[ubuntu-uk] gimp

[London School of Puppetry]

On 06/02/07, Caroline Ford <caroline.ford.work at googlemail.com> 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)

I have been told that my computer is too slow to use gimp effectively. What
kind of power should I be looking at to run some of the programmes you have
been discussing here?

Caroline lsp


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London School of Puppetry
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