Replacing GIMP

Kristian Rink kawazu at zimmer428.net
Sun Jul 31 11:22:33 UTC 2011


Am Fri, 29 Jul 2011 18:40:09 +0300
schrieb Jarno Suni <jarno.ilari.suni at gmail.com>:

> mtPaint has layers and it is very light.

Does it support easy loading/storing of layered images into a single
file akin to *psd or *xcf? The last time I checked this, even pinta
wasn't up for that. And even this way: Is this software an average user
needs, or is this "expert" functionality? Is "advanced image processing"
or "digital painting" a use case required to be covered by a standard
installation / live image? I'm not sure.
 

> I would add rawstudio, but it is not made for painting at all.
> Rawstudio does not modify your original photo files. Instead, it saves
> your setting for each image in hidden .rawstudio folder in image's
> folder. Processed images are saved in a folder of your choice. Batch
> processing is supported (for scaling at least).

Rawstudio and rawtherapee are apps even more specialized than gimp or
pinta IMHO as they only make sense if you (a) do RAW photography at
all, (b) do own a camera providing a RAW format supported by either of
these tools and (c) want and know how to effectively do RAW file
processing on your computer after all. In my opinion, those tools just
should be found maybe on a "graphics oriented" version of UbuntuStudio
but really don't make sense on a default one-size-fits-all installer.


> Some of these have a database of images that may help organizing
> images; you have to import images to make your application aware of
> them. You can use e.g flickr website to upload your photos, so it is
> not necessary to use a local application for that. But there is some
> advantage in sharing function, if you use tagging for your photos in
> your image management software and want to use the same tags in e.g
> flickr. IIRC there are tools specially made for exporting images to
> flickr and others.

Yes, but in my opinion, the "beauty"(?) on a default installation here
lies in an effective, easy-to-use, visually appealing tool to provide
most of this functionality in one pleasant, productive GUI. This is
where gthumb, shotwell or some of the KDE apps do pretty good these
days from my point of view.
 
> > lower memory footprint, at the expense of eventually having to work
> > with two different applications for "viewing" and "rudimentarily
> >  manipulating / sharing" images.
> 
> Well, if you have qeegie, you won't miss one of these. It can edit
> orientation of photos, but otherwise it is just a viewer that can show
> everything you want about your images fast. You don't import images by
> qeegie or others in this category.

I actually tried most of these tools including geeqie (been a heavy
gqview user a couple of years ago), but in the end, its inability to
scale or crop images (which really is a feature I excessively use)
ultimately made me give up on it. Been installing and running a whole
load of "lightweight" image viewers ever since but most of the time
ended up using gthumb again because of all these I tried, it was the
most lightweight one to allow for scaling down or cropping images
without the need to launch gimp. By now, seeing that "amount of images"
also is an interesting aspect to deal with, shotwell slowly starts
gaining my interest however. ;)

 
> I don't use Gimp or such often after I found Rawstudio, but I
> occasionally use other editors to make things I can not do by
> Rawstudio, like adding text.

I'm not all that much into RAW photography, but the few times I did so
far,  I ended up using rawstudio for doing the raw->jpg "development"
and then using gimp to post-process the whole image. From an "advanced"
point of view, I'd like to have both of them in an UbuntuStudio Visual
Edition (or the like), but not on a default desktop installation, same
as eventually I wouldn't see the need to have a multi-track audio
editor or a non-linear video processing tool bundled with such a
package. ;)

Cheers,
K.




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