Comment by allendoerfer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by allendoerfer | Hacker News Reader

I have to open a .psd three times a year and do not like to pay for PS for this or even install it, since I use Linux, so it would be great if the .psd handling would be further improved.

I really have no other wishes for Gimp aside from stability and performance:

- I learned the Gimp hotkeys first

- I know the menu structure around filters and so on is weird compared to PS, but I know it

- I like selecting, zooming and scrolling better in Gimp, somehow I have the feeling of more control and find it easier to make something pixel-perfect while getting sent non pixel-perfect .psds

- I like the old multi-window interface, even though it took me some time in the beginning to grasp it

- the text tool is fixed now

Maybe the only thing, which sounds interesting to me are the advanced and non-destructive layer options and transformations (or whatever these features are called in PS), but then again: I know my way around Gimp and if the PS layers were fully supported it would already be fine for me.

Edit: Have seen another comment about non-destructive editing and found out, that it is on the roadmap for 3.2 after GTK3 in 3.0. So my hopes are that this way the PS counterparts will be supported, too.

You might enjoy this rant: https://bitbucket.org/WAHa_06x36/old-xee/src/fe1cec107972603...

I guess, that's what you get for supporting a file format through the years in a backwards-compatible manner.

But I also believe, that over the time technical debt like this is a huge advantage for the company, because it fences off competitors entering the domain through integration.

Another example is the Adobe PDF spec. In my opinion a thoroughly overdesigned document structure where it's nearly impossible to implement every possible way of positioning an element. Trust me, i've seen alot of differently produced PDFs and it feels like each one of them is a unique snowflake.

The only one who profits is Adobe which provides the only Reader supporting every feature imaginable...

As a photographer, Lightroom changed everything for me. The need for Photoshop was suddenly close to nil. Now I try to fire up Affinity Photo whenever I would have fired up PS.

As an open source alternative to LR I can really recommend Darktable. In many ways it is even more powerful than LR, but the usability and raw conversion engine sometimes lacks. Noise reduction and color handling is not quite up to par with LR.

Agreed on both Lightroom and Darktable. I'm finding I actually prefer Darktable's UI, and the fact that there's a manual which describes what all the tool parameters do places them a step above a lot of open source programs.

Real photographer, old shool photographer, don't edit the picture after, if you need to edit it it's was not a good picture :-)

Tell that to Ansel Adams. Or is he not old school enough for you?

Yeah, Ansel was actually kind of famous for the way he would produce different versions of famous images over the years.

Then, of course, there were guys like Jerry Uelsmann, doing 'photoshop' effects in a darkroom equipped with 14 enlargers.

Most of what you'd want to do with Darktable is more akin to developing your picture, rather than editing it.

Look at it this way: your camera captures a lot more information than a JPG can hold. Either you let the camera decide which bits to keep, or you shoot RAW and use a tool like Darktable to help you decide for yourself.

And because I know what my tooling is capable of, I can tweak the first stage (setting up the camera to capture the image) bearing in mind the way I want to process it, to get a better picture than I'd otherwise be able to take in that context.

Of course, I could also set up the camera to have the right levels of saturation, sharpening etc. before taking the picture, but the camera controls aren't nearly as fine-grained and I don't have time while shooting to tweak and re-shoot every image several times.

That's a common misconception. People always manipulated photos. From the very beginning. It just was more constrained and required a different set of [technical] skills when it was still done in a darkroom, using multiple exposures or even working on the negative directly.

http://petapixel.com/2013/09/12/marked-photographs-show-icon...

The photo itself is a manipulation of what you're actually seeing. You play with your f/iso/speed to get what you want. So long as you haven't lost any data (over/underexposed), you can further develop it in Lightroom. If you're capturing in RAW, this is an essential part of the process.

So your argument is you limit your manipulation to just the camera, with its crappy screen and limited ability to show you color calibrations.

There is something to say about that as an art form. Some people use pin-hole cameras. Some people still use film. That's fine if that's what you're going for. But just because you load a photo into software doesn't mean you're editing it any more than just flipping those settings on your camera.

What a silly comment.

By that criteria Ansel Adams, Paul Strand, and just about every famous photographer ever are not "real photographers".

It's even more silly with regard to digital photography because raw sensor data is just a bunch of numbers that have to be interpreted and converted to an image somehow. There's no such thing as an unprocessed digital photograph. Either a person is shooting RAW and tweaking the conversion themselves, or the camera is doing it behind the scenes using a preset interpretation of the raw data.

Are you serious? Photographers have been manipulating pictures in the dark room since forever!

>>Real photographer, old shool photographer, don't edit the picture after, if you need to edit it it's was not a good picture :-)

I guess you're too young to have ever worked in a 'real' 'old skool' darkroom then?

Where do you think the phrases like "mask" and "burn in" that your graphics software uses came from?

What about paying the GIMP guys then?

Definitely. It would be awesome if they would use something like bountysource.com or any other way to pay directly for developer time, even better so if you can specify a broad project you want to support. I like how pypy is doing it.

At the moment their donations page says, that you can support some conference. While it is a nice way to give something back, it is not a cause that gets me excited about donating or telling others to donate.

You can try Krita (www.krita.org) with PSD.

Gimp and Inkscape are the only free or open source graphics tools that have something resembling a secure download process.

Krita serves their website over https and the download over http from some mirror. Can't find any trace of a hash on their site either.

Why don't you use your distribution's packages manager to install it?

A relative was using MS Paint to draw some simple floor plan diagrams and asked whether there's any better tool available.

Gimp is actually overfeatured for what they need, but that was the only thing I found which I could install with a good enough certainty that I won't infect their computer with malware.

Gimp is actually not that good for drawing. I guess that if simplicity is needed, Paint.NET (www.getpaint.net) is a good option.

EDIT: I mean drawing geometrical stuff. Of course it's good for general drawing.

I strongly advise against Paint.NET. Besides the lack of download security they have huge "download" ads leading who knows where on the front page and a tiny download link.

They are knowingly using this dark pattern to make ad money which is too bad, because as you say the app is really good.

You could install it with Ninite?

Inkscape?

I ended up installing that too, but to be honest it's much too complicated and not exactly a good fit for floor plans.

I just remembered that there's also Dia (diagram editor), I might give that one a try.

I'm afraid I don't see that Gimp is any more suitable. Far less, actually.

Krita is not malware...

FWIW, files.kde.org does support HTTPS as well.

And if you press the details link you get all the info you could want:

    Filename: Krita-3.0-Alpha-master-e5109c2-x86_64.AppImage
    Size: 85M (88670208 bytes)
    Last modified: Mon, 11 Apr 2016 07:27:01 GMT (Unix time: 1460359621)
    SHA-256 Hash: 5d6574f750a188f67548d965ce6a8abd4d33479bc64f88130e545250e179a0e1
    SHA-1 Hash: bf969c7ce56aac754eb84a2123caa9cbf4174884
    MD5 Hash: ee0b82e82a98086dccad7f1344888a1c

The hashes only seem to be visible over http (no details link over https).

files.kde.org is also accessible over HTTPS (but use a package manager if possible).

While you're right, Krita publishes checksums for their downloads:

https://krita.org/en/item/krita-3-0-released/

Thanks, but I don't understand why they would put them in the release announcement instead of the download page. Everyone wanting to download this software will head straight to the download link and won't jave time to hunt for blog posts.

Also sha1 should be avoided nowadays, but at least it's not md5...

Good enough for verifying integrity in transit ("the line didn't mangle any bits"). Without a side channel, that's all the hashes are good for (if someone can get a rogue version on a site, they can also change the hashes displayed on the same site).

Well, the reason is that I went crazy from people mailing me "what are those numbers? what should I do with them? They are scary!!!" We had to make the download page as simple as possible -- and I still get mails from people who cannot figure out how to download Krita. Several, per week.

If you're the site maintainer please consider adding a link to the KDE https downloads or a link to the checksums somewhere on the download page, in the source code tab or even at the bottom.

I would say you're overly paranoid, but I do fear one day clicking on the wrong site.

That being said, we have to trust something.

I am not paranoid, the distribution security of most software projects is weak. It is feeble.

When I need to install something on Windows (be it drivers or apps), I keep marvelling: the process has remained identically crude for two decades, all the way since Win95: download some executable from any old website, no verification possible (yeah, there's a MD5 hash - on that same website), and hope it won't screw up the system (or at least not too much; btw there's no clean way to uninstall). Repeat step for step for every package, manually clicking through ten steps in the executable (where the only one that actually matters is the license - when was the last time you wanted to install somewhere else than C:\Program Files?).

Don't even think about "give me this, this, this, and this; check that it is the right version from a trusted source; make it so!" (PortableApps can do that, so it's demonstrably possible, even on Windows)

Progress? We don't need no steenking progress! Package managers are for lusers who prefer clicky GUIs over Glorious Hard Work and spelunking in the dark corners of the net! (How that ever got pushed as user-friendly?)

Well Windows 10 finally includes all the tools for package management out of the box. Now they just have to convince people to use them.

Wonderful!

AFAIK not for Win32 apps.

Out of the box PackageManager should support anything that can be packaged as an .msi file and it lets you write plug-ins to handle just about any other type of method for packaging and distributing apps.

At the moment it's however largely a case of Microsoft quietly developing a quite powerful tool and then going out of their way to not tell anybody about it. Microsoft has also not shown any interest in developing and supporting their own general software repo (I guess they don't want to compete with their app store). So we've basically got to wait for third party developers to fill the cap. Fortunately the people behind chocolaty are working on this and have said they'll have something ready by Summer 2016.

You need Chocolatey in your life: https://chocolatey.org

It's great if you're forced to used Windows as your development machine.

And soon Chocolatey will be seamlessly integrated with Windows 10 Package Management tools

What you're describing is either:

1. Chocolately (https://chocolatey.org/), which most people don't know about, or

2. The Windows Store, which I hope never catches on.

How is installing on linux any different when your One True Package Manager does not provide what you need? Usually it is "here use this third-party repository which is just some guy providing executables" or "build from source".

What's worse is when your One True Package Manager creates a broken package because the packager has no clue what they are doing. Debian and SSH ring any bells? Would using an exe provided by the developers have that problem?

Ah, the "but Linux sucks too" tactic! Of course it does, so does everything. In the past 10 years, I had to build from source about 50 times, and had 2 broken packages - while installing thousands (plus dependencies, not counting that). Not perfect - but way better than hunting for each and every single one.

On a side note, it is interesting how many incredible projects started from KDE (and how few survived or at least gained major traction): KMail, KDevelop, KOffice, not to mention Konqueror - KHTML / Webkit lives on, but Konqueror users are very rare. Does anyone know why this is happening?

Don't want to diminish KDE, but how is that incredible considering that for each of these there is a much more popular GTK or even Gnome project software?

Hmm, is there?

KHTML/WebKit: I don't think the GTK/Gnome folks ever wrote a browser engine. KDevelop: Did the GTK/Gnome folks ever write a significant IDE with a code model? Krita: It's focused on painting/illustration and doesn't directly complete with Gimp. Among artists doing this Krita is likely more popular than Gimp now, since the latter isn't even in the running. (Support for MyPaint brushes is progress on that front, though painters want many other features.)

For KMail/Kontact there's Evolution, but arguably neither ever became really popular if you compare them to, say, Thunderbird.

I think it's because Qt has traditionally had a pretty weird dual- or tri-licensing model: https://www.qt.io/faq/#_Toc453700684 which resulted in less adoption by developers because of the viral nature of the GPL.

IIRC, it used to be that even the core Qt libs were GPL (unless you paid for a commercial license), while now most (but still not all) libs are also available under the LGPL.

GTK has always been plain LGPL 2. Nothing scary.

Don't forget Reconq web broswer. It was pretty faster compared against Firefox and Chrome, and was using WebKit. Sadly, died...

There is still FUD about the licensing, decades on. And a lot of Linux vendors make Gnome the default - perhaps partly because it's less configurable and so easier to support, but partly it does seem to be this weird prejudice. I wonder whether it's a US/EU thing - most of KDE seems to be developed in the EU and the major European distros (which is only really SuSE these days now that Mandriva doesn't exist any more) seem to have it as default, whereas the American distros seem to prefer Gnome.

KDE is resource hog. And it segfaults pretty often. I used it for year, but I'm returning to something GTK based. (not GNOME, of course)

Not my experience at all (except on Ubuntu, which seem to somehow mess up all their KDE packages)

It's slowly coming back. Wireshark used QT in its latest release. Some people are switching back due to GTK3, which is...eh...just eh.

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