[CALUG] [baltolug] Gimp Image Program

[Bryan J Smith]

On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 11:21 AM, Ron Swift <rswift at swiftstaffing.com> wrote:
> I am looking for someone with Gimp experience that would be interested
> in working remotely to support my company with a Photoshop to Gimp
> conversion of several files. The files were created by an ad agency and
> some of the layers and fonts do not appear when opening them directly
> with Gimp 2.8 running on Ubuntu 12.10.

Fonts are usually simple to deal with, especially if the ad agency can
provide you with a list, if not the font files, in case they are not
available publicly.

Layers can be many things.  There are a lot of extensions and plug-ins
in the Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, etc... ecosphere you won't find
anywhere else, some even proprietary outside of Adobe itself, but they
just target Adobe's API/extension/plug-in stack.

E.g., were some of the shots taking with a camera?**

> In addition, I would like to have the same person give a presentation on
> Gimp at a future Ubuntu-Maryland Loco meeting.

Going into the various extensions, plug-ins, etc... that exist for The
GIMP would not only be several presentations in itself, but that still
wouldn't really cover the expectations of 1:1 mappings from Adobe
Photoshop, if they exist, let alone likely don't work different, or
are completely owned 3rd party and even Adobe itself doesn't have the
code/IP/info.

However, fonts and other coverage would be helpful in a presentation.
Heck, one could have a presentation on Fonts themselves, from Adobe
Type 1 to the current OpenType standard post-TrueType et al.
generation.

-- bjs

**P.S.  Regarding extensions for cameras, which is a great example of
"real world" extensions and editing layers/meta ...

There are a lot of proprietary extensions and support for various lens
and other meta from the shutter are only found in Photoshop because
Canon, Nikon and others consider them trade secrets.  Pentax
standardized on Adobe DNG as a peer RAW in all cameras awhile back,
and has published a lot of information for its lenses and Adobe DNG
which also maps to its Pentax PEF format, but not everything is there,
or not implemented outside of Photoshop, Lightroom and others --
especially since Canon and Nikon are dominate, especially outside of
Japan (which is Pentax's only heavy market).  The author of DCRaw has
been very vocal about this industry-wide problem.  But more and more
the information is being discovered for all models.

At least that is one thing I used to regularly run into myself.
Living in Florida I switched to Pentax for build quality and options,
like weather sealing, a long time ago (once they finally got on the
digital bandwagon), and found that to be a "bonus" once I ran into
lens-specific, meta-specific details.  I used the now defunct,
Java-based byte code, multi-platform LightZone (it was $99 when I
bought it, and well worth it) and have switch to open source Darktable
[1], but those are more Lightroom solutions, and not going to give you
the type of editing that Photoshop does.  There is just not a good
end-to-end set of solutions that Adobe has with Lightroom, Photoshop,
et al. that has a base API/extension/plug-in framework that can follow
an entire workflow.  In my case, I don't do much editing, just
touch-up from 12-bit RAW DNG or PEF, so LightZone and now Darktable do
the job.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darktable


--
Bryan J Smith - Professional, Technical Annoyance
b.j.smith at ieee.org - http://www.linkedin.com/in/bjsmith