GIMP needs to compete with Photoshop

      • and add: unified transform tool.

        I think GEGL might be a good aid in points 1 and 2 you made, though. I do hope they'll be making use of it to work at the resolution on display (manipulate only a few pixels) and 'render' that to the full res in the background, and tiled management so that if I do work on a small piece of a gigapixel image, it doesn't try doing so on the full copy in RAM (and inevitably swap file), but just the tiles I'm hitting.

        In the mean time, I guess I keep adding RAM and speeding up the

    • Not to mention they spent that effort duplicating something that has already been done years ago by GimpShop [gimpshop.com]:

      "It shares all GIMP's advantages, including the long feature list and customisability, while addressing some common criticisms regarding the program's interface: GIMPshop modifies the menu structure to closely match Photoshop's, adjusts the program's terminology to match Adobe's, and, in the Windows version, uses a plugin called 'Deweirdifier' to combine the application's numerous windows in a simila

    • This is expected for GIMP 3.0, which isn't all that far away in the scheme of things. The main issue as of 2011 is not so much implementing high channel depths, it's porting the obscenely huge amount of existing tools and effects to use it. Someone long ago, in 2000, before I was allowed to drink, decided that the GIMP's core should be replaced by a high tech and elegant solution called GEGL which not only ups the bit depth and allows colour-space conversions but allows pixel's values to be re-calculated to

  • Screenshot? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23, 2011 @09:51AM (#37178550)

    You'd think a story about a major UI change would come with a screenshot or something...

  • Yes but can you draw a straight line yet intuitively without having to look up a tutorial? :)

    Yo Grark

  • This is a great step in the right direction. While I know the GIMP is far behind the current Photoshop in feature set, having a similar UI will encourage more users to give it a try. Even with the features of Photoshop years ago, the GIMP will be more useful with a decent UI than it is currently.

  • by eepok ( 545733 ) on Tuesday August 23, 2011 @10:12AM (#37178882) Homepage

    Prior to graduating, I used GIMP because I couldn't afford Photoshop and didn't want to pirate it. When I started working for the university, I used it and Open Office specifically to show low/no-funding educational organizations that they don't need to spend thousands of dollars so their workers could edit documents and make beautiful images.

    I continued to use it in different departments so the departments wouldn't have to spend the $200 university license fees.

    In all these instances, I used GIMP portable either from a thumb drive or from the desktop. No installation because no one has permissions to install programs on their computers. A couple weeks ago, though, a new campus-wide update prohibited the launching of ANY exe not explicitly installed by an IT admin. I appealed and they said to buy and use photoshop. /sigh

    • A couple weeks ago, though, a new campus-wide update prohibited the launching of ANY exe not explicitly installed by an IT admin.

      Then how do students and faculty in the computer science department test the programs that they're working on? Or are computer science courses at your university fully Dijkstra-style [wikipedia.org] courses done entirely on paper?

      I appealed and they said to buy and use photoshop.

      Have you tried making it known to the heads of all departments that IT's policy of declining to approve GIMP, which you have shown to be the least expensive program that fits the departments' requirements, is counterproductive to the university's mission?

      • by eepok ( 545733 )

        Yes. Their rationale is that they don't want to have to spend the time supporting (answering questions about and updating) another program which has such a small user-base. Of course, they said the same thing about Firefox and Thunderbird (both of which I was running that from a thumb drive for a quite a while) and now they're both supported programs.

        Funny Bit: The supported campus email clients were Outlook and Eudora up until a couple years ago. Yes, EUDORA.

        Also, I don't think that they would agree that p

        • by tepples ( 727027 )
          Do they also refuse to give you a report of what they perceive to be the potential risk of using GNU Image Manipulation Program and why they expect that risk to average over $200 per seat?
    • by xaxa ( 988988 )

      Package GIMP on a CD (i.e. copy the installer), and sell it to the university for $1. Might they then install it?

      Or, show that there's a need for you to use software that's affordable in the developing / academic / whatever world. Where I work I'm hoping "no, we must use MySQL/Postgres as our partners in African countries can't afford the higher-up-in-government mandated Oracle, and we have joint projects with them as a key part of what we do" will work. (It's worked before, apparently we're told to use s

  • People wanted an MDI like Photoshop. Instead they get an SDI. It is almost as if the GIMP devs wanted to prove they could fail at even the simplest UI design choices.

  • I know, must be the same person who goes full screen on
    EVERYTHING, even though he has a 24" screen to begin with. GIMP
    makers can stop right there and call it a one-off, heck even
    sell this on street corners, make it a really rare copy that you
    can't even download on TOR.

    Oooh, coffee's ready!

  • I love how that was the biggest Whine from the Photoshop crowd. Yet Photoshop went to floating windows design with the advent of CS2 and I did not hear them all whine to Adobe..

    Honestly, you cant make them happy. Dont even try.

  • To the 1990's Gimp.

We are Microsoft. Unix is irrelevant. Openness is futile. Prepare to be assimilated.

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