CinePaint: Open source deep paint software

Version 1.1 release delayed after finding and fixing memory leak bug

By Robin Rowe

LONDON, ENGLAND (CinePaint.org) 2012/12/26 – The next release of CinePaint seems to have at least another week’s work for me to do. I’ve just about completed working on the libwire source files, but still have changes to the libbase and app directories to go. The task became larger than I’d scoped when I decided to fix all compiler warnings and unneeded library dependencies as I worked through the source files toward version 1.1.

What triggered that decision was a compiler warning that led me to find a nasty memory leak. That bug had been introduced by (more…)

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A look at upcoming features for the free open source deep paint program

By Robin Rowe

LONDON, ENGLAND (CinePaint.org) 2011/12/20 – When you take an old car and replace the engine and drivetrain with modern high performance components, it becomes what’s known as a “sleeper”. It may look like nothing special on the outside, but boy is it fast. If there’s a software equivalent to the sleeper, it’s CinePaint. CinePaint was created by taking an existing open source paint app and replacing its low fidelity 8-bit core with an image engine that handles 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit high dynamic range channels.

 

As I work on the version 1.1 release of CinePaint, I’ve been giving thought to what CinePaint may offer in the future. Because CinePaint was originally (more…)

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Valgrind as a possible solution for CinePaint developers fixing memory leaks

By Robin Rowe

HOLLYWOOD, CA (CinePaint.org) 2011/11/30 – We got a bug report today for CinePaint 1.0 having a memory leak when handling large TIFF files. To fix this we can look to the free Linux debugging tool Valgrind. Here’s the Valgrind Quick Start Guide. For Valgrind to work you need to build CinePaint with debug enabled.

./configure --enable-debug
make
sudo make install

It might be challenging to use Valgrind due to the way CinePaint loads plug-ins. The issue is that the TIFF plug-in spawns a process under Linux instead of being a DSO/DLL as implemented in the (not presently available) Windows version. Will Valgrind find it difficult to trace across a spawn? The leak is more likely in core than in the TIFF plug-in, so looking in the core may be sufficient. If not…

Building the Linux plug-ins as DLLs is on the to-do list. The obstacles with that are the many Linux build system changes necessary and that the DLL load code (that is in the CinePaint source already bracketed inside #ifdef WIN32), can encounter an endless loop bug. That bug is the main obstacle to a Windows CinePaint release. It may be that Valgrind can help bytracing that bug under Linux, rather than in Windows. The bug is due to a logic error from the retrofit of DLLs into CinePaint, not OS specific.

Memory leak bug to fix:

• Open a tiff file
• Crop
• Gaussian Blur filter
• Save As…
• Repeat this twice, and the tiff file module refuses to load

Exit and re-start and all is well again. The above scenario is particularly severe with 70mm film. Each frame is about 450MB. The machine has 6GB of memory. At times, the crash manifests itself as endless loop pegging a whole CPU at 100%. If the crash happens during disk I/O it may take several long, irritating minutes to kill because Linux is not very good at runaway disk consumers.

 

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Latest CinePaint source available to build on Linux

By Robin Rowe

HOLLYWOOD, CA (CinePaint.org) 2011/11/29 – This Thanksgiving release of CinePaint fixes many build errors and provides a source tarball that can be downloaded  and built on Linux-based systems. CinePaint is a free open source deep paint program that’s an alternative to software like Adobe Photoshop. This release of CinePaint is numbered at 1.0 rather than 0.27 for administrative reasons. It is not significantly different from 0.26. It has known bugs. Mac and Windows versions not available at this time. Report user experiences in the comments section below or on the mailing list.

Download cinepaint-1.0.tgz (17mb)

./configure
make
sudo make install

Updates since this was posted…

• Sent announcements to CinePaint-Announce, CinePaint-Developers, CinePaint-Users and LinuxMovies-General.
• Website bug fix: Rewrote ShowPosts() in WordPress template functions.php so comments can be posted to site
• Added News, Release and Events categories in WordPress
• Posted email feedback from testers as comments here

Photo courtesy of U.S. Air Force photo archive. Full size image.

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