[Gllug] GIMP (was Flash and Dreamweaver going to port for Linux)

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Wed, 2004-03-17 at 10:54, Richard Turner wrote:
> On Wednesday 17 Mar 2004 10:41 am, Tethys wrote:
> > There are a few areas
> > that Photoshop arguably makes easier, and where the GIMP UI could be
> > improved. But I don't really notice them...
> 
> GIMP 2 is imminent isn't it?  I'm no artist by any stretch of the imagination 
> but that looks quite promising - are your UI issues likely to be solved with 
> that release?

GIMP2 prereleases have been in Debian unstable for a while. The UI is
immeasurably better, IMHO. The new version of GIMP is a pleasure to use,
and is a very powerful tool. There are however a few areas where GIMP
lags Photoshop, and these areas are total show-stoppers for some
professional people. The two big things I can immediately think of are:-

1/ CMYK support. As Tet mentioned CMYK support in GIMP isn't great. You
can extract CMYK from GIMP, but you get problems with colour crushing.

2/ Colourspace support. Photoshop allows you to tag an image to a colour
profile, so you can have images in SRGB or Adobe RGB, for example. The
colourspace controls how the pixel values are mapped into the
colour-cube, and affects the gamut of your images.

These are sort of interrelated, and are hard to fix. Colourspace support
is an area plagued by proprietary specs and patents, and is hard to do
right anyway. Couple that with the fact that a significant number of
users who are supposedly professional graphics people are utterly
clueless about colour management. I regard myself as a total amateur in
this area, and I find people representing themselves as professionals
who talk complete rubbish. Printers who want images at 300 dpi, but
don't seem to understand that the DPI tag in the JPEG header is
effectively meaningless, and all you need is enough pixels in your
image...

Oh, and there's also 16 bit mode, which Cinepaint (formerly FilmGIMP)
supports, but GIMP doesn't. I actually think the practical use of a 16
bit per channel editing path is of questionable value for 99.9% of
users, but people want the feature nevertheless. 

My personal bugbear is that Adobe has a great plugin for dealing with
RAW formats from digital cameras, while GIMP has nothing comparable.
This is made worse by the fact that the Adobe plugin is based on open
source code, but they've done a really good job of packaging a rather
arcane process in a nice UI, and GIMP has nothing. 

Mike.

-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug