On 11/14/2010 04:53 PM, Liam R E Quin 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. > Let's apply Paretos's rule. 90% of users use 10% of the code. 10% of users uses 90% of the code. > 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 :-) :-) > I did that a long time ago to clean up a disk full of obsolete utilities. Got very few requests to put some things back :-) > As for, which filter to use on a photograph, it depends on the > photograph, on the lighting that was used, on the subject matter... > Yes, proper filtering requires a lot of education. And there is little pupose of giving people a whole toolbox (that they have to carry around) if they don't know how/why they could use some of the tools inside. > 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. It's popular because it's the better bang for the buck. But the Gimp defaults are a bit too much for me :-) > "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. > We are in full agreement on this. _______________________________________________ Gimp-developer mailing list Gimp-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
