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The one other contender would be Krita, wouldn't it?

http://www.koffice.org/krita/

With KOffice 2.0 (now in beta release) Krita 2.0 will gain significant capability, and also the ability to run on Windows.

It doesn't seem that far off to me, though I'm not really familiar with this application area.

Don't forget Cinepaint. It looks similar to Gimp but is more advanced, rich in features and used in industrial Studios like Dreamworks

Good point. I didn't know about Cinepaint. It looks as though it solves GIMP's lack of support for more than 8 bits per channel, but that it doesn't solve GIMPs GUI issues.

http://www.cinepaint.org/about.html

Shame about the GUI though:

http://www.cinepaint.org/pix/linux/index.html

Anyway, the more solutions the better, I believe. This way, more people are likely to find what they want. It is also more valuable counterpoint to the FUDsters who would still to this day try to claim that "you can't do professional photo editing on Linux".

Don't tell me about Cinepaint! Rowe promised the new generation Cinepaint in days/weeks and it tool YEARS to release something that is far from usable...

Cinepaint was used in professional environments like Dreamworks (I mean, "FilmGimp" was...) and so in a time where not many applications supported hi depth channel file formats (at this point, it was no more than a GIMP fork with better file format support and file sequence support... but that's about it). But almost every single professional application support these formats (Cineon, DPX, OpenEXR, etc) these days. CinePaint is forgotten in professional environments, as a victim of ostracism and lies.
Rest in pieces CinePaint...

Cinepaint is GIMP. Its what GIMP 2.x should have been, imo, but the developers of GIMP wanted to go another direction, so the project (formally filmgimp) was forked and the name was changed, but at its core its still gimp 1.x.

I've (tried to) use Cinepaint quite a bit and I would hardly call it more advanced and feature rich than Gimp. The only thing it really has going for it is that it can handle more than 8 bits pr channel and supports file formats commonly used in the movie industry. Beyond that it lags behind Gimp in almost every way.

Cinepaint is a dead end. They've forked the GIMP and added 16bbp and 32bbp support. But they have no concept other that that. GIMP's GEGL approach is much more sane and structured. And even it took years to get GEGL (and BABL, for the matter) to the levels they are today, GIMP/GEGL are a solid foundation to work on.

Freeware is proprietary software. GIMP is not proprietary. Therefore, GIMP is not freeware. If you want to say GIMP is available free of charge, just say it is free of charge, "price: $0", costless or even just free (as in price). Or anything with that meaning. The fact that some clueless people do not care about the difference does not justify or excuse lying. Truth is truth, whether some people care about it or not.

This may come as a shock to you but regular users couldn't care less about software freedom especially when the product is not very good.

Most would pay or risk pirating a commercial product rather than using something that kind of meets their needs.

Making this type of observations makes you look like a fanatic.

As for GIMP, I'm really glad that they started to change the UI. Now if they only changed the name, too.

Edited 2008-10-02 07:39 UTC

It's not that SOME people do not care, it's that MOST people don't care. And those who DO care know what GIMP is and what the original poster wanted to say.

He did not want to undermine GIMP or free (as in speech) software, in fact he was praising it.

Also I'm sick of people acusing other people of lying. A lie is a "a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive". In my world making someone a liar is an insult.

I don't understand what is your motivation to insult people you don't know over the difference between freeware and free software.

Strange, I thought GIMP was under GPL, meaning that it from legal point of view actually is propriatory. (Sombody owns it, and licenses to us through GPL)

I think, what you meant to say, is that GIMP is free software, where free means free as in free speach. What makes it free is that GPL allows you to:

-use the software for any purpose.
-study and modify the software.
-copy the software
-modify the software, and release the modifications to the public

The nice thing about free software licenses is that they uses copyright law to expand the rights of others rather than limit them.

"Proprietary software is computer software on which the producer has set restrictions on use, private modification, copying, or republishing. Similar terms include "closed-source software" and "non-free software".

Proprietors may enforce restrictions by technical means, such as by restricting source code access, or by legal means, such as through copyright and patents."

...

"Proprietary software includes freeware and shareware."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software

The fact that the proprietor can set restrictions on how his property may be used is the basis for free software.

It is the nature of the restrictions, that determines if the software free or not. And yes, GPL contains restrictions. If you don't think that is the case, just ask Microsoft why they often are reluctant to incorporate GPL:ed code in their software.

If you should have an opposite to propriatory software a better candidate would be public domain software. You can use things in the public domain as you see fit, including incorporating it in your own work without e.g. asking somebody for permission, or paying any licensing fees. Then you can release the result under whatever licence you want.

This is why I think it is a bad idea to talk about propriatory vs free software. Doing that sort of indirectly implies that GPL (and other free software licenses) is less valid than e.g. an EULA from Microsoft. In both cases it is the owner of the software that tells us under what conditions the software may be used, copied, etc.

Your first assumption is incorrect. Freeware merely defines the software as being available at no cost in itself. Free software, OTOH, does not define the price of the software itself, but some freedom-related aspects.
So, "freeware" and "free software" are not opposites, but orthogonal. GIMP happens to be both.

Wrong again. See e.g.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeware#Criteria
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/freeware
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/freeware

Edited 2008-10-02 12:54 UTC

Freeware means exactly that: software that is free of charge.
It does not mean proprietary software, it can be and maybe often is proprietary, but it doesn't have to be.

So I think it's nonsense that you want to make him call it free of charge, "price: $0", costless or free (as in price)?

Depends on your definition on *better*: some tasks which I was never able to find how to do in Gimp, I managed to do them in 5 minutes with Paint.NET.
[I didn't read any doc these two applications and I don't *want* to]

So for the casual user, I consider Paint.NET as clearly better (note that the versions of Gimp I've tried were old), a professional willing to read documentation may have a different view.

GIMP is a great program, but it's not a Photoshop replacement and probably never will be. That's not what it's meant to be, though most of its users wish it were. It does more than most other free editors out there, and I personally think it is superior to PSP, but for a pro photographer it will eventually fall short of their needs.

For amateur photographers and other users though, it's just what the doctor ordered: Free, highly functional and as you said, highly expandable.

Actually, if GIMP would support the whole arsenal of features in GEGL it would become much more powerful than Photoshop in many areas. Unfortunately getting there takes quite some time because the lack of full-time GIMP developers.

GIMP is great. For a very lightweight image editor I use ImageJ. Runs on java. I use it for my computer vision tasks a lot.

GIMP is fine for creating items that are only going to be viewed on the web or are not in color.

But as soon as you go to print in color? It doesn't matter if its inkjet, laser, or offset press, it's got to be shifted to a CMYK color profile, or "miscolored" RGB with an understanding to how the colors will shift or it won't print the desired colors.

Clients (and creators) care very much about the color accuracy.

For example, where I work we have an Official Shade of Scarlet that must be used on publications. We have a hex code for the web, a Pantone number for the printer, a CMYK profile for the printer and graphic artists, and an RGB profile to use in Word. The RGB color looks maroon on screen, but prints the Official Shade of Scarlet on the model and brand of color laser printer we have in our building. But if you try printing it on another printer? There's no gurantee of correct color due to how that printer model handles RGB --> CMYK.

And if you print out and distribute something that's not the Official Shade of Scarlet (because, Scarlet, Crimson, they're both reds, so what's the big deal?) and get caught? Be prepared for several irate phone calls from the people in the Big Chairs.

Without proper CMYK support, GIMP is a wicked keen toy, not a professional level tool.

What you have to understand, Eugenia, is that even though this is called 2.6.0 that doesn't mean that Gimp 2.6 is here. Gimp 2.6 won't be here until 2.6.1 is released in 6 months. No one ever claimed that Gimp 2.6.0 was going to be Gimp 2.6, so it makes no sense to complain about missing functionality. But just wait until 2.6.1 comes out! After that, I don't think their will be any future for that *other* image editor.

Edited 2008-10-01 23:47 UTC

Right.

Huh? 2.6.0 is a (subversion of) 2.6 by definition. And if that's not enough, then how about all the 2.6:s sprinkled around everywhere (e.g., in the release notes of 2.6.0 and in the splash window)?
Or is there some weird, hidden meaning in what you wrote that I just don't get?

Huh? 2.6.0 is a (subversion of) 2.6 by definition. And if that's not enough, then how about all the 2.6:s sprinkled around everywhere (e.g., in the release notes of 2.6.0 and in the splash window)? Or is there some weird, hidden meaning in what you wrote that I just don't get? "

I think the "joke" is a reference to the release of KDE 4.0 when it wasn't really very near being a feature complete implementation of KDE4.

There is some parallel to justify this ... for example the article mentions that at this time of release of GIMP 2.6.0, the underlying GEGL engine doesn't proplerly support cmyk as yet. Full cmyk support will be a feature of GIMP 2.6.+something.

This is the way of it with free software, however. "Release early, release often" is the catchcry.

This is however a very different paradigm than the release of commercial software, where you are trying to charge people real money to buy a software application, and then charge them again when they want to upgrade to a newer version. In that scenario, "release early, release often" (with early releases not being feature complete) actually would equate to "rip-off".

However, the point is that the GIMP program, like KDE4, is not commercial software, it is free software. Enjoy the new features now for no charge, and get an even more complete feature set as they are developed a bit later on, also for no charge.

So the intended sarcasm rather misses the point, wouldn't you say?

KDE 4.1.1 is out now, and it is quite stable and now has feature parity (more or less) with KDE 3.5.x.

What you have to understand, Eugenia, is that even though this is called 2.6.0 that doesn't mean that Gimp 2.6 is here. Gimp 2.6 won't be here until 2.6.1 is released in 6 months. No one ever claimed that Gimp 2.6.0 was going to be Gimp 2.6, so it makes no sense to complain about missing functionality. But just wait until 2.6.1 comes out! After that, I don't think their will be any future for that *other* image editor. "

They should have stuck with the developer release tree numbering and call it Gimp 2.5.5.

Personally I'd prefer the (old?) Linux model with versions x.y.z and all odd y were unstable/dev and even y were stable/maintenance mode.

Then it'd still be 0.2.x.

By any minuscule chance, aren't you some kind of politician ? You'd fit right in.

DON'T TAS^H^H^H CASHEW ME, BRO!

Haha, Mr. Aaron Seigo Jr. :-)

A naming convention without any sense. 2.6.0 is not 2.6? Why? They should use 2.5.9X or any kind of release to do the alphas/betas. Otherwise users can get very confused.

I can't mod you up as I've posted, but I liked very much your parody of KDE's numbering brain deadness.

Don't forget the folks that say that The GIMP will never be a good application because of the name.

The name probably could use a change.

The interface is still a mess (at least the worked on it this time instead of adding feature on top of it). The 3 floating independent windows is a dead end, tiled environement like blender and now inkscape offer a much better experiences. The way menu are organized is also one of my complaint about The Gimp. It is sometime hard to find feature and naming is not always perfect. The color profile handling was also a problem with the past release, RGB and grayscale are good for computer, but not for printing (and the fact the the color mode is not located in the color menu is one of the good example of the deficient menu layout). It is the combination of all these little things that prevent me from using/liking Gimp. I really hope that someone will stand up and do the "moving things around" job someday, yes it will make old user frustrated, but it will attract much more. They should look at how Inkscape do things, the way they deal with feature organization on screen and try to "copy" it. Inkscape had cloned the interface of gimp long time ago (it was called sodipody back then) but they saw that it was deficient and rewritten it.

That's an opinion of course, not fact, it may depend on your taste.

GIMP's interface is improved, but still a bit of a mess. Krita's GUI interface is OK though, AFAIK. I haven't heard of any complaints about that.

Both of these are of late becoming very capable free software raster image editing programs.

This won't stop complaints coming from everywhere that "there is no decent applications software for desktop Linux". Those complaints will be utterly unfounded and ill-informed ... but that won't stop them coming.

In fact, as these applications, and others like them, get more and more capable, and they move past what is available for Windows at reasonable pricing, then you can assume that the unwarranted dismissing of free software desktop applications such as these two will become ever more shrill, over ever more trivial points.

How about the fact that almost none of GEGL's nice features are included (yet)? E.g., there still seems to be no way to use more than a puny 8 bits/channel (and destructively), which makes it unsuitable for any serious image editing, because of the huge number of rounding errors that will accumulate, causing nasty banding and "holes" in the color gamut.

How about the fact that almost none of GEGL's nice features are included (yet)? E.g., there still seems to be no way to use more than a puny 8 bits/channel (and destructively), which makes it unsuitable for any serious image editing, because of the huge number of rounding errors that will accumulate, causing nasty banding and "holes" in the color gamut. "

So if that is important to you, at this time use Krita instead.

http://www.koffice.org/krita/

"Krita supports many managed colorspaces, like rgb, grayscale, cmyk, lab, ycbcr and lms, in 8 and 16 bits per channel. Some colorspaces even support 32 bits per channel! "

"Krita can import RAW images in 8 and 16 bits per channel and load and save the usual image formats: tiff, png, jpeg. Other image formats, like xcf, can be imported and sometimes exported through the GraphicsMagick import/export plugin, but are not fully supported."

Of course I have krita installed, but this article was about GIMP.

But since you brought it up... I've found Krita to behave a bit oddly (read: buggy) at times. E.g., if I create a "16-bit float/channel" RGB image the white background is shown as gray, and if I paint with a yellow brush it comes out as black with a blue outline. And no matter how deep my color space is, the RGB palette is still using only 8 bit integer values, and the HSV palette similarly.

Of course I have krita installed, but this article was about GIMP. But since you brought it up... I've found Krita to behave a bit oddly (read: buggy) at times. E.g., if I create a "16-bit float/channel" RGB image the white background is shown as gray, and if I paint with a yellow brush it comes out as black with a blue outline. And no matter how deep my color space is, the RGB palette is still using only 8 bit integer values, and the HSV palette similarly. "

I haven't actually tried this ... as I say this isn't an application area that I am familiar with.

I can only go on what I have read, such as this:
http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/6459/1/

... which seems to indicate to me anyway that there isn't a problem, and that Krita is really the only way to go if you are looking for a free software raster graphics applications with extensive support for useable colour spaces.

I was hoping that GIMP 2.6 would become the second option, but apparently, and somewhat disappointingly, it seems as if GIMP 2.6 isn't there yet.

So, for now, if you want that capability in a free software raster graphics editor, then AFAIK Krita is your only choice.

Have you tried Krita from KOffice 2.0 (beta only as yet)under KDE 4.1.1? Apparently it has quite a bit of extended capability.

I've been really impressed with Gimp on Windows in the past few years, it's a wonderful alternative to PSP and Photoshop for most editing needs. I keep it on a USB stick along with a bunch of other F/OSS and freeware for family and friends to pass around.

Oh, and by the way, XP wasn't "free" on your eeePC, it was just preinstalled. You still paid for it as a bundle with the computer, though probably not as much as if you'd bought it separately.

Oh, and by the way, XP wasn't "free" on your eeePC, it was just preinstalled. You still paid for it as a bundle with the computer, though probably not as much as if you'd bought it separately.

This is untrue. The Xandros only version was exactly the same price. I researched it carefully. This fact has annoyed a lot of Linux users since it appears MS is giving it away to keep market share.

Not that I give a rat's, but it's more likely that they are selling it for the same price as xandros, which is not "free as in beer" or as in "Freedom Fries." And aren't the windows and linux versions also differentiated by hardware?

Nope, the Linux version comes with a SSD while the Windows version comes with a standard drive. So, Asus is making up the $100 or so price difference by giving out a much cheaper hard drive and then "pricing" them the same.

I am talking about the SPECIFIC feature, not for the whole app. Their release notes LET YOU BELIEVE (unless they go and change the text back), that if you turn "on" GEGL, you will have some 16bpp. Instead, while INTERNALLY some operations might happen in 32bpp, the importing of 16bpp images is still done in 8 bpp. This makes the feature indeed, USELESS. Because, ALL pro/prosumer photographers will want to import in 16bpp+, so this feature is just going down the drain for them.

Okay, I see now that I misread what you wrote. You were indeed speaking of the specific feature. My sincerest apologies, Eugenia.

Not all Photographers Eugenia. Since 95% of digital photographers shoot in jpeg format, which is ONLY 8 bit anyways, 16 bit is worthless, unless you want to save as a 16 bit tiff file from the original 8 bit jpeg file.

Very few cameras offer TIFF as a shooting format (Nikon D3 is the only one that I can think of). Most (at least DSLRs) offer RAW and various shades of JPEGs. And it's with those that you might want or desire 16 bit capability. Even though, most people shooting RAW will probably convert to jpeg anyways just for ease of convenience. Few will convert from RAW to PSD or TIFF, and probably will convert to an 8 bit lossless variant anyways. Well, that's my belief ;-)

I shoot in RAW and use 16 bit TIFFS in Adobe RGB colour space, using either Canon's DPP or Capture One Pro. But then, I'm a serious amateur :-)

Dave

Please read the article more carefully. I am talking about prosumer and professionals. These people shoot RAW, and EVEN if you shoot JPEG, you STILL need 16bpp, otherwise you lose quality as you edit.

I HATE people who THINKS I'm TOO STUPID to understand the IMPORTANT PARTS of the MESSAGE and decide to WRITE IN CAPITALS those parts.

Pros wouldn't touch the GIMP. Whether you like it or not, Photoshop is the standard, and people like to use the standard. Let's look at Paintshop Pro - not a lot of pros use it, despite its vast features and cheaper price than Photoshop.

The vast majority of people think that images taken with their 5mp camera phone are great. These types will never use advanced photo editing software. More serious amateurs tend to still shooot JPEG, at least from my experience on POTN for the past 3 years. I encouraged a Welsh friend to move to RAW, and to use Photoshop etc, and to be far more critical of his miages, and his images have improved a lot - most ordinary (read large portion of the population) would never even bother.

If such a small percentage of photographers need Photoshop, then most surely they don't need 16 bit per channel etc. I guarantee that in most cases, your ordinary person could not tell the difference between a 8 bit JPEG at medium quality, and a high quality 16 bit TIFF. Ordinary people do not pixel peep.

Dave