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GIMP now handles RAW format and 48bits/pixel

N

Nick_S

Troglodyte
Users of open-source software may be interested to know that the long-awaited version 2.6 of GIMP has been released. This incorporates an extended graphics library known as GEGL which allows 16 bits for each channel of RGB, direct importing of RAW format, non-destructive image editing and appears to use an extended colour gamut known as scRGB. It will be interesting to see how it develops as an alternative to Adobe Photoshop.

More details and compiled binaries are available for downloading here:

http://www.gimp.org

Nick
 
I just got a thousand images in RAW format from the pro photographer who covered my wedding a few months ago (Nikon 35mm and a Phase1 Mamiya 645 back) so I'll do some experimenting with these when I get the chance.

Nick
 
Hi Nick, I was wondering how your GIMP experience turned out? I'm expecting delivery of my D40 today and am busy getting to grips with software. It would be good to hear feedback on GIMP's new features.

Cheers,
Carl
 
I haven't had a look at GIMP for the last 10 years, back then I got horrified for life by all those windows. Does it still look that way ?
 
It is quite an awful bit of software the few times I have tried it. Especially as the latest photoshop elements is like forty quid. I know its free but.
 
hacker said:
Hi Nick, I was wondering how your GIMP experience turned out? I'm expecting delivery of my D40 today and am busy getting to grips with software. It would be good to hear feedback on GIMP's new features.

Cheers,
Carl
Click to expand...

Hi Carl

At the moment I'm spending my time getting familiar with film scanning using a recently acquired Nikon 5000ED scanner. Since I'm scanning in wider colour gamuts than are available with the narrow sRGB color space, I've been sorting out bits of useful software that are aware of tagged icc profiles. For everyday image viewing I have settled on Irfanview with the colour management plugin for TIFF and JPEGs. This was considerably faster with large images than the Fastone viewer which can also be set to correctly handle icc profiles embedded in images. Irfanview correctly displays images in ProRGB colour space, avoiding the corpse-like skin tones that one gets when the icc profile is ignored.

Now I plan to move onto evaluating GIMP for image editing. Once thing I'll be looking into in the new GIMP is whether it can handle other working color spaces than the (admittedly very wide) scRGB it uses by default.

Garyi, I disagree that it is 'quite an awful bit of software', the user interface is different from Photoshop, but it has been successfully used in the motion picture industry, for example. Here is some information on Film GIMP (now renamed as CinePaint):
http://www.desktoplinux.com/articles/AT7096363910.html

Another open-source image editing package that appears to handle 16 bits per colour channel, icc profiles and RAW files, which may be worth looking into is Krita, available for Linux:
http://www.koffice.org/krita/


Nick
 
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