(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Hey all. I have good news for anyone who's interested in photography or cinematogrophy. I just got Cinepaint to work in Puppy. I've been trying for weeks without success.

For those who don't know, Cinepaint was originally a branch of Gimp called filmgimp. It's primary purpose is in motion picture production, where it is used to retouch films frame by frame. It is of interest to still photographers also because it can work on images with higher bit depths than Gimp. Gimp can only handle 8 bits per channel, whereas Cinepaint can do 8, 16, or even 32 bit floats. What this means in practical terms is that any images that require more than average color or tonal correction can be much more effectively rendered. Lower depth images that have undergone "heroic corrections" often have banding, or abrupt transitions in tone that should be a smooth gradient.

Cinepaint certainly isn't as powerful as Gimp for many tasks. Gimp has more options such as filters, plugins, and scripts than just about any application other than Photoshop. Cinepaint can, however fill a crack in the workflow for people who demand high quality images. I found it indispensible when I was first making the transition to linux and have been missing it ever since.

I got this working by grabbing a tarball from MYDSL. I don't currently know how to make an unleashed package, but I think I'll try making a dotpup that registers with pupget like I just did with XnView. This one's a little more complicated so it might take me a bit more time. Will keep you all posted.

Nathan

Good job Nathan I was just about to ask what facilities Puppy has for video production . . .

good luck with the dot pup - very much look forward to this

the Xnview dotpup is excellent incidentally

Okay this is definately going to take some time. There are 117 individual brushes to add to cinepaint.files in .packages. That doesn't even scratch the surface as I still have to add gradients, plugins, pallettes, and the list goes on and on. This makes me appreciate all the more the work that has gone into the various projects going into Puppy. My fingers are sore from typing but I'm going to press forward anyway. Just don't expect this to be done any time soon.

Also, Lobster, consider Cinepaint more of a still image editing program rather than for video use. Hollywood uses it to retouch scanned film frame-by-frame. The difference is that it has a feature to work on sequential images. I'm not sure how that part works as I haven't used it. The documentation is a little sparse since it's such a new program and has been used up until now almost exclusively in a production situation. That is changing however. There is currently a Debian package available and DSL users can easily experiment with it via MyDSL. There is also a near complete Mac version. The program is very useful for still images for the reasons that I mentioned earlier. At one time there was talk that it could turn into the next version of Gimp, but they were working in two different directions and that idea got scrapped. I feal that it was a big loss and that at least some of the features should have been added to Gimp several versions back.

Sorry this has ben a rant
Nathan

All right I think that I have a fairly good version ready now. If anyone would care to give it a try I've put it on m server. I have to caution you that this is quite a bit more complicated than my first dotpup and there's more of a chance for things to go wrong. I'd recomment trying it out on a fresh pup001 file until I'm a little more sure about it. I have to stress that this is BETA. I've only tried it once so far.

This version does register with dotpup. It can be run from the command line but I haven't tried to put in menu entries as that's getting more complicated what with four or five different window managers running now. I have it set to open up /usr/bin when you install and you can drag the executable to your desktop if you want to make a shortcut. I think it's pretty good but I'm open to any and all suggestions for making it better.

url:
ftp://ftp.texasangel.biz/cinepaint.pup

Nathan

I found a bug already and just fixed it. I had a symlink named wrong causing a failed dependency. New version is at the above link.

Nathan

I declare the current release to be ready for prime time.

Nathan

I am having prob with connecting at the moment

Testing is one of the easiest ways we can offer support for moving Puppy forward

I hope others will download and test

I'm still tinkering with this at the moment. Everything works as it should but I'd like to get it to add an entry in the start menus. Bear with me as I'm on a steep learning curve. When I'm done with it I intend for it to integrate seemlessly with Puppy. I've had a couple of downloads but so far no feedback. If you've tried it please give me your thoughts.

Nathan

After dissecting several other scripts to find the way to get it done, I put together a script that adds Cinepaint into the menus for fvwm95, jwm, and icewm. I haven't incorporated it into the main installer script yet, but I'm going to post it here for anyone who has tried out the program and wants to have it available in their start menu. The script has an option that keeps it from registering twice. I plan to incorporate this into all future dotpups that I make. If there's any problems, let me know.

Nathan

PS-I want to give Papaschtroumpf credit as this script is based very closely on part of his pinstall script for Betaftpd.