I've been using devel versions for a long while now and have to say I I'm quite unhappy when the new save system. Before the change collegues were impressed by the ability to just add the extension to the filename to save in the desired format, it was a real feature. Some background on my usage: I work in an architects office and do a lot of viz as well as the ususal preparation of photographs and other images for publications and presentations. This means doing both heavy (50 layers or more) images for sizes up to A1 and simple tweaks to photographs and other images. The performance of Gimp is unfortunately not good enough for very complex and large format work and there I have to use PS. In my spare time i do a fair bit of web design, mainly for personal and free software projects, but I have previously worked as a web designer. I'm also an amateur photographer, whose pictures have been published in magazines and books. At home all my computers run Debian and has done for years. At work we are obviously a windows shop and have the full Adobe suite installed. I'm quite fond of Gimp for some tasks and switch between Gimp and PS. A few years ago the main reason for using gimp was the startup time and the ease of saving to various formats. Perfect for small tweaks to images. Then some of the tools developed and the perspective correction and the Free Select Tools surpassed PS. Both very commonly used by me so that was great and made me push the use of gimp into more complex task at work. So the tasks I do is: 1. Large complex, multilayered collage type images aiming for close to photorealism. Often painting shadows etc. 2. Adjustments to photographs, curves, sharpness, size perspective corr. 3. Lo res images and graphics for websites. 4. Preparation of images for use as textures, bumpmaps etc for 3d visualisation software. I mainly use Blender and Luxrender. The thing is that of all those tasks only no 1 could potentially benefit from the safety feature of xcf only save. But even there it actually gets in the way. I've never accidentally lost work due to saving in the wrong format. And I'm in my mid 30's having done graphics for ever ;) Task no 1 is often based on images prepared using 2,3,4 beforehand. This means that a *vast* majority of saves and opens fall into categories where xcf seriously slows you down. 2,3 and 4 were the tasks gimp used to be perfect for but it has now lost that advantage and due to the save, export, overwrite design it's now more complicated than PS and very confusing. As mentioned I really like Gimp and I'm grateful for your hard work. I understand that the vision is for Gimp to become great at complex tasks as no 1. I'd just like to emphasize that in my case, and I believe it will be the same for others, way more saves (and opens) will be to jpg,png etc than to xcf. Regards -- TWFB - PGP: D7A420B3 _______________________________________________ gimp-developer-list mailing list gimp-developer-list@xxxxxxxxx http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer-list
