But they do not preserve the advantages to shooting RAW, which are twofold:ĬinePaint is the descendant of the Rhythm and Hues fork of The GIMP, and it expands on the broad file format compatibility of that branch. JPEGs can look stunning, and most of the time they are perfectly adequate, even for some print jobs. JPEG compression is, after all, JPEG compression. Most of the time, people shoot RAW and then process the images to ordinary JPEGs under the mistaken presumption that they're getting more bang for their buck, when in fact they're just creating more work for themselves. This is left up to users to do with their computers when they offload the images, which easily can run more than 10MB each. RAW formats are CCD data dumps-the three color sensors aren't interpolated, blended or processed like you would normally expect. Nikon, Canon and most of the other major manufacturers have priced Digital SLRs below $800, and almost all of these cameras allow users to shoot in RAW format. Although that may seem irrelevant to most end users, the corollary is not. In the world of film and photography, high-quality film scanning has pushed the contrast resolution of a good drum scan higher still, into the realm of 16-bit float or 32-bit linear. High-def video formats have a wider contrast ratio, using a 10-bit floating point rather than an 8-bit linear color format one of the high-def formats, HDV, is priced to sell to more spendy consumers in the form of camcorders from all the major manufacturers, starting at around $1,000. To put it bluntly, even at its best, color in the digital world has pretty much always sucked. Although this looks wonderful on a computer screen compared to what we once saw, and although the sharpness and resolution of modern flat panels mean that they often look better than old CRTs or television, the fact remains that a contrast ratio of 255:1 is small, particularly compared to the thousands of gray shades that film reproduces and the hundreds of thousands that our eyes perceive. There are 24 million possible colors and 255 different potential levels of brightness. Consumer equipment outgrew GIMP.įirst, GIMP can handle only 8 bits of contrast per channel. In the intervening years, computing power comfortably chugged along the path of Moore's Law to Kurtzweil's Singularity, and some startling changes happened. There have since been a number of abortive attempts to replace GIMP's color engine with GEGL to handle high-depths, but so far it's been vaporware. That decision proved remarkably short-sighted. After all, Photoshop didn't support such images then either, and no one really needed it. The patches were primitive and didn't seem important anyway. But GIMP, still in the 1.x release series, didn't know what to do with it, and it rejected the patches out of hand. Once upon a time, Rhythm and Hues submitted a set of patches to GIMP that gave it high-color depth capability (a necessity for retouching movies). But, under the hood, it truly is becoming gimpy, because its core is hobbled by design. It is now more memory-efficient, and its new features, such as improved font handling, keep it looking fresh and chipper. GIMP frequently may be maligned for its un-Photoshop-like interface and its utilitarian approach to filters, but I've grown to love it precisely for these reasons.ĭuring its 2.x release cycle, GIMP has outgrown a lot of its early awkwardness. Most of all, I love the pixel pushers-those end-user programs for editing raster graphics.įor years now, I've been using The GIMP for the most of my postprocessing work. I love that RAW image processing is simple and efficient with UFRAW, which saves to high bit-depth formats and preserves one of the great advantages of using RAW for texture and HDRI work. I love the UNIX philosophy of creating larger applications by knitting together a suite of modular programs that do one thing and do it well. I love the variety of CLI tools for batch processing in ImageMagick, and PanoTools (though I doubt I'll ever master all their capabilities). Most of my machines run Linux, and I prefer it that way. I keep Photoshop at the ready in case of emergencies, but I don't use it if I don't have to. But, when the client calls go quiet, and no projects are pressing, I take time to indulge in my escapist passion: photography. I run a small multimedia studio and often do a number of jobs simultaneously, from sound engineer to producer.
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