The GIMP - can it open 16bit TIFFs yet?

[xpatUSA]

there are many applet extensions for Photoshop which integrate to provide the user with alternative (usually higher quality at the cost of slower performance) image operations; those were two brand names that I could think of.

Explains my ignorance - I don't use any Adobe products, being rather Adobephobic

spurred by your interest, I installed a fresh Windows virtual machine to try out Partha's latest build and see about adding those environment variables. I see that he's built in a theme which looks very PS-CC inspired! Also, most every worthwhile community filter plug-in or process is also included default. For the purposes of trying it out, everything seems to work really great, apart from things that are still "not ready" like the cage transform tool (which can very easily be pushed to breaking). I added the environment variables very quickly and easily but couldn't determine if they were working, being that I was running this was inside a virtual machine and the performance reporting was a bit funny, and that I didn't bring any really big files into it because I built it with some reasonable constraints on its resources.

a final suggestion I would make for getting started is to look over a few videos on YouTube by a guy called Patrick David ( he's made a few which are good quality compared to 99% of software tutorial videos on youtube).

Thanks again for your continuing advice, greatly appreciated.

Ted

[andy.k]

just as a follow-up for the doubters and those unaware of what gimp is and where it's going, here's a blog post on libregraphicsworld.org from one of the core gimp developers, Alex Prokoudine:

http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/gegl-gets-mipmaps
covers all the goodies and a few things I was unaware of (like The Grid being a project that another core gimp developer, John Nordby, is involved with)

[Damon Lynch]

Alex Prokoudine has written an interesting post marking Gimp's 20 year anniversary:

http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/gimp-is-20-years-old-what-is-next

Many congrats to the Gimp team, present and past!

[andy.k]

wanted to bump the thread again for the announcement of a semi-stable "technical preview" release, v 2.9.2!
having run the development branch for nearly two years now, having just updated today there was another
extremely serious performance bump. I'm not sure if this is due to better mipmap usage, or some measure
of further GEGL optimization.

just tried the build from http://nightly.darkrefraction.com/gimp/ (here are the links for the 32-bit and 64-bit Windows
 versions) in Windows 10 (via virtual machine), and the first boot up is quite slow because it builds the font
data-base, but seems to be okay after that. However (!) I've noticed just how janky the standard panel and
menu setup is. I'm appending the contents of my sessionrc file, which I think sets up GIMP closer
to something that makes sense for a Photoshop user (whose main activity is editing photos). In a Windows
install, this file lives in ...\gimp-dev-x86_64-2015-11-27\etc\gimp\2.0\sessionrc and you can merely cut and
paste the text below into this file and see if it works for you.

Perhaps the thread needs a video tutorial for the curious (but low on motivation) for how to set things up to
be more familiar for a Photoshop user?

edit: the contents of sessionrc are obviously ugly and too long. here's a download link to it instead, just copy it into the correct directory and save over the original.

[Lundberg02]

Will GIMP open a 16 bit TIFF or not?

[Damon Lynch]

Will GIMP open a 16 bit TIFF or not?

While a few advanced features of GEGL such as non-destructive editing are planned to be exposed in GIMP at a later development stage (v3.2 and onwards), with 2.9.2, you can already benefit from certain aspects of the new engine, such as:

• 16/32bit per color channel processing
• Basic OpenEXR support
• On-canvas preview for many filters
• Experimental hardware-accelerated rendering and processing via OpenCL
• Higher-quality downscaling

Additionally, native support for PNG, TIFF, PSD, and FITS files in GIMP has been upgraded to read and write 16/32bit per color channel data.

Source: http://www.gimp.org/news/2015/11/27/gimp-2-9-2-released/