[ubuntu-uk] gimp

[Caroline Ford]

David Morley wrote:
> Like many others, I enjoy processing digital photos. In the old days I
> played in the darkroom, now I like to think that my computer, plus
> software, is my digital darkroom. So, what do I want to do? I want to be
> able to selectively crop whilst maintaining a fixed aspect, usually
> 7 x 5 because I print on paper 7in x 5in and I want the print to be
> borderless. In addition I want to be able to adjust brightness,
> contrast, sharpness, colour casts and to be able to remove or change
> bits of the photo to improve the end result. Not a lot is it?
>
> I would like to add that although the gimp is probably the best for
> all your needs most of what you want can be achieved in f-spot and
> digiKam for sure.  Although digiKam is the kind of defacto photo app
> for KDE it will run on ubuntu and has lot of facilites and is quite
> easy to use.  How ever the gimp is like photoshop or paintshop pro
> it's an industry strength tool that is available to everyone.
>   
If you are running with kde libraries installed I'd recommend krita the 
kde bitmap editor as well.

I really think the gimp is being oversold by the community in general. 
It is very badly designed and doesn't do 32 bit colour. The lack of 32 
bit colour led to the development of cinepaint, and the design problems 
are notorious. I read an online lecture on usability and all the 
examples of bad practice came from the gimp..

The gimp is nothing like photoshop - sorry. I think we should aim high 
but photoshop is far superior. I've never used paintshop pro but it's 
not industry standard - it's for home users. The industry standard is 
photoshop. The gimp *can* do some things if you know how - but often not 
as well. The filters in particular are really gimmicky - it feels like 
it was designed for computer scientists not artists. </rant>

One thing we really need is an equivalent of poser - i can't think of a 
program I'd recommend for people wanting to do animations for something 
such as second life. Poser makes those sort of things relatively easy.

Krita is using gimp format brushes which I think is a really positive 
step towards making a free software standard. Photoshop compatibility is 
pretty much the closed source standard. I currently make free content 
for tuxpaint and I'm pondering making content for the gimp now that 
better programs are using its standards too.

Apparently filters for the gimp don't work across versions (unlike 
photoshop which has an api i think as other programs can use photoshop 
filters.) This may explain how poor most gimp filters are - based on 
maths not art, or so it seems. KDE are making a cross application 
standard for plugins which feels really positive. The kde graphics 
people seem to have really picked up all the problems with the gimp. 
Some people seem to treat the gimp as an iconic free software program - 
i think many of these people have never used anything better. I *know* 
we can do better than that - it's a real bugbear of mine!

Caroline (secretlondon)