[CREATE] Questions and reflections about gradients

[Alexandre Prokoudine]

On 11/4/10, Olivier BERTEN wrote:

> * I don't see the point in Foreground/Background colors
> <http://www.mail-archive.com/create@lists.freedesktop.org/msg01272.html>
> ;-) I see even less the point in having gradients swatches defined with
> Foreground/Background colors... This is a "feature" you can find in
> Photoshop and Gimp gradients. For sure I don't see how it would be
> useful in an exchange format...

Inkscape doesn't have FG/BG colors in gradients, even though we were
criticized for that some months ago (the discussion was in
inkscape-devel@) :) IMO, "start" and "end" are the best you can get
really. FG/BG are just common conventions many people got used to.

But even for gradients fg/bg and start/end don't have to make sense.
If you look at Mandelbulber's Shaders tab, you'll see a kind of
gradient that controls coloring of a 3D fractal. The concept of start
and end is quite washed out there.

> * I think the "segment" concept of Gimp isn't really interesting since
> the position of a segment start has to be the same as the end of the
> previous one, and in 99% of the cases, the color is the same too. For
> the 1% left, you can create another stop at the same position.

OTOH things like blending function and coloring type for segments in
GIMP's gradients can be of use.

> * Is there any free software dealing with noise gradients?

Not that I know of. Noise gradients are entirely a Photoshop thing to
the best of my knowledge. I have to admit though we haven't looked at
any of Corel PSP's assets (mostly because the installer doesn't wish
to work on wine out of box).

Alexandre Prokoudine
http://libregraphicsworld.org