TAM
KDE has not serious paint tool? I thought they had one when I was working in Linux some years ago.
Maybe I mix things here.
I do a bit of digital painting and can’t wait to see what 2.8 has to offer on this front. It’s going to be an evolution, but the Gimp roadmap looks good (like the Blender one). For now I don’t mind 2.6, it doesn’t crash (OK maybe once a year) and has a great plugin repo if I need something.
I’m not using it myself and so can’t speak about its performance and depth and amount of feature in comparison to GIMP, but i have heard that Pinta was a project for a multi-OS clone of Paint.NET and so had a Linux version.
Looks like Pinta still got some work ahead of them. Krita is better. Looks like I may just need to learn it.
I wish GIMP devs would smarten up.
Tam
for Paint.net might VirtualBox not be an option? You will a win license, but I made
good experience with virtualizing other OS on the same hardware.
Krita has always been a bad and crash ridden experience for me…probably my fault for running under gnome but other kde apps fare ok!
Gimp has been my major 2d application and when paired with inkscspe and mypaint I’ve found myself well covered…
It’s interesting that throughout this thread ‘pro’ (non) users complain about the interface so much whereas in the blog link from the second poster it’s predominantly engine issues…(32 bit)
A classic case of damned if you do, damned if you don’t!
Personally I’d agree with the blog… UI changes are cosmetic in this case whereas gegl support addresses functional barriers…
Barriers that are run into a lot less often than you might imagine… many pro photographers shoot jpeg but just don’t admit it…
Justin, I feel your pain when you needed to do 32 bit displacement map editing… for that the open source world doesn’t cut it…
I short though, I agree with jay. Roadway is good, but even if Gimp was PhotoShop right now people would complain that it isn’t aftereffects…
Could you try Luminance HDR (http://qtpfsgui.sourceforge.net/) out? Version 2.0.2 pre release out last month. There is a Windows and a Mac binary, however, I don’t do compiles, prefer stable repos. Apparently provides Digikam with 32 bpp and can save in OpenEXR. Sadly Krita is moving towards painting only and dropping photography tools. GEGL looks great on paper for non-destructive abitary bit depth. So far, not so. Just bought myself a camera with RAW support (Samsung EX1), just waiting on delivery, and was impressed with HDR Expose, but I’m skint after new camera, monitor and GPU and I run on open sauce. Looking at combining multiple images with differing exposures and settings into single HDR images, thus the EX1. Would have preferred a Canon D12 though. The truth is, as you mentioned, is that photogaphers, sadly even professionals do not use RAW files. I am a photolithographer, now computer-to-plate specialist for almost 30 years and the quality of digital still has a long way to go to match film, IMO mostly because of the jpeg format, the higher the compression rate the better it seems. ALL my origination is infected with jpeg artifacts, except from one single client who recommended Aperture/Photoshop combined with HDR Expose.
That is your feeling not mine but there is nothing wrong with that. The only thing I remember that for our needs gimp was (and the last time I looked still) inaqudate and slowed us down. That it may be good enough for certain tasks could be, but for us that was a wholeother matter.
That pro’s shoot with jpegs could be but from those moments something needs to printed at a press you will do backflips if you can use ps over the gimp
I don’t know if GIMP has the same macro facilities that PS has. I am able to set up different profiles with different sets of processing instructions for different photographers/clients really quickly. When the photos come in, I can quickly send them through the macro and process a whole card’s worth in minute or two. Doing that manually would take you an hour or more.
I don’t think that Photoshop is perfect, it has suffered from feature bloat recently. I love version 7, but the CS versions have tended to be very slow and clunky.
Completely on the flip-side is InkScape, which is just a joy. I’ve used it on several pro logo assignments. It isn’t as fully-featured as Illustrator by any means, but it is perfectly usable for most stuff.
Ditto, TeaMonster.
gimp has nice scripting features which can be used for macros. as far as i know that’s more powerful than what photshop can do? or does it support a scripting language in newer versions too?
can’t paint.net be run with mono? i think i read a post about this on miguel de icaza’s blog.
edit: http://code.google.com/p/paint-mono/
i also still like photoshop 7 most. 
i don’t really need the new features of the CS versions and they feel slower and more bloated.
Photoshop has a built in macro system.
You just click record, do your stuff, and stop recording. Done.
I dig PS CS5 most.
Some features are just awesome:
i use gimp quite often for all basic things like croping, resizing, curves and so on. i really like it for those things, but i don’t use it for photo retouching, painting or more complicated things for reasons you already mentioned.
at work i once wrote a little bash-script that would feed a running gimp instance with script-fu. it re-encoded all PNGs recursively within a folder and optimized its size. it outperformed PS regarding the final PNG file size (even if you use save for web) quite a bit, was pretty quick and worked without even needing up a GUI.
i feel very happy about the coming (and optional) one-window mode. once gimp also supports higher dynamics, HDRI, non-destructive editing and CMYK i think it has the potential of being a real threat to PS, at least for non-powerusers and semi-pros.
The limited bit depth problem with the GIMP was a shock to me. I was always wondering why I was experiencing so many problems with gradients. Truly not something I deal with enough though.
I’ve learned to deal with the program, but it needs work all over. I would like to continue to use it, and eventually give back to it some day.
That is good for me than. I’m personally after a paint program. MyPaint is my preferred app at the moment - but I’d like it ideally to have a lot of the same features as photoshop and painter. In time I guess.
For you photographers - have you guys fooled with Darktable? I think its pretty fantastic.
http://darktable.sourceforge.net/
Looks like Krita is it. Looks promising. But it still needs work, feels like a very old version of painter at the moment IMO.
ugh. Yeah its pretty sick.
But I’ll be honest. I’m new to blender still (though it’s been over a year now) and I remember looking at it 4 years ago and thinking the other apps were so much better and it still needed work.
Look at it now! I love this app. It surpases the others in some areas.
GIMP, MyPaint, Krita and others just need some love!
The latest 2.7x testing build that one of you guy’s linked to seems to be much improved, although I find the brush engine rather strange, the single user mode really does make all the difference.
One reason why I love using Blender is due it’s layout, which can all be contained in one main window, no horrible floating windows, unlike other applications (Max, Maya) where you have windows on-top of windows, and it quickly becomes messy. This is what I went through with the older versions of GIMP, and it put me off. I haven’t faced the technical limitations yet, as I don’t use it all that much, but like anything development needs to be taken one step at a time and the user interface is a good a place as any, GEGL is being worked on, it looks to be partly available in the 2.71 build, although I’m not sure if that’s working fully.
I should also add that Photoshop could take a note out of Blenders book for some operations, like the smear window occurring directly on the canvas, instead of in a separate window, things like that would just make it more streamlined.
Why is it such a pain to get pre-combiled versions of GIMP for linux?
Blender has a great setup with the download options. Why don’t the gimp devs do the same?
They might actually get more users interested.
I am not sure which professional Photographer shoots in JPG
maybe those who come and do shots with 500 $ equipment.
Those I worked with have cameras more expensive then my
computer equipment by far and shoot only in RAW.
Michael
there are people who complain about the interface and it is a valid comment.
However quite many also argue about the lack of speed, color depth, and CMYK.
Last three for me reduced Gimp to an image cropper in its curent stage.
krita 2.3 which just was released is mcuh better for painting in my optinion… it’s rock solid too, i haven’t had a crash since the 2.3 version has been in alpha/beta.
not sure if people are using old krita and rating that. either way, the latest krita is awesome, give it a shot if you haven’t ever or in a long time.