Google is funding work to ensure the Windows version of Adobe Systems’ Photoshop and other Creative Suite software can run on Linux computers. “We hired CodeWeavers to make Photoshop CS and CS2 work better under Wine,” Dan Kegel, of Google’s software engineering team and the Wine 1.0 release manager, said on Google’s open-source blog. “Photoshop is one of those applications that desktop Linux users are constantly clamoring for, and we’re happy to say they work pretty well now… We look forward to further improvements in this area.”
Well it’s worked in WINE for quiet some time but honestly, the newer versions are really for pros, you can do alot of great stuff in Photoshop 7 which works great in WINE.
Sometimes I do wonder why people want Photoshop in linux using WINE, it’s a complicated app, it can do amazing things but mainly at the hand of a professional. If you just want to edit your photo’s use GIMP and I do 99% of my artwork in Inkscape now since vectors are more the thing with Linux DE’s. I dont know if This will bring more professional artist to Linux or what but I guess it’s one more app you dont need Windows for if it works well in Linux.
huh? Photoshop is not the sole province of “pros”, I really beg to differ here. That really is serious misinformation.
There are huge differences between CS2 and Photoshop 7, both in terms of RAW file support via ACR (Adobe Camera Raw), liquify filter (great for getting rid of blubber on modelling shots), smart sharpen (more intelligent in sharpening than the traditional USM) and a host of other stuff that just doesn’t jump out at me yet.
CS2 has NOT worked for a long time on wine, try having a look at the winehq logs and you’ll see what I mean. The last few releases of wine have had Photoshop CS2 working, but there are extra steps required, and it doesn’t work out of the box.
And no, as good as the GIMP is, it is no Photoshop replacement, and is quite poor in many areas in comparison imho.
Dave
None of the point and shoot type cameras support RAW, so you really need to be at least a camera geek to own a digital SLR or something that uses a RAW format.
Yeah I sure photograph a lot of models… This is a prime example of something only professional photographers do.
Not something the average camera owner is likely to use.
If they don’t need any of these, why bother with a graphic-editor at all? Most amateur photography tools are supported in simple apps like Picassa or iPhoto. Hell, many cameras have built in functions for these tools also.
JPEG sharpening is the cause of many issues (as is the compression tool used), at least “in camera”. There is far more control over sharpening, contrast, exposure in software, than in camera.
As to sharpening not looking right, that’s because you’re probably doing it right. Oversharpening is one of the largest causes of an image looking bad, and it’s because people don’t take the time to learn how to effectively use the sharpening tool.
Photoshop is like anything – you have to *take* the time to learn how to use it. If you do, it’ll give you the results. I’m speaking from personal experience here, since I used to HATE Photoshop with a passion, and couldn’t understand how to use it. When I went digital, I made myself learn the basics, and I’m so glad that I did.
Dave
I agree with the sharpening thing. In fact, I don’t touch the sharpening, because it always makes photos look dodgier somehow..
However, whilst most your point and click cameras don’t support raw (canon’s at least because they wont to upsell people to a DSLR), the Panasonic Lumix LX2 http://www2.panasonic.com/consumer-electronics/shop/Cameras-Camcord… does.
I have one myself as I see so many dorks with massive DSLR’s around their necks at party’s, and you know that they aren’t really the party type instantly. Its 10.2 megapixels (widescreen) too (so 7mpixel 4:3). It fits in my pocket perfectly, so its for your normal crowd who need to be flexible (even many photographer buffs own both a SLR and a normal camera).
But either way, you are right mostly, but I’m personally hoping the Lumix’s take off, because they are a great camera, and whilst the IXUS’s are undoubtably the most popular camera at the moment, they only store stuff as jpg, making them mostly useless. And Canon’s older models used to support RAW too. But now, they are just using it as an excuse to upsell..
Anyway, where were we? ^_^
Parties are one of the places where DSLRs are most useful. Mostly because they can shoot in low-light : a typical party is indoor, with relatively low light, so the capability of DSLRs to produce noise free pictures are up to ISO800 or even ISO1600 is paramount. Also DSLRs can be fitted with wide-angle, low minimum aperture ratio primes. You like wide-angle because in a party you’re among the people you shoot and you don’t want to have to backup too much to get your frame. You like the low minimum aperture ratio for the same low light reason.
That depends on if your goal is to get the best possible pictures or if your goal is to socialise, have fun and perhaps take a couple of snapshots.
Most party snapshots aren’t destined for 8×10 prints, but 640×480 jpgs that you email to some or put on a webpage, and quality is irrelevant as long as you can make out who’s on the picture and what (or who) they’re doing.
Edited 2008-02-20 22:01 UTC
Wrong – many of Canon and Nikons P&S support RAW format. It is becoming far more popular now. Processing RAW files is not that hard.
As to photographing models, you don’t have to be a professional to do that. Even photographing a loved one is good enough reason to use some of the Photoshop CS2 tools to make them even more appealing if you want to.
True, most average photographers don’t use any software at all, they just simply shoot jpeg in camera and export to the PC and display. Generally speaking, the jpeg format has sharpening, and that’s why half the jpeg images look bad. jpeg is not a good format for displaying images, png is far better.
Your argument is moot though, as most people wanting Photoshop CS2 to work under wine (indeed using any version of Photoshop) will be more than likely using some, or all, of the tools that I’ve mentioned.
I really like non photographers trying to tell I, and most of my photographer friends use/do etc.
Dave
<snip>
This last comment about jpeg format having sharpening and png being a better format for displaying images is utter rubbish. First jpeg itself does not have any sharpening, if I shoot RAW and export to jpg using one RAW-converter or the other without sharpening, there will be no sharpening. Now the problem with many P&S cameras who only do jpgs is that they process the images in camera quite significantly, i.e. sharpening, strong saturation and noise reduction (much more a cause for bad looking images from P&S cameras). BTW some of the camera manufactures (i think Canon and Nikon both) started to apply sharpening to the RAW file, so you can’t get rid of it. Reason being that strong saturation, sharpened images tend to look better on screen where most people look at it, however prints usually look horrible.
With respect to png being the better format than jpg for displaying, rubbish again. png was never designed to replace jpg, it was designed to replace gif. You can’t even compare jpg and png, because jpg is designed to be lossy, i.e. you loose information but get a smaller filesize. Photographers who want a lossless format usually use TIFF.
I’ll deal with each of your comments one by one.
Yes, I should clarify, by default, jpeg settings “in camera” generally have high a high degree of sharpening by default, and with a lot of digital cameras, it’s not possible to reduce that sharpening.
I stand by my comment that PNG is a better file format than JPEG – for the simple reason that any photographer who is really worried about image quality will not sacrifice it due to file size. Of course, old habits die hard…
As to RAW files, I believe it was Nikon that was not really producing real RAW files. As far as I’m aware, a Canon RAW file is RAW data. True, most modern Canon DSLRs have the picture styles, and standard/natural both have sharpening added to the RAW file. Canon allows you to change the picture style to something like neutral, which does not have any adjustments to sharpening or contrast. I shoot neutral on my 1D Mark IIn for this very reason. Hue/saturation is also defaulted to “neutral” as well. Canon isn’t exactly super clear on the subtle differences between standard/natural and neutral, but if you bother to do a bit of reading of the online help of DPP, you can easily find the answers. The problem is, most people are lazy and don’t like doing research.
Dave
About png <-> jpg. It really depends on what you want to do with your pictures. If you want to display them on the computer/online, I’d always go with jpg. It’s way more convenient. If I need to transport it for printing, I’d use tiff, because I’m more confident that the different printing services can deal with it. And using LZW(?) compression they are smaller than png files as well.
With respect to sharpening on RAW files. I don’t remember the details, but I there were several threads about this on the dpreview forums. On the higher model DSLRs (your 1D is definitely one of them
you can turn it off. It might have been Sony where you couldn’t. But as I said this is just hazzy memory.
Yes, that sounds about right, typical Sony
Dave
Haha. You are going to get in trouble when your girlfriend finds out you felt the need to remove some of the “blubber” from her with photoshop. “Here honey, I’ll take your picture, but I’ll just spend a couple hours photoshopping it to make you look better”.
Right, and that’s what you were talking about. Only pros and camera geeks need highly complex image editing software. Normal people are fine with no software or whatever basic stuff came with their camera.
Complete BS of course as others have already pointed out. Perhaps you mean that some cameras perform automatic sharpening. That has nothing to do with JPG.
Depends what the purpose is.
Sure, and they are probably pros (or people that just want the latest and greatest for no good reason).
np
Edited 2008-02-20 22:46 UTC
Actuallt there are a fair few that do. The Canon PowerShot S60, PowerShot S70 and their G series of cameras support it. Fuji F700 and F800 cameras shoot Raw. Panasonic and Leica have a few etc.
Most current camera geeks where camare geeks back when cameras used film. Digital SLR does not in any way indicate computer or photoshop geek. Most dSLRs are probably in the hands of amatures and not pros.
In my spare time, I’m the owner of LSG, Hegre and FEMJoy. I’d normally not have time to post here with all the “perks” of ownership, but I’m truly spent and need to recoup. Nothing like downtime to get a man’s energy up and ready to blog.
‘huh? Photoshop is not the sole province of “pros”, I really beg to differ here. That really is serious misinformation. ‘
Of course it’s not just for Pros. That’s why there are filters in Photoshop
Edited 2008-02-20 08:49 UTC
I’m not saying GIMP is a replacement but for the desktop user it is and does it’s work good enough. Why on earth would the average desktop user want Photoshop to do simple photo tasks and spend ^Alb400 on that?
Photoshop is more of a pro’s app, other same apps can do the same thing for free, so I dont see why non pros even need it(unless you need it for your training at collage). I’ve used Photoshop/image Ready years ago to do icons in WINE and it was a buggy and somewhat unstable, I doubt a professional would rely on WINE to much, what if updates break it because Adobe dont need to fix WINE so it runs their updates.
Edited 2008-02-20 10:37 UTC
Your argument falls apart once you accept the simple reality that to most average desktop users Photoshop and gimp cost exatly the same. Once you’ve accepted this you realize you have to comparing PS to the other apps purely on features and useability. Once you do that you start to understand why so many people chose photoshop over the ‘cheaper’ apps.
Good points – unfortunately, some open source people love to shove open source software down everyone elses throats, whether we like it or not. They cannot, or will not see why sometimes, proprietary software is a better option. I personally have a heavy dislike for both capitalism and proprietary software, but I’ve learnt over the past few years to accept it and use it to my advantage. In a perfect world, I’d love all software to be open source and released under the GPL, but alas, due to human greed, that’ll never happen.
Dave
Well, the fact that many people pirate Photoshop doesn’t meant that people *should* do it. For those people who want to use a capable photo editor tool that’s both free AND legal, Gimp is a good alternative (so is Krita, by the way).
Saying that cost doesn’t matter because most people pirate PS is not very far from condoning software piracy. I seriously hope that’s not what you’re implying…
It’s got nothing to do with condoning and everything to do with accepting market realities. Gimp and all the other alternatives competes with pirated Photoshop, no two ways about it. And most people don’t have any ethical problems with casual piracy.
In fact one of the best thing that could happen for the advancement of open source would be that Microsoft, Adobe and Autodesk where to take a serious zero tolerance approach to piracy across the board. Of course the people who run these companies are smart enough not to do that.
dagw,
Sadly, you are absolutely right.
…and they won’t as long as their tech-oriented friends continue to provide them with access to pirated software, and do not make the case that they should really *buy* software if they want to use it.
Also, using cracked software downloaded from the Internet is a great way to get your PC hacked. I’ve found that telling this to casual pirates is a good way to convince them to go legit – especially after telling them I wouldn’t help them clean up their computers if they installed pirated software.
I use Fireworks at home, and at work the gimp. After having to use the gimp for half a year I see why real designers prefer to use prop. software.
Having to go through five or six dialogue boxes just to save? Everything detached and floating… always where you don’t want it.
Trying to edit text is a nightmare, or even just saving an image with transparency. Anyone who thinks gimp is comfortable to use or even great at what it does has obviously not actually done much real design work. Real design work does not mean making horrible psudo-aqua over rendered buttons or resizing your porn pictures so that you can see everything in one screen.
On other sites lots of people go on about the filters for GIMP and how great they are… filters are not used by professionals in any app. There for making dumb effects that have no practical purpose or use in professional design aside from allowing your mum or dad to do stupid things to their photographs
Thanks for your comment. I strongly agree!
Photoshop is not a “pros” application. I see people from beginner to intermediate to advanced to pro using it. That’s a broad generalisation that is sadly very wrong.
What about Elements? It’s very powerful, cheap as chips, easy to use and suits a lot of people.
Then there’s paintshop pro – itself a very good application, that is also quite cheap.
Now if you really want to talk pro applications, then something like Phase One’s Capture One Pro is something like you’re thinking…few amateurs can justify spending it, unless they are SERIOUS about their photography. A lot of pros use it, although many have migrated to lightroom (overrated imho).
The argument really lacks substance – why do people buy Lightroom, instead of using a free raw editor like RAW therapee? Or dcraw? Performance, features, ease of use, accuracy all come into play as valid reasons.
I don’t know why some GIMP users get all up in arms when Photoshop is recommended over the GIMP. Are you that afraid that if Photoshop is made to run reliably on Linux, that people will leave the GIMP in droves and move to Photoshop under wine?
As to bugs with Wine, that’s not Adobes fault, so don’t bash Photoshop because of that. Bash wine if you must bash someone.
Dave
So what is Elements for then?, they created it for the user who dont want to get deep into Photoshop. If your wanting to create artwork on a professional level then PS is for you, it’s not for general computer users who just want to do some effects and some photo editing/cropping.
If your friend ask you to recommend a app that edits photos and some effects, would you say get Photoshop BTW it’s ^Alb400 or elements which is ^Alb50 and easier to use?
They will only leave GIMP because they may know Photoshop better or have a copy, but if people can warrant the price of Photoshop to do simple things that other apps like GIMP does then go right ahead. When I used to use Windows I used GIMP for the simple things like photo editing and compression, thats my point.
Edited 2008-02-20 14:48 UTC
Actually, illustrated has always been regarded as a better application when dealing with computer based art. It allows for vector based manipulation of graphics that, up until at least cs1, photoshop was not meant to do.
Another option for that was fireworks which was geared towards web based graphics creation, but now that Adobe owns all macomedia applications, I don’t know how that works either…i no longer have a need for those applications professionally.
Photoshop elements is $100 maximum. It does most of what you consider everyday users need and is significantly less than the newest Photoshop CS.
The differences on a non professional level are minimal and the cost, while not free
http://graphicssoft.about.com/cs/photoshop/f/elementscompare.htm See that for a comparison between Elements and Photoshop.
If you just want to edit your photo’s use GIMP
I’m a professional web developer and I find it frustrating to use GIMP, even for the most simple of tasks. What frustrates me even more is the fact that GIMP can do 99% of the stuff I need but fails badly in the UI department.
If I were in charge of GIMP development I’d stop any kind of development and concentrate all forces solely on UI redesign.
I don’t believe that the GIMP UI should mimic Photoshop’s, or any other program’s for that matter.
The best idea would be to make it exceptionally customizable by using some sort of themes that would rearrange everything – the menus, the palettes, the keyboard shortcuts, the toolbars. If I come from Photoshop, I simply choose the Photoshop theme, if I come from Painshop Pro, I choose that theme, if I like the current GIMP UI, I choose the Classic GIMP theme and so on. This way people who want a Photoshop look-a-like get what they wish, and people who want the old GIMP are still happy.
If they actually managed to do that, Photoshop wouldn’t be needed anymore on Linux, maybe except for print work. And anyway, it’s better to have a native, reliable application than Photoshop running through a compatibility layer.
If it is just a matter of removing red eyes, resizing pictures or doing mundane stuff, free software such as the GIMP is more than enough. The casual photo editor does’nt need to spend $$$ on Photoshop just to do that.
Now if someone is looking for a 1rst class application, then spending the money on Photoshop can be justified.
One does’nt need OpenOffice or MSWord to create a single page document. Most of the times a simple application like Abiword will do.
I agree that the GIMP’s UI could be made more intuitive and straightforward, but keep in mind that it comes from a command-line philosophy.
I’m not sure know how the ability to use Photoshop on Nixes fits into Google’s strategy, unles they plan to release their own GNU/Linux flavor at some point.
Edited 2008-02-20 15:19 UTC
That’s the main problem of GIMP. Just put a newbie in front of both GIMP and Photoshop, ask him to do some image manipulation and then see which program he would prefer and find easier to use.
I hope GIMP would have a major overhaul in its GUI department, trying to improve things from the usability point of view instead of just throwing in more features without a good overall design.
GIMP has the features most people need but it often fails in design and usability.
KDE’s graphic app Krita is actually quickly getting better than GIMP in many fields.
Edited 2008-02-20 17:16 UTC
Have you tried Gimpshop?
That gimpshop website is a joke or what ? there is 2 millions ads on it and no infos whatsoever on what it is.
What do you mean, millions of ads and no information? Are you sure you found the right GIMPshop website..?
See here: http://www.gimpshop.com/
More information and related links here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimpshop
Didn’t work on either Windows or Ubuntu
What you describe would probably not be very hard, technically. You might head down to http://gui.gimp.org/index.php/GIMP_UI_Redesign and see if you can make some contribution, even if it’s just the ideas in this post.
I’m sorry, but amateurs also need more than the red eye removals tools. As long as the Gimp developers will restrict their app to only photo editing stuff, how do you expect graphic artists to consider it seriously?
2D graphics are not just photo editing. It’s like saying that a 500$+ machine is only able to produce letters, browse the web and remove red eyes on pictures. Amateurs are also painters, they like to do things more creative than editing family pictures. Ever heard of Deluxe Paint? TV Paint? How can we expect open source to attract the artist community when the tool we advocate isn’t up to par with 20 years old applications?
Photoshop, along with Painter, is used daily by thousands of amateurs to produce beautiful drawings. Trying to do that in the Gimp when the tools are castrated by keeping the app’s development only focused on photo editing is like trying to paint with a log. You can do it, but it’s tedious and painful.
And even though I also use Inkscape intensively (and there’s more chances to see Inkscape address graphic artists needs thanks to their open minded and productive developers), it’s not there yet, it’s not sure it will address these needs either, and if it does it will take more than a few years due to its vector nature.
AFAIK gimp is not focused on photo editing, quite the opposite, it is more focused on icon/web-design. At least originally. I think photo editing is also the area where it is most inferior to photoshop. I don’t do any icon design stuff, but I’ve been told by numerous people who do that gimp is actually quite good at it, and not much inferior to photoshop. A lot of people have also moved on to do vector based graphics for this stuff, so the moved away from photoshop/gimp to illustrator/inkscape.
OK, open up a blank document in GIMP.
Using a paintbrush, draw a simple Y shape.
Now, draw an oval selection marquee around a portion of the center such that you have three rays of the Y inside it.
Take the paintbucket tool and position it inside one of those empty spaces. What do you expect to happen when you click the tool: the ray is filled, but only the ray because the selection marquee is supposed to also function as a boundary?
Instead, all three areas are filled inside the selection because the fill algorithm doesn’t treat the marquee as a boundary. No other well-known image editor has this problem, even the original MacPaint from 1984.
This was brought to the developers’ attention before 2.0 was released. After getting to the actual code maintainer, his response was that the bucket fill algorithm was “too optimized” to modify: i.e., the source code isn’t documented and they can’t understand it well enough to touch it.
Believe it or not this is a dealbreaker for some of us, firstly because it is a basic functionality (selections are boundaries, not just masks) and secondly because it says too much about how GIMP devs prioritize bugfixes.
Maybe some professionals would prefer to run Photoshop on Linux rather than Windows or Apple.
It’s nice to be able to run Photoshop in Linux, although:
– Pros will stick to the Mac (or Windows). I don’t see pros using Photoshop over WINE with Linux.
– General users will not use Photoshop because it’s too expensive (and will stick to GIMP that shops with many distros for free).
In the end, a very limited number of people will benefit from this, but every bit helps
Not from my experiences as a photography, and as a member of a very large community of Canon photographers – both pros and amateurs alike. Many fellow amateurs are going for the full Photoshop, rather than elements.
Running Photoshop under wine on Linux means you don’t have to worry about Windows licensing costs, and you have a more secure, productive environment to boot.
I currently use XP, but I can honestly say that if they can get CS2 working under wine well, and add DPP and capture one pro (expensive raw processing software), then I’ll switch back to Debian full time, or at least high amounts of usage. In the interim, I’ll be doing a triple boot on my new PC that’s due to be built – xp pro/vista 64 bit ultimate and Debian.
Dave
You just proved the previous person’s point. While I admire your tech prowess, your skills are not typical.
It’s not just that…when I see comments like this, it reminds me of why there aren’t more commercial apps for Linux. “I only boot into Windows to play games” or “I only boot into Windows to run Dreamweaver”, etc. I understand where you are coming from but if you want to make a difference, you have to stick to your guns and as long as your willing to boot into Windows to do anything you give software companies one less reason to work on a native app.
Yes, I could do that, but native Linux applications do not do what I need them to do, to the level of quality that I need.
I personally would love Adobe to port Photoshop to Linux, and in reality, there’s no real reason why they can’t do it. OS X has less users worldwide than Linux on the desktop, and if they can port to OS X, then they can sure as hell do it for Linux. They just won’t do it, because the GPL scares them.
It’s not my fault Adobe and others are plain idiots.
Dave
“OS X has less users worldwide than Linux on the desktop” – Really? Any figures to back that up? Or are you making it up to suit your needs? Quoting visitor statistics from one or two technically-targeted websites doesn’t count, by the way.
The aforementioned triple booting is not that hard.
1. Install XP first.
2. Install Vista. Vista’s new bootmanager will automatically take care of it and XP.
3. Install Linux last. Most distributions will pretty much automatically detect and setup grub correctly, with little, or no input from the installer.
Note: You do have to partition the drives first of course…that is in itself, harder.
Dave
If you’re looking for a good photo editing software for linux, have a look at lightzone (http://www.lightcrafts.com). Quite different approach, but I found it much more effective than the traditional way. They currently have a beta for linux, hopefully they either decide to make it possible to buy the linux version also, or keep the free unsupported beta.
I wouldn’t be so sure. Pros are the first to hate a tool that is cumbersome, unstable and doesn’t work like expected. Windows is great for the office minded persons, but you’ll find that most artists can’t bear its deficiencies (and man, no decent virtual desktops support – do you think professionals are that happy to use Alt-Tab and juggle with their windows? Desktop space is scarce, your boss wallet won’t afford 3 30′ screens for everyone either).
Since not all of them will want to go Mac, that leave a huge proportion quite willing to try another solution.
That’s so much easier..
Extra licenses? More resources used?
————-
And yes, for point and click stuff and quick editing, GIMP will do the trick (and sometimes, Pain.NET in Win32)
Uhhhhhh …. odds are, if you already have Photoshop for Windows, you have Windows. :-p
Not necessarily. VMs don’t have to commit physical memory until it’s actually required.
Most people have a Windows OEM license that came with their computers. The license does not allow installing th e OS to a virtual machine, so you do need another Windows license even if you paid for your existing one when you purchased your computer.
Having Photoshop on Linux is also great for movie editing studios that may want to retouch certain frames and it integrates well with those using Maya on Linux.
Is good that Google will fund for improve the Wine/Photoshop combination.
But, why not to invest money to improve the Gimp or Krita that are open source applications instead of creating a non-native port of a commercial application?
Google isn’t a charity. They talk a good game about open source, they use its resources, but quite frankly, they’re more interested in trying to hurt their primary competitor — Microsoft — any way they can. That means trying to take away Windows customers — and move them to Linux. Otherwise, they’d do as you suggest and fund GIMP et al. But that would have the unintended consequence of helping Apple, which isn’t in Google’s interest, either.
Edited 2008-02-20 04:39 UTC
Most mac users Iv’e known, and artists in particular, seem to hate using gtk apps in osx. It’s possible my experiences might not be typical, but for what it is, even a gimp with more features than photoshop wouldn’t temp them away as long as it was gtk based.
That could be because there was no native GTK port for OSX. Imendio has done a lot of work on integrating it with Macs recently – they removed dependency on X11 (it’s using Quartz now), added OSX menubar support etc.
GTK can become more visible on OSX in few years, mainly thanks to Mono.
I have to add something as this was posted just moments ago
http://people.imendio.com/richard/archives/2008/02/native_mac_them….
If your statement is true, I wholeheartedly await their paying the DirectX developers in WINE to get us up to speed.. THAT would be the single biggest slap in the face to Microsoft they could do IMHO… Gaming is THE area Microsoft have no one else in competition on the “PC” platform, and is indeed one thing that holds people back from using *nix alternatives.
Don’t you worry, Google does fund parts of the KDE projects through Summer of Code.
But, ability to run latest photoshop on linux is one of the greatest markerting stunts. Wine benefits. Linux benefits. People continue to use the free graphic editors and not by the overpriced trinkets from the Church of Scientolo… i mean Adobe.
Google will probably also win because 5 of its employees can now draw the google art in photoshop on linux.
I don’t see a single bad part to this deal.
That’s great and everything, but it would be better if Adobe were to pick a distro and develop CS3 for it natively rather than having to use Wine. Of course debates would flair up – which distro/package to use? Red Hat, SuSE, Ubuntu, Gentoo, etc… But any of those would be a big win for Linux.
Why pick a distro? Why is this always brought up?
It’s not *that* hard to support multiple distros nowadays — google earth can do it, opera can do it, adobe reader can do it, commercial games for linux can do it — so why shouldn’t photoshop be able to do it?
What puzzles me everytime is why adobe doesn’t port photoshop for linux. There’s obviously a growing market of professionals that are moving to linux, and adobe doesn’t seem to have anything to lose with the move (they don’t sell OS’s nor hardware).
They have money to lose. They would have to pull people off other projects and/or hire new people with the right skillset. Then they have to hire and train a support staff on the new version. Non of that is free. They’ve probably done the math, and worked out that they probably won’t sell enough new licenses to make it worthwhile.
Actually, if done right, they only have money to gain. At least in the long run.
IMHO, they should make Photoshop cross platform by porting it to KDE4. If they did that they would only need to maintain ONE port which would work in Linux, OS X and Windows.
It is regularily used as an excuse by companies to hide the real reasons why their products are not available for Linux.
It i so widely used because it actually looks valid and so it is being repeated by others.
Actual reasons are usually things like huge, totally unportable codebases, contracts/licence agreements, already being at the limit of your development resources, etc.
It is quite obvious companies wouldn’t want to disclose those.
They might have decades old licence agreements with a Unix vendor who licences prahics know-how, e.g. SGI), effectively prohibiting them from releasing such software for X11 systems.
They might have decades old legaly code bases, effectively makeing “porting” an almost totaly re-write.
They might have separate development teams working on the Windows and the Mac OSX versions instead of having one team work on all platforms, effectively resulting in the need of a third team to do a Linux version.
As I said above these are not the kind of things companies want to have to admit publically, so they rather ignore public demand or answer with well tested, reasonable sounding excuses.
This will hopefully improve when their next generation software will require consolidation of their development efforts anyway and have them look at 21st century development options like multi platform application frameworks.
Ever heard of native software like http://www.pixelimageeditor.com or teh Gimp?
Edited 2008-02-20 09:47 UTC
Pixel: yup, I actually shelled out for this “cross-platform” kit, and found it lived up to that claim at least: it crashes constantly both on Windows and Linux. The bugreports I raised haven’t had an answer in nearly two years… I still don’t know how other people have such good experience with this POS
GIMP: I think previous posters have covered quite comprehensively the downsides of GIMP (or at least, why it ain’t no Tattyshop). And on a purely personal note I still find the UI fugly.
If Google want to throw some cash around, they should help out the Mono hackers who are working on porting Paint.NET (rumour has it this is nearly done already, mind). PDN is a terrific photo editor, maybe not on a par with Tattyshop, but its featureset is growing all the time and it has a UI that more Windows-refugees will be able to get their wee heads around.
Pixel: yup, I actually shelled out for this “cross-platform” kit, and found it lived up to that claim at least: it crashes constantly both on Windows and Linux. The bugreports I raised haven’t had an answer in nearly two years… I still don’t know how other people have such good experience with this POS
I have only tried out the trial version, but I actually liked it very much. Atleast I like it a LOT better than Gimp
I just find the UI so.. Well, it sucks :/
I see using Wine to run Photoshop on Linux as a step-gap anyway.
Right now it is possible to do high quality RAW processing and 16bits post-processing in Cinepaint for top quality digital photography – all with OSS. (my blog on that: http://jcornuz.wordpress.com )
With GEGL integration seriously going on in the Gimp as well as some UI work, I want open source software for my photo workflow – and save the cost of a PS license to buy a new DSLR…
Take care,
Joel
Why does the GIMP come up in any of these discussions? The GIMP is a horrible, horrible program, and better options exist on linux for casual users, like krita. The GIMP trys to be a pro app, but is a good decade behind the real pro apps, including in the UI department. Photoshop is usable by anyone with a basic understanding of how graphic apps work, but because of its poor UI design, it is hard to find a usage scenario at all where the GIMP is a good idea.
It doesn’t try to be a pro app at all, are you saying it can’t do what GIMP stands for or saying you dont have the skills to do it?
So please tell me why I use GIMP to adjust photos and compress so they can sanely load on the web, thats what GIMP does, how can you say otherwise?
It does try to be a pro app, and fails. Krita trys to be a prosumer app, and succedes, and Kolourpaint trys to be a casual app and succedes. That is what i am saying. If you are trying to target a casual or non professional audience, you don’t need the complexity that the gimp embraces. As for skills, I am not a professional designer, but I am a professional web developer, and am comfortable in photoshop, paint.net, paintshop pro, krita, illustrator, and inkscape. I don’t claim to be an expert with any, but I can get the job done with a minimal amount of headache. I consistantly find the gimp to be a pain to work with, and the output to be sub par.
I am not saying otherwise, I am saying that it doesn’t do it as well as numerous other alternatives do, and I question why the gimp always comes up when talking about photoshop when there are plenty of other apps out there that do a far better job.
Edited 2008-02-20 17:57 UTC
Plenty?, Krita is very slow, pixel is just unstable, cinepaint?
I dont see plenty at all and Inkscape is a vector editor, it’s got nothing to do with editing photos(pixmaps). GNU Image Manipulation program, thats what it does, if you dont like the UI then change it, panels can be placed anywhere, the tool box can be made thin like PS and have no tabs in it.
I don’t mean to go on about GIMP but I think your vastly underrating it for what it does, you don’t need a high grade app like Photoshop to touch photos and put layers together, if your talking about massive professional done images then yes but for desktop users who just want to make their photos work better on the web you can’t go wrong with GIMP.
Edited 2008-02-20 18:44 UTC
Coming from a person who has a Chuck Norris icon just sends shivers of awe down my spine.
Was Christie Brinkley’s icon taken?
Everything about chuck is hilarious. I tend to find internet comedy to be funny long beyond when most people move on (all your base are belong to me, i for one welcome our new <blank> overlords, in russia the <blank> <blanks> you!, the whole lolcat thing, etc). I am a fan of Chuck Norris in the same way that I am a fan of William Shatner, they are culteral icons that are so over the top they end up as self-parodies.
You! Cannot! Be Serious!!! We! Who! Lived! Through those Times! … Needed! To be! Entertained!
Moving from a Shakespearean foundation to 1960s TV could not have been easy.
And he did improve by the time the movies rolled around.
I’m more of a Leonard Nimoy fan. But mostly a Spock fan.
Just to testify of being one of the people who can profit of this. Doing research, we use Linux computers but still need CS2 for image preparation for articles.
– Rebooting is not an viable option (cross mounted shares, lost of service)
– Gimp as much as I would like is not yet offering the same level of usability for us.
Currently I am using vmware with xp just for CS2 – a stable CS2 under wine would be great. I just tested it with new wine, seems much better. Still some polishing to do but looks good.
Instead of wine, how difficult would it be to implement Apple’s APIs on top of linux?
It should be considerably easier, since the underlying OS and filesystem layout etc are very similar anyway. I believe linux already has (or had) the capability to run binaries from other x86 unixes, you might need to emulate quartz (or clone the libs that use it to target X11 instead), but I believe at least some of the work has already been done by gnustep.
For that matter, how hard would it be to get apple’s entire desktop environment running atop linux instead of darwin?
OS X apps need to run on HFS+ volumes, AFAIK. Linux support for HFS+ isn’t quite there yet.
So you say the GIMP UI sucks. I disagree, but let’s not argue. Krita has a much more familiar UI and a decent set of features. Certainly it is enough for at least non-pro users.
Step 1: Improve Krita to GNOME feature levels.
Step 2: Improve Krita to Photoshop feature levels.
Step 3: There is no step 3.
Step 4: Profit!
Where’s the down side to this scenario?
If we have to improve Krita to GNOME feature levels, we will have to start taking features out endlessly, but I have to concede that it will look pretty in the end…
Edited 2008-02-21 12:29 UTC
GOOGLE touts FOSS and helps a ton of projects, but when it comes to taking a shot at creating a broader market of competition into the Digital Imaging markets they hire drones to keep the status quo.
Krita? GIMP? Nah!
If this isn’t an olive branch to play well in the sandbox then Women are ready to have a Chick run the White House.
Edited 2008-02-20 20:59 UTC