[lug] Wanted: Recommandations for HDD and Mem Upgrades for CU Freshman

[Lee Woodworth]

dio2002 at indra.com wrote:
>>       I'm in the M.Arch program at CU Denver and use these for my studio
>> work:
>>           OpenOffice, Inkscape, Gimp (loads much faster than photoshop),
>>           dcraw and ufraw for camera files, amarok for transferring mp3s
>>           to the ipod, Xsane for scanning, Kaudiocreator for ripping,
>>           and K3b for CD/DVD writing with a gui.
> 
> i'd like to hear more about your experience with the OS design tools that
> compete with Adobe Creative Suite.  I'm entrenched at the hip with adobe
> because it's my lifeblood.  i could move to open source but i'm
> comfortable in the adobe space i'm in now.  just curious how they stack
> up?

Don't do professional publishing, so I can only talk about what I observe.
I think ps (photoshop) has more options for dealing with production
printing (spot color, pantone). Gimp doesn't have as many options for
color modes (no CMYK or LAB) but can use color profiles (may be able to
work on individual channels too). Don't think it can work in >8bits per color,
although for printing may not matter since paper's color gamut was (still is?)
smaller than computer displays.

Gimp handles layers, alpha, layer ops (by pairs of layers), paintable masking,
paintable selection. Has a lot of useful tools, probably a subset of those in
ps: magic wand, scissors, paint (whole selection or by color) with an op (eg. multiply),
perspective correction (forward and backward), shear, rotate, scale, crop,
and clone. Can paint/fill with a pattern. Does a little bit vector handling
via bezier path objects (that can be stroked, and maybe converted to selections).
Can handle some tablets with a pressure sensitive stylus. Has a moderate number
of filters/brightness/color effects.

I used Gimp to produce a 24x36" board @ 150ppi using 64bit gentoo & 64bit compiled
beta version (2.4-rc1). Pretty fast and stable. Only found an odd ctl+scroll wheel
zoom out operation that crashed it so far. Imports raw image files from nikon d40x
via the ufraw plugin (allows for pre-RGB conversion adjustments such as EV or color
balance). In linux imports svg, eps, ps (maybe pdf) files and converts to a bitmap.

Inkscape covers a lot of the SVG 1.1 spec (see w3c.org for info).

Have to go now as I have a lot of work to do.