LWN: Comments on "Getting ready for the GIMP 2.0"

Getting ready for the GIMP 2.0

gwg — Sun, 11 Apr 2004 05:04:54 +0000

If I was the product manager for Photoshop, I'd be sleeping easy in regard
to GIMP. While open source code has been available for handling color
properly for a number of years (Little CMS & Argyll), the developers
of GIMP have shown little interest in using it. This perhaps is not
too surprising, when the majority of GIMP use appears to be display
graphics, where everything is RGB, and noone is too worried about
exact color reproduction. It's only those who deal seriously in color
accuracy, and are printing things out all the time, notice the lack
of serious color technology in GIMP. The developers of GIMP shouldn't
feel too bad about it though, many multi-billion dollar companies that
manufacture widely available printers, still don't "get" color. There
are some really good books available to educate developers about color,
but the learning curve is still steep, and few take the time to really
learn enough about it to do useful things.

Getting ready for the GIMP 2.0

leandro — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 12:23:18 +0000

> a derivative of the Scheme language[...], Script-FU is far from a friendly language

Quite to the contrary, it is extremely friendly. It is just not familiar, being functional.

Getting ready for the GIMP 2.0

jmalcolm — Fri, 02 Apr 2004 00:33:05 +0000

I think that you missed the point of a couple of paragraphs...

If I am not mistaken, GEGL will bring support for CYMK in the way that you describe. There is quite a lot about GEGL in the article.

When he says, "sidestepping that issue one last time" the word "that" refers to GEGL which refers to CYMK.

So, the article basically says "apart from once again not addressing the CYMK issue, their is little left that is missing."

Since you raise only the importance of CYMK to prepress, it sounds like you agree with the author.

If I was the product manager for Photoshop I would be pretty worried.

Getting ready for the GIMP 2.0

allesfresser — Thu, 01 Apr 2004 16:45:08 +0000

I notice that GEGL has support for multiple color spaces (including CMYK, CIExyz, etc.)... it seems like this is a good solution. If so, I await it with great anticipation.

Getting ready for the GIMP 2.0

allesfresser — Thu, 01 Apr 2004 16:37:12 +0000

"Little left that is missing?" What about, oh, perhaps, CMYK support? It's a major, glaring omission and one that completely disqualifies GIMP from prepress work (where it would be greatly welcomed as a balance to the high price of Photoshop.) I realize that it's a major-league undertaking, but for print work, it's a must. There are a couple open bugs regarding CMYK, but it seems to me that they're more about importing and exporting CMYK than actually working with it as a native format (i.e., being able to choose File->New and have CMYK be available as an image type along with RGB and grayscale.)

Getting ready for the GIMP 2.0

bobg — Thu, 01 Apr 2004 13:52:48 +0000

I just downloaded GIMP for windows, and installed it on my laptop, so I can process images from my web cam / telescope combination. I found the Gimp to be an excellent package for doing Astrophoto image processing, alleviating the need for a very expensive purchase of Photoshop.