On Sun, 2010-11-14 at 14:30 +0100, Ofnuts wrote: > [...] > Consider the amateur photographer and Gimp > beginner who wants to add some sharpening of a picture. What filter to > use? Sharpen? Unsharp mask? NL? Why does Gimp offers the three? What are > the differences? That's a bit of a culture shock when one comes from > Picasa.Putting the "Unsharp mask" one in a "Photo" submenu would already > be a hint. But sharpen is useful on images that are not photographs. I haven't done much with NL or Van Gogh myself, but any assertion that "no-one uses them" or that they are "not useful" must be backed up with some real data. There was a project gathering usage statistics on an earlier version of Gimp, maybe they have some data on that? Or make the filers crash when used and see if anyone complains :-) :-) As for, which filter to use on a photograph, it depends on the photograph, on the lighting that was used, on the subject matter... Unsharp Mask is popular partly (I think) because it makes a slight halo effect similar to some darkroom techniques, so that the result is closer to what you see in printed books. "Smart sharpen" is another interesting alternative, but has no preview and is slow. A better approach long-term might be to make it easier for people distributing gimp to package individual plugins or groups of plugins, and to have away to search and request plugins from within gimp, sort of like CTAN for TeX, CPAN for Perl, CXAN for XQuery. Then the core could have fewer plugins, with perhaps a primary add-on set, or a small group of add-on sets tailored to particular use cases such as "digital painter," "professional photographer," "photomanipulator," "scientific visualization," "scanning" and so forth. Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org _______________________________________________ Gimp-developer mailing list Gimp-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
