High res gimping

dmouritsendk · Posted: Sun Apr 11, 2004 2:01 pm Post subject: High res gimping

My cousin dropped by for a visit last night, and he brought his newly acquired Canon EOS-1DS camera (he's a professional photographer). Needless to say I had to try and fire up the new gimp, to see how it handled pictures at insanely high resolutions. And also give him a chance to play a bit with the gimp.

The good:
Good set of features, good RGB color rendering, great filters collection and he also really like the level of customize-ability of everything.

The weird:
Some of the filters seemed to have problems at really high resolution, for example sparkle, it didn't sparkle much when using it on a 4064 x 2704 picture.

The show stopper:
No CMYK support

After we where done gimpin', he wanted to see how Linux handled big CMYK PDF files. So we connected his usb2 hdd and grabbed a catalog he just finished doing for a traveling agency. With the humble size of seven-hundred-something megabytes.

Gnomes PDF viewer froze/crashed instantly the minute we tried to zoom, change page or just about anything. So we gave ggv a run and came to these conclusions:

The good:
The redraw speed after a page was loaded was apparently impressive.

The bad:
The loading speed when changing pages where mighty mighty long, a good deal longer than he used to on his(slower 2.4/533, mine is a 2.4/800) windows machine. I figure this must be due to ggv is doing pdf to postscript conversion.

The awful:
the colors where off by a bit, enough for it to be unusable for him.

We didn't try Acrobat Reader for Linux, but both expected that it would feature what needs from a PDF viewer. But anyways, gnome's PDF viewer needs some work. He asked if I though that the people developing gnomes PDF reader could be interested in some 700MB+ professional quality CMYK PDFs containing a huge amount of high res graphics, since he would be willing to supply them with some. I could imagine that the gnome pdf people have access to stuff like this already, but i could be wrong(What do you guys think? should he mail them?)

All in all, he was very impressed with Linux as a desktop. He really liked nautiluses Image collection view and he was very impressed with the general speed of the system. Especially burning a CD and being able to continue working in other apps without feeling a hit from the burning impressed.

In the end of the day, he really wanted to move to linux. But he still feels he needs to run Photoshop and InDesign, since no real alternative presently are available. Since I never tried using wine, I couldn't really answer his question on how big the performance hit would be. So, I'm turning to you guys. Have any of you used Photoshop and Indesign with wine and how do they run compared with a native win32 system?

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Apr 11, 2004 3:00 pm Post subject:

dmouritsendk,

You say the coulurs were off. Did you have your monitor set to the correct colour temperature?
If thats wrong, photos look gastly. If you set it right for photos, most other things look gastly (to me anyway).

WINE - You ned to try it. The performace hit if your choosen apps work at all, will be very small to negative (some Windows apps are faster on Linux+WINE than on Windows).

Wine Is Not an Emulator. It lets the applications x86 code run nativly on the processor but picks up the Windows API calls, does whatever needs doing in Linux and returns any results to the app, just as windows would do. Not all API calls are implemented yet.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

dmouritsendk · Posted: Sun Apr 11, 2004 3:48 pm Post subject:

AgenT · Apprentice Joined: 18 May 2003 Posts: 280

Did you know that GIMP, at least 2.0, has CMYK support through plug-ins? At least that is what I read somewhere...

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Apr 11, 2004 5:42 pm Post subject:

AgenT,

GIMP 2.0 is in the unstable feed now too.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

AgenT · Apprentice Joined: 18 May 2003 Posts: 280

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Apr 11, 2004 6:45 pm Post subject:

AgenT,

Yes that's right.

I was getting my terminology mixed up with Familiar, which is linux for handhelds. Sorry about the confusion.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

tihkal · Apprentice Joined: 28 Feb 2004 Posts: 225

I've never used it (In fact I remembered it as FilmGimp) but have a look at Cinepaint.

CMYK is in the pipeline by the looks of things, but it is designed to handle HUGE image files both in terms of resolution and colour depth.