[Promotion] free desktop contests

[Martijn Klingens]

On Saturday 25 February 2006 12:45, Thilo Pfennig wrote:
> A jury should look at:
>  * how fast is somebody getting a result?
>  * is the result really what it should look like?
>  * how good is the overall quality?
>
> To make it more difficult (I think this would only make sense after
> release of GIMP 2.4) the task also could be to print the results and
> to see how good these are.
>
>
> What do you think of it?

You also need to take into consideration the question "can the result be 
achieved at all?", to which the answer for both Krita and Gimp will 
unfortunately still be "no" for professional work.

If we leave aside GUI issues, retraining, lack of plugins and company support 
and all that there are still numerous areas where the Free apps lose out.

Think of:
* Color models other than RGB, and ideally also other than CMYK, including
   gamut warnings when converting
* Color separation, also when e.g. printing
* Non-bitmap layers with e.g. text or vector objects
* Decent ruler support including snapping to layers
* Decent support for paint primitives
* Color profile support
* High-end print support
* More than 8 bits per color channel

And those are just *basic* features that when missing will instantly rule out 
paint apps for consideration. No matter how good they are, if any of the 
above lists "no", it's not even worth considering for graphic pros.

Now, Gimp 2.4 will improve on support for this, and the upcoming Krita 1.5 in 
KOffice 1.5 will have even more of the above supported than Gimp, but neither 
of them is ready to take on Photoshop yet.

Both teams need to continue development and one day they'll be ready. Not 
right now.

Ironically the healthy and open competition between Gimp and Krita has no 
doubt improved the pace of development a lot more than Photoshop, it's no 
coincidence that very soon after Krita announced CMYK support the Gimp people 
merged the experimental plugin in the main tree and started to improve on it. 
Dave Neary (of Gimp) and Boudewijn Rempt (of Krita) have a lot of contact 
with eachother and that is a very good development to see.

And if Adobe doesn't release a Photoshop for the free Linux and BSD desktops 
soon they might not even need to. At the current pace of development I expect 
Krita to be quite close to Photoshop by the time the KDE 4 version comes out, 
and I would expect Gimp (which I don't follow as closely) to be on a similar 
level by then.

Then (and only then) we can ask the media to do new reviews of Gimp and Krita 
vs. Photoshop, and then (and only then) we can hope to see people moving 
over. By then it's also worth to do actual marketing. Currently it'd be a 
waste of effort.

-- 
Martijn