GIMP 2.9/2.10 Feature Preview | Hacker News Reader

GIMP 2.9/2.10 Feature Preview

gimpusers.com

155 pointsdiminish64 comments

Floating point images have been something I've been waiting for for awhile.

For a game engine I'm working on, I need floating point textures to represent emissivity (how much light an object might reflect...anything greater than 1.0 means the object is generating its own light, think a neon sign).

Without the ability to draw floating point textures, I've been limited to using regular 8-bit monochrome (which maps 0-255 to 0.0-1.0 in the engine), and having a special "multiplier" pixel in the corner of the image, used for multiplying the 0.0-1.0 value, so I can have, for example, emissivity of 3.0.

Floating point images eliminate the need for all of this :)

how does it compare in size though? why can't you use an image with 3 channels instead to achieve the same goal (avoiding inaccuracies)?

Yeah, Arelius pointed out that the single channel float textures are 4 times bigger than a single channel signed byte texture. I think the convenience of using a float image in gimp though, is that I can easily draw the levels that I want in the texture in a single channel, vs trying to draw the levels in multiple channels.

Could an alpha layer be used for this purpose?

You could but it would waste space. In my setup, I only need a single pixel to serve as the multiplier, but if I added a whole new layer, that's width x height more pixels.

Do keep in mind that a floating point buffer is 4 times the size of a normal buffer.

And an alpha mask can be gray scale, or even one-bit color.

Not that this couldn't be a good use of floating point textures for other reasons (A full HDR pipeline for example) But it sounds that using floating point textures is actually the real waste of space.

Could they rip off the layer effects feature from Photoshop? There is a plugin for it but it's honestly pretty useless. It takes forever to generate the effects, you can't edit them afterwards and they are on a separate layer.

They needed to implement GEGL for all image operations, now that this is done, we might actually see "live" effects on layers in future.

well, all it takes is for someone to tackle it, seeing as how the project is open source.

What I really want to see on GIMP would be a rip-off of content aware fill. I'd really like to have a look at how it's done. Obviously I can't look at Adobe's code.

http://linuxers.org/article/adobes-content-aware-fill-huh-gi...

try resynthesizer

Who is the target user for GIMP? Professionals are almost all heavily invested in Adobe and it's interface is much too hard for a casual user?

We use it at the agency I work at. The developers all use Linux (2 as 'main os', 2 via VMs on their windows 7 & os x boxes). We use GIMP to take what are finished designs produced in Photoshop CS6 & CS3 and make the assets for our sites and applications out of it from the designers exported PNGs.

One of us (the windows user) has a copy of CS6 which if needs be he can use to make any minor amends before exporting out PNGs etc. If a designer has forgotten to export out a certain layer on it's own too - that sorta thing. For everything that _we_ need to do - (eg cropping out, making sprites, minor color amends, some blending) it is absolutely perfect and just as good as Adobes offering in that regard.

I would go so far as to say the selection tools are actually _much better_ than in photoshop. I find selection transformation a lot more intuitive and easier to do in Gimp.

As an added bonus we've saved ourselves at least £3,000 at last count on license fees. I have also found as a side affect that because we can't open the PSDs there and then (usually), we're more likely to get totally complete assets from the design team that we can get to work with. Beforehand we'd just get dumped on with several PSDs as is.

We have applied a similar workflow when it comes to office documents too - making heavy use of Libreoffice for all but a few users that really do need to edit and send out docx "exactly".

Finally, for what it's worth I have never seen the big deal about it's UI either. It follows the same sort of paradigms as many graphics tools so I've never saw that as a barrier to use. I appreciate you aren't suggesting this at all, I always saw the "Gimp is for amateurs or is rubbish compared to Photoshop" argument as arrogance or snobbery. Especially in office environments - I think (some) people associate the cost of the PS license with a validation of their skill.

For an agency this seems insane. Saving £3,000 seems like nothing, it's like a professional photographer buying a point & shoot camera for a pro job. Incompatibility with clients and numerous other inadequacies of GIMP would make saving Adobe licensing fees seem like a really bad business decision to me.

I can't imagine any designer I know joining a design agency that didn't provide professional tools, which in today's world means a fast Mac, a big cinema display and the Adobe CS.

Whoa, slow down a bit. They're not talking about taking Photoshop away from designers.

The developers are using GIMP to do simple cropping and amendments to prepared images. GIMP works just as well as Photoshop for this simple use case. In fact, the post says that they find it better than Photoshop in some regards. Furthermore, some of the developers are using Linux, on which Photoshop is not available.

So, given that they're using a tool that works for them, that they like, and that runs on their choice of operating system, what's insane about that?

From what the post implies, the designers are still using Photoshop. They're the ones who need it - or think they need it - or are used to it and happy and productive with it, which is perhaps the most important consideration.

Photoshop's PNG export is inferior. It should be one of the best things it can do given the popularity of it for web design. Whatever tinypng.org is doing both PS and GIMP need it badly.

Also, there are things like creating seamless textures, tiling them that is easier in GIMP. Animated gif import / export is pretty easy to do too. If only GIMP could do smart object work and live layer styling, I'd be all over it. But I do use it as a professional designer / developer for specific use cases. Another designer and I had a discussion. Basically since CS2, there hasn't been a valid reason to upgrade Photoshop really other than gimmicky stuff.

I used GIMP the same way up until recently. It worked for me, but switching to Photoshop has sped up a ton of common workflow -- slicing an image, turning on and off groups of layers, and similar. Also I've found that some small tweak to the PSD is almost inevitably needed, and it's worth the cost of Photoshop not to have to wait for an updated design from someone else.

I don't want to just hate on open-source graphics software - a lot of amazing work has gone into GIMP, it had fun things like content-aware resizing before Photoshop did, but Adobe has 1000X the resources to invest in usability and they've used those resources well.

In 2.8 at least, turning on and off groups of layers is a single click on the "eye" icon of the layer group: http://docs.gimp.org/2.8/en/gimp-layer-groups.html

I think Gimp can do the slicing with a plugin. There's a lot of stuff it can do that the gimp pros don't advertize, or the instructions are linux only or just difficult to lock down.

Me neither but I was talking about developers here :) Saving £3,000 isn't much in the scheme of our annual turnover, that is true. However that £3,000 didn't need to be spent on these licenses - instead it can (and did) pay for europython tickets & flights, spinning up & down aws servers, sublime licenses, the odd team lunch and beers on a friday afternoon.

I'm a fan of saving money wherever we can. For what its worth I've lost track of how much we've spent on our photographers studio/rig/software. We're def. not adverse to spending money on software here and all the designers get a crispy fresh creative suite when it comes out.

As linux, foss friendly devs though GIMP fits perfectly into our workflows and in 3 years of "we no longer need to use photoshop" we've had minimal problems with it. For those instances we really do need to consult and work off the PSD our one copy suffices to do what we need before getting back into GIMP.

My guess: Casual users who don't think the interface is too hard and people liking free software. I seem to fall into both groups.

But more generally - a lot of people I know which are starting out with game programming work with The Gimp. Also pretty much anyone who wants to learn serious image manipulation, but not willing to either make illegal copies or spend hundreds of dollars on such an application (don't know, maybe that's not much money for you, but for most people it is a lot). And certainly people on Linux where PS simply isn't available.

No. Gimp recently - or by now some time ago - defined their target group and work with a HCI-expert to get the software in shape for them. The target users are pretty much professional users (or "for intense use", like they put it), see http://gui.gimp.org/index.php/User_Scenarios and http://gui.gimp.org/index.php/Vision_briefing.

Casual users are no longer the target.

This might be true, but my daughter (13) uses Gimp to draw. But then again, she might be an expert because she is recording a 'Lets draw Mangas' thread on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhMwfWFG5GI

She might very well be. Using Gimp for content creation for some time could make her an expert (especially a fast learning and seemingly quite intelligent kid). Though painting itself isn't the main usecase gimp seems to want to support.

Though like so often: Only because a software wants to support a specific target doesn't mean it will be completely unusable for doing everything else.

Funny, my daughter's 13 too and constantly drawing manga characters with Gimp (http://julieflorac78.deviantart.com/gallery/). I've just bought her a wacom tablet, that's much easier.

funny^2 - she just got a wacom tablet for christmas :-). did you get the wheel to work with gimp?

No, but AFAIK it doesn't work yet with Linux. The other buttons work out of the box, though.

Ah ok - she is on win7. doesn't work either, though.

let her try mypaint! it is made for drawing and rocks.

What do you do with the rocks?

Paint.

Target or not, that's what I am and I've been using Gimp for all my photo work for over 10 years.

Thanks, I had not heard about that before. Although a little sad, as I know a lot of casual users using it right now (even including some young kids). But I guess at least the "Creating Original Art" can be seen as targeting people like game developers.

Casual users (including kids) have been creating art with Photoshop for some time now.

At any rate, there are multiple free software packages that can do the "creating art" job at least as acceptably as GIMP. Consider MyPaint or Krita.

MyPaint and Krita are actually both great programs for digital painting. David Revoy is an artist who uses both (and also created one of the brush sets for MyPaint) and his work is worth looking at: http://www.davidrevoy.com/2-portfolio.html

He has a number of tutorials available on his site too: http://www.davidrevoy.com/4-tutorials.html

I believe he also uses Gimp with the Gimp Paint Studio presets for some things: http://code.google.com/p/gps-gimp-paint-studio/

I would like to point out that the Gimp now has a single window mode that is available under the windows menu. This makes the interface magnitudes better, but there is still a lot of work that needs to be done.

The Gimp definitely doesn't meet the needs of a professional, but it is still very powerful. If you have some reasonable knowledge of how to use it or Photoshop you can do some amazing things. I think it does a very good job of meeting the graphics needs of the opensource community and people who need the power of an editor like Photoshop, but don't need all of the new advanced features of Photoshop and don't want to be a pirate.

Personally I love the Gimp now that I am used to it. Even when I had Photoshop (acquired through my school) I found myself using the gimp instead. I just wish it was more polished, the fact that brushes are still so clumsily implemented is really frustrating. Oh well, if I really want to paint something I will use MyPaint, which is an amazing project that has developed a million times faster than the Gimp.

Thank you! How had I not noticed that?

In Windows GIMP refuses to show up in front of other windows. I must minimise everything else until it shows up. Single window mode works perfectly.

This matches me and my wife. Most other free image editors fall short in some useful way or another, and Photoshop is obscenely expensive for amateur uses. It's worth spending a bit of time learning the pieces you want to use to avoid the endless frustration in other tools - the rest can basically be ignored, unless you really want to learn the 'gestalt' of the whole thing.

It also helps motivate us that the vast majority of free image editors on OSX are infinitely inferior to e.g. Paint.NET.

For amateur uses on OS X I've used Acorn and Pixelmator, until I finally switched to Adobe's Creative Cloud.

There's also amateur pro - usually people using it for a hobby. And of course people on Linux that don't want to switch for various reasons.

I'm an amateur[1] and I use rawtherapee to process my RAW images to JPG, then the gimp to process the JPGs a little.

I've been using Linux since 96, or so, and GIMP is about the only image editor I've ever used.

[1] - http://edinburgh-portraits.com/

For family photos the GIMP is perfectly adequate, overkill even, editing on an iPad would give you just as good results. It's only if you need a professional workflow that the Adobe tools would be necessary.

I don't know if I am a target user, but I "photoshopped" my LinkedIn photo (removed some stuff from the background, touched up my hair, made it black and white) with it. Worked well, and a I didn't want to buy a Photoshop license to do it.

I use it all the time to create, reformat, and resize images for websites. I don't need to do that frequently or elaborately enough to require Photoshop, and Gimp does a fine job. It may be hard to use for casual users, but not for technical users. And there are lots of resources an tips online.

Is there anything else that is a) free, b) cross platform, and c) has the powerful features of GIMP? I use GIMP because of those three factors (and to be clear, I would happily purchase Photoshop, but I switch OSes all the time and want something I can use everywhere).

There's also people who need the tools of photoshop but have no intention of creating anything with it I.E Web devs working with designers.

It's hard for me to imagine any software reaching adoption "escape velocity" with a name as noxious as The Gimp. Rather than adding more features, a more evocative name might make "GIMPing" more appealing to a larger community.

This has been brought up before -- but for different reasons. The newly renamed "Reglue" project, that installs Linux on computers for needy kids in Texas, brought this up a long time ago. That the acronym/name of the program you can use to paint on your new computer is also somewhat offensive is just unfortunate. At any rate, the program itself is useful and I've supported the project in the past financially.

http://linuxlock.blogspot.com/2011/05/your-vote-counts.html

If you use GIMP, I highly recommend chipping in on the new work on resamplers: http://www.freedomsponsors.org/core/issue/78/add-other-sampl... The guy working on it has already contributed lots to GEGL and ImageMagick, and the work is already going straight into GIMP (no forking).

You do want your rescaled images to look good, right?

Just a usability thing about that site. There's so much stuff at the top that when I clicked on the 'lastest news' thumbnails I thought there was some JS preventing the page from loading. Turns out that the actual content was below the fold of my (large) browser window. But it took a while to notice.

On a side note, Adobe is giving away its flagship Photoshop (actually the entire creative suite) away for free, with VALID serial numbers. However, they're giving away only the CS2 version though. EDIT: It's a semi-official free version. But it's still a great deal!

You can fetch it from here: http://www.adobe.com/downloads/cs2_downloads/index.html

http://forums.adobe.com/message/4974662#4974662

"You have heard wrong! Adobe is absolutely not providing free copies of CS2!

What is true is that Adobe is terminating the activation servers for CS2 and that for existing licensed users of CS2 who need to reinstall their software, copies of CS2 that don't require activation but do require valid serial numbers are available."

It's not a give away it's for existing owners. It's not a great deal, it's for valid CS2 owners.

Actually, these serials are legit and they seem to work. It WAS earlier only for existing users, but I read somewhere later that adobe changed that. That's why you don't even need to sign in to download these (usually you are required to sign in)

LINK: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/01/adobe-...

Did you actually read the article you linked?

"Adobe says in order to legally use CS2, users still require a purchased license."

>It has not. Instead, Adobe has made CS2 even easier to get, by removing the Adobe ID requirement. The company created a new CS2 download page, and this time around, it had no registration requirement at all.

Read this. I hope you read it atleast.

Meanwhile, Ubuntu still only has 2.6 as an available stable version.

2.8.2 is in the latest stable release of Ubuntu (12.10 Quantal) http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=gimp

(Not in the latest long support release, but can't really expect that.)

aka the previous stable version. 2.7 and 2.9 are dev branches, as will 2.11 be. 2.8 was only released in May last year, which is a little over halfway through the Ubuntu release cycle. It's probably safe to expect it in April's release.

Thanks

My Debian testing installation runs 2.8.2. Is Debian actually ahead of Ubuntu for something?

Keyword here being testing. Debian stable has 2.6.10

For years, testing has been the defacto 'stable' distribution for anyone who wanted something remotely current and quite stable. Debian 'unstable' is the true testing branch, where bugs can actually impact a user.

Going back to 2000, Debian's stable releases have emerged about once every 2.1 years (median 1.9) [0]. Unless you're hosting a server, the continuously-updated 'testing' branch is the place to be for stable and modern software. I haven't experienced an important 'testing' bug in perhaps at least 7 years.

[0] http://www.debian.org/releases/

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