

GIMP 2.9/2.10 Feature Preview  - diminish
http://www.gimpusers.com/tutorials/whats-new-in-gimp-2-10

======
daenz
Floating point images have been something I've been waiting for for awhile.

For a game engine I'm working on, I need floating point textures to represent
emissivity (how much light an object might reflect...anything greater than 1.0
means the object is generating its own light, think a neon sign).

Without the ability to draw floating point textures, I've been limited to
using regular 8-bit monochrome (which maps 0-255 to 0.0-1.0 in the engine),
and having a special "multiplier" pixel in the corner of the image, used for
multiplying the 0.0-1.0 value, so I can have, for example, emissivity of 3.0.

Floating point images eliminate the need for all of this :)

~~~
aw3c2
how does it compare in size though? why can't you use an image with 3 channels
instead to achieve the same goal (avoiding inaccuracies)?

~~~
daenz
Yeah, Arelius pointed out that the single channel float textures are 4 times
bigger than a single channel signed byte texture. I think the convenience of
using a float image in gimp though, is that I can easily draw the levels that
I want in the texture in a single channel, vs trying to draw the levels in
multiple channels.

------
veeti
Could they rip off the layer effects feature from Photoshop? There is a plugin
for it but it's honestly pretty useless. It takes forever to generate the
effects, you can't edit them afterwards and they are on a separate layer.

~~~
tsahyt
What I really want to see on GIMP would be a rip-off of content aware fill.
I'd really like to have a look at how it's done. Obviously I can't look at
Adobe's code.

~~~
benjiweber
[http://linuxers.org/article/adobes-content-aware-fill-huh-
gi...](http://linuxers.org/article/adobes-content-aware-fill-huh-gimp-already-
had-it-years)

------
jiggy2011
Who is the target user for GIMP? Professionals are almost all heavily invested
in Adobe and it's interface is much too hard for a casual user?

~~~
coffeeaddicted
My guess: Casual users who don't think the interface is too hard and people
liking free software. I seem to fall into both groups.

But more generally - a lot of people I know which are starting out with game
programming work with The Gimp. Also pretty much anyone who wants to learn
serious image manipulation, but not willing to either make illegal copies or
spend hundreds of dollars on such an application (don't know, maybe that's not
much money for you, but for most people it is a lot). And certainly people on
Linux where PS simply isn't available.

~~~
onli
No. Gimp recently - or by now some time ago - defined their target group and
work with a HCI-expert to get the software in shape for them. The target users
are pretty much professional users (or "for intense use", like they put it),
see <http://gui.gimp.org/index.php/User_Scenarios> and
<http://gui.gimp.org/index.php/Vision_briefing>.

Casual users are no longer the target.

~~~
dirkk0
This might be true, but my daughter (13) uses Gimp to draw. But then again,
she might be an expert because she is recording a 'Lets draw Mangas' thread on
Youtube: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhMwfWFG5GI>

~~~
wazoox
Funny, my daughter's 13 too and constantly drawing manga characters with Gimp
(<http://julieflorac78.deviantart.com/gallery/>). I've just bought her a wacom
tablet, that's much easier.

~~~
dirkk0
funny^2 - she just got a wacom tablet for christmas :-). did you get the wheel
to work with gimp?

~~~
wazoox
No, but AFAIK it doesn't work yet with Linux. The other buttons work out of
the box, though.

~~~
dirkk0
Ah ok - she is on win7. doesn't work either, though.

------
jm3
It's hard for me to imagine any software reaching adoption "escape velocity"
with a name as noxious as The Gimp. Rather than adding more features, a more
evocative name might make "GIMPing" more appealing to a larger community.

~~~
K_REY_C
This has been brought up before -- but for different reasons. The newly
renamed "Reglue" project, that installs Linux on computers for needy kids in
Texas, brought this up a long time ago. That the acronym/name of the program
you can use to paint on your new computer is also somewhat offensive is just
unfortunate. At any rate, the program itself is useful and I've supported the
project in the past financially.

<http://linuxlock.blogspot.com/2011/05/your-vote-counts.html>

------
unhammer
If you use GIMP, I highly recommend chipping in on the new work on resamplers:
[http://www.freedomsponsors.org/core/issue/78/add-other-
sampl...](http://www.freedomsponsors.org/core/issue/78/add-other-samplers-
that-properly-reduce-downsample-and-warp-images) The guy working on it has
already contributed lots to GEGL and ImageMagick, and the work is already
going straight into GIMP (no forking).

You do want your rescaled images to look good, right?

------
afandian
Just a usability thing about that site. There's so much stuff at the top that
when I clicked on the 'lastest news' thumbnails I thought there was some JS
preventing the page from loading. Turns out that the actual content was below
the fold of my (large) browser window. But it took a while to notice.

------
neya
On a side note, Adobe is giving away its flagship Photoshop (actually the
entire creative suite) away for free, with VALID serial numbers. However,
they're giving away only the CS2 version though. EDIT: It's a semi-official
free version. But it's still a great deal!

You can fetch it from here:
<http://www.adobe.com/downloads/cs2_downloads/index.html>

~~~
michaelbuddy
It's not a give away it's for existing owners. It's not a great deal, it's for
valid CS2 owners.

~~~
neya
Actually, these serials are legit and they seem to work. It WAS earlier only
for existing users, but I read somewhere later that adobe changed that. That's
why you don't even need to sign in to download these (usually you are required
to sign in)

LINK: [http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2013/01/adobe-...](http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2013/01/adobe-almost-does-something-amazing-by-accident/)

~~~
kibibu
Did you actually read the article you linked?

"Adobe says in order to legally use CS2, users still require a purchased
license."

~~~
neya
>It has not. Instead, Adobe has made CS2 even easier to get, by removing the
Adobe ID requirement. The company created a new CS2 download page, and this
time around, it had no registration requirement at all.

Read this. I hope you read it atleast.

------
rhizome
Meanwhile, Ubuntu still only has 2.6 as an available stable version.

~~~
hosay123
aka the previous stable version. 2.7 and 2.9 are dev branches, as will 2.11
be. 2.8 was only released in May last year, which is a little over halfway
through the Ubuntu release cycle. It's probably safe to expect it in April's
release.

~~~
rhizome
Thanks

