Re: HDR and CinePaint plug-ins

A hearty "amen" from the peanut gallery!

As a photographer, I loathe the idea of editing in 8-bit. The quality of a
finished product goes up exponentially if I use something like Cinepaint to
adjust curves/levels/etc when compared to using gimp (or some other 8-bit
only app).


On 3/12/08 5:02 PM, "Robin Rowe" <[email protected]> wrote:

>> "Actually 256 levels is enough, and all printing is done at the 8 bit
>> level, so you might ask what the point is of having 12 bit data."
> 
> There are two very good reasons 8 isn't enough, one general, the other
> specific to CinePaint.
> 
> 1.) Headroom is always needed when editing. For example, in the days
> before DVD when everything was distributed as a VHS tape, nobody wanted
> to *edit* in VHS because the picture quality would fall apart. In the
> digital realm today, nobody wants to edit in JPEG, MPEG2 or MP3 that's
> been fully compressed for distribution. If this output=input logic
> worked, then nobody would use RAW because no one will output to it.
> 
> 2. CinePaint can go 16-bit all the way to the print. Gallery-quality
> photography is supported with the Gutenprint printer drivers.
> 
> Of course, for motion picture output, film printers have more than 8
> bits of output channel depth. That this is true is why it's treacherous
> to work in 8-bit for output to film. It may look fine on 8-bit monitors,
> but will show banding on film unless you're very careful or deliberately
> add noise to gradients.
> 
>> plugins for Cinepaint, which is missing several that The Gimp
>> offers.
> 
> Which ones do you want? CinePaint can fool most GIMP plug-ins into
> compiling as CinePaint plug-ins without significant changes. However, a
> programmer needs to add a switch/case to the CinePaint version of the
> plug-in to define what it will do when it encounters 16-bit or 32-bit data.
> 
> Robin
> -
> Robin Rowe
> CinePaint Project Leader
> Beverly Hills, California
> www.CinePaint.org
> 
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