Hi, Patrick McFarland <unknown@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > Erm, dunno why this didnt reply to the list. To those who missed > stuff, I asked "Is it easy to add 16-bit per channel support to > gimp?" the answer was "No it isnt." > > But yeah, Film Gimp has issues. The xcf loader plugin doesnt work at > all on x86 (known bug) so thats why I turned back to Gimp to see if > I could get it here. (I do all my graphics artwork in Gimp.) > > This might sound a little dumbassish on my part, but why wasnt > 16-bit support added earlier? As far as I know, even Photoshop 6 > doesnt have this (and when in native 16-bit mode, I cant get it to > do layers at all.) And, yes, its hard to do now, but it wouldnt have > been as hard in gimp 1.1 when it was in heavy development mode. Now > of course, this would force all gimp 1.0 plugins to break (assuming > the majority didnt already.) it does indeed sound dumbassish. It also this sounds like you are volunteering to contribute. Why haven't you done that when 1.1 was in heavy development mode? Why don't you do it now? > Though, my method wouldnt break any plugins, however. Any plugin > accessing the data would get back 8bit values because the layers are > still in 8bit mode, its only a higher precision rendering engine > that would be added. 8 bit goes in, 8 bit comes out, but its 16 bit > in the middle. (And yes, when dealing with 20+ layers, all doing > things other than Normal mode, and sometimes bringing the darkest > color below 0,0,0, and the lightest color above 255,255,255, it > comes in handy.) we don't really care about the plug-ins and there will probably always be such an 8bit compatibility mode like the one you suggested here. The hard part is to do the necessary changes to the GIMP core. Since there are effectively only a handful of developers working on The GIMP and the code base is huge and used to be chaotic and fragile, this is not a trivial job. It will be addressed as soon a 1.4 is out. Well, actually someone could start to work on the 2.0 core based on GEGL right now while we are busy to finish 1.4. Salut, Sven
