Re: [SLUG] GIMP (Was: Lenovo wins $150m NSW schools deal or April Fools joke?)

[Glen Turner <gdt@xxxxxxxxx>]

elliott-brennan wrote:
> I've never been shown the difference (as in, "here
> are examples of a photograph") and I don't know if
> most (the majority of) people would notice or care
> either way.

The difference is mainly apparent when using shades
around black. That's a part of the printer's palette
(ie, CMYK) where RGB lacks sufficient resolution to
describe all that the printer can do.  Getting silver
shades is particularly hard in RGB.

Also lacking in GIMP and Inkscape is support for spot
printing and multi-colour processes.  PANTONE is the most
common of those process -- it is commonly used to print
logos onto things.

In short, you wouldn't notice with photos, but if you're
trying for a moderate level of graphics arts on paper then
the lack of ability to describe all that the printer is
capable of gets old pretty quickly. As a simple example,
I had to ditch GIMP to get a "sun rising" effect on some
PR material I was preparing.

Similarly, the lack of PANTONE support sucks if you are
printing stuff like your sporting club's logo onto water
bottles or whatever.  I got particularly burned by Inkscape
having an error in the image flattening -- the image had
white over a gray spot, but this didn't flatten into a
hole in the gray spot, leading to Tasmania being dropped.

--
 Glen Turner