Re: [CinePaint] cinepaint vs Gimp

Bob Friesenhahn <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.video.cinepaint.user
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On Fri, 12 Jan 2007, Frank Peters wrote:

> magnitude into a highly polished form.  That Cinepaint even exists
> at all is, to me, a worthy accomplishment.  After all, Cinepaint
> was the first comprehensive Open Source package to venture into the
> realm of higher bit levels.  It's lack of absolute perfection can
> only be blamed on a lack of participants in its development.

Interestingly, the Gtk widget set was originally invented in order to 
support development of the GIMP.  The Gtk widget set was designed to 
work efficiently with the display systems of the time and its 
inventors never considered a need for more color depth or range than 
one could see on a computer display.  The GIMP extension mechanism 
depends heavily on Gtk.  The GIMP is a victim of its own success.

Supporting higher bit levels is not difficult if the imaging software 
decouples its internal image representation from the display image 
representation as a basic requirement of its design.  This has an 
obvious performance/efficiency impact but the level of pain diminshes 
as computers become faster.

Photoshop used to be bound to 8 bits but managed to (painfully) 
introduce support for more depth across many release cycles.  It seems 
that Photoshop's success is due to brute-force development (i.e. more 
algorithmic special cases) fueled by being the market leader.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
[email protected], http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/


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