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Gimp v Photoshop


Ags

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I've been playing with processing images using Gimp and I am very impressed with it as a tool, despite its slightly odd name.

How does it compare to Photoshop? I recall reading somewhere that it uses fewer bits to represent each color channel. Does this make a big difference in processing images? I imagine it might affect stretching of the histogram (ignorance speaking, here).

I've been amazed at what I can achieve with simple processing of the miscolored output of my current compact camera - all techniques learnt on SGL!

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Its a no contest! PS wins hands down for astro pics. GIMP is OK for snapshots and can do lots of clever tricks for the "family photo's" but the fact that is only 8bit means you simply can't get the detail out of your pictures as you can with 16bit PS.

I did use it when I began astrophotography and it does work to a degree but I wouldn't go back to it now I have PS.

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That's a shame. A quick search reveals that Gimp 2.6 has an experimental feature called GEGL which offers 32 bit color processing. I can't find any information as to the effectiveness of this new feature.

There is also a Gimp fork called Cinepaint that offers 16 bits (I think) per channel.

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As soon as GIMP offers 16 bit (or more) image processing it'll be quite a powerful contender - it'll offer all the key tools from PS (curves etc) without the price tag. I'm very fond of free good stuff.

Me too :) But PS (along with MS Office) are 2 packages that I'm pleased I shelled out to buy. The free "alternatives" just don't hack it.

A large chunk of the value of PS is the mass of documentation, how-to's, books and articles about it. While GIMP may well have a lot of these functions, they are not well documented, easy to use or even to find (being buried in odd, non-obvious places. I've always found the GIMP interface to be annoying because it's not very well designed - for example, windows that pop-up obscured by their parent window, or being too small to display all their options. That's just plain sloppy.

While these could be described as minor faults, they have a cumulative effect on GIMP's usabiity which takes my attention away from the job in hand, while I have to fight the application to find out how to do things.

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I use GIMP for all my post processing (i.e. stretching, colour balancing). Depends what you are are intending to do with the pictures. but if you are displaying them on the web then using 8-bit is not a problem. Where you can get problems is if you start dividing or subtracting.

NigelM

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Has anyone tried "Delphinus" on Windows? That's free and seems to offer a whole host of astro related processing features (including support for FiTS and RAW files) and also camera control.

I installed GIMP as an intermediate tool for viewing files after DSS but the 8-bit downscaling of TIF files really kills the gradient detailing.

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Can anyone send me a raw file that needs stretching? Or point me to some test data? I would like to compare the stretch between basic Gimp and GEGL-enabled Gimp.

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I enabled GEGL in my Gimp 2.6 installation and stretched an unlucky TIFF I found on the internet. The result is a barcode histogram, so I would say that GEGL does not bring Gimp up to the Photoshop level, yet... :-(

post-20027-133877641515_thumb.jpg

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As far as I know GEGL is for internal operations only. So the problem is that when you read in a 16bit tiff it is converted to 8bit by the import routine - hence even though the stretching may subsequently be 32 bit (floating point in fact) you still see the original quantisation.

NigelM

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While these could be described as minor faults

I don't think so. In usability terms, I'd say they were pretty major.

Unfortunately, this is true of a lot of "free" stuff. The Linux community often has a mind set of "Well - why not make the changes yourself, re-compile the code, and upload your new version?" But even as an expert engineer, life's too short for that kind of undertaking when you've got other stuff to do... I'd rather pay money to folks who've already noticed and fixed the problems...

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I don't think so. In usability terms, I'd say they were pretty major.

Unfortunately, this is true of a lot of "free" stuff. The Linux community often has a mind set of "Well - why not make the changes yourself, re-compile the code, and upload your new version?" But even as an expert engineer, life's too short for that kind of undertaking when you've got other stuff to do... I'd rather pay money to folks who've already noticed and fixed the problems...

Technically our mindset is more 'if you don't like it then why don't you ask for a refund' than 'do it yourself' but you know :) Developers often put their whole life into a project and you have to respect that, you can't expect them to do everything overnight.

I use GIMP for more advanced editing, Pinta for being lazy and picnik for being ultra-lazy. As far as i'm aware GIMP has had 16bit support since 2008?

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Developers often put their whole life into a project and you have to respect that, you can't expect them to do everything overnight.

Well... I think it's more to do with the way that non-commercial Open Source software has turned out to not be the Holy Grail of future software development as originally evangelised by many (but not all) people.

It's turned out not to be scaleable because contributors (naturally) like to choose which aspect of the software they want to work on (often the "cool algorithm" stuff), and so aspects that require little or no coding, such as attractive graphical design and/or the more abstract aspects of user interaction design remain underdeveloped - no matter how many years the project has been running.

i.e. the balance of developer skills is not matched with end-user requirements.

anyway - I'm skewing dangerously off-topic here, but in summary, something like Gimp will simply never "catch up" with Photoshop for this reason.

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