The problem is...

Story: Time to stick a fork in the GIMP?Total Replies: 3
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Kagehi

Mar 11, 2006
3:53 PM EDT
GIMP, for all its features suffers from:

1. No MDI. Why the heck would I use a browser with multiple tabs, or just multiple window **in** a main one, but desire a image manipulation application that doesn't.

2. Paintshop Pro has them, and I suspect Photoshop does too. What? Icon menus and settings that hide themselves, instead of being in your way all the time.

3. Icons.. Two words - "Too Big". The tool bar takes up more space than it needs to do anything.

4. Menus.. Some people use a hack that re-arranges things so its more like Photoshop. Can't imagine why, except maybe "some" configurations make more bloody sense.

5. Miscelanious stuff that doesn't work or doesn't exist. PNG support for example. Photoshop works right when dealing with gamma settings, Paintshop Pro uses code that mimic Opera and IE, both of which screw up some colors, especially yellow. Now, I don't know the original image intended, but someone made a test of this. You take Red, Green, Blue and Yellow, make four boxes from them, make the center of the boxes color corrected with Gamma, the result *should* be:

LRLRLBLB LRDRDBLB LYDYDGLG LYLYLGLG

Where L = light, and R = Red, etc.

What Opera, IE, Paintshop Pro and damn near everything else did was:

LRLRLBLB LRDRDBLB LXDXDGLG LXLXLGLG

Where X is "gold", i.e. something like 8F5F00, instead of 8F8F00, which would have been the correct combination of DG = 008F00 and DR = 8F0000, when the original color was like FFFF00. Basically, it somehow screws up when the color has two components, instead of one.

GIMP however solves this problem simply by ignoring the fact that PNG even *has* a gamma attribute.

See, its missing some things it needs, has the stuff it does have scattered in places that don't make sense, then sticks the whole thing into an interface that ironically Microsoft figured out wouldn't work for pictures way back prior when they created Windows 3.11 and MS Paint. (Well I doubt actually MS thought about it much, just see how long it took to figure out that people hate multi-window systems when web browsing.. lol) Point is, the substructer is pretty good, if flawed in ways that are hardly unique to GIMP, like the PNG problem, but its stuck behind a store front that looks like it should be condemned.
jimf

Mar 11, 2006
8:07 PM EDT
Well, photoshop is a nightmare, both design wise and as a proprietary monopoly that is rivaled only by MS. Pixel is really a Paint Shop Pro clone (not Photoshop), and not bad when I tried it, but again it's proprietary, and a one man creation from a guy that has a terrible track record for support. He still owes me a license and has never answered my emails. I remember there being a British company that was going to port to Linux, but that is a maybe in the future....

So, Gimp is not perfect, but, usable, and it is open source. Most of the points that are mentioned are on the to-do list and the progress made in the last three years that I've used it is quite substantial. Amazing actually. I agree that it still needs major changes, and, I assume they will continue to improve, but, 'stick a fork in it'???.. What BS.

Oh, and the latest gimp now has rgb & cmyk color control (as promised).
helios

Mar 12, 2006
2:35 AM EDT
Xara is the program you are thinking of. The one that is being ported to Linux. We are happy to have a hand in getting the word out on this and it seems to be coming along nicely.

http://www.xaraxtreme.org/about/

jimf

Mar 12, 2006
9:07 AM EDT
Nice to see that the project is moving along so well. It appears that Xara is quite serious in their commitment to Open Source.

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