By Robin Rowe

HOLLYWOOD, CA (CinePaint.org) 2012/1/8 – I’m back from London. Had a great time there and productive discussions how to improve CinePaint.  While in London I received some suggestions for improving the website. The CinePaint WordPress template I developed from scratch so it doesn’t have the crud that many of the standard templates do. That makes it easier to make changes and faster to load, but also means more testing is needed to get rid of rough edges.

1. Make Twitter follow me banner smaller
2. Move sponsor links higher on the page
3. Instead of Google text ads run more banners
4. Try separating articles with something other than dotted lines
5. Make fonts more consistent(update CSS)
6. Check comments work on all articles
7. Place search bar consistently across pages
8. Fix so text doesn’t touch pictures
9. Link to Facebook page

Let me know anything else you notice.

By Robin Rowe

Monarch caterpillar, a bug that becomes a butterfly

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 a programmer no longer with the project who clearly didn’t understand how C memory works, that you can’t just keep allocating the same memory over and over every time a function is called . As a result, every time CinePaint code looked up the home directory of the user, it bleed a little memory. The bug was in a function that CinePaint calls a lot.

I’ve been renaming some CinePaint files and directories, which means version 1.1 will show up as a brand new version control upload. CVS gets unhappy about renaming things. There have been suggestions in the past to move to Bazaar or Git or Subversion, which everyone including me can agree are more modern and have more features. Unfortunately, the last I checked, these newer systems are not as well implemented across non-Linux operating systems or as well understood by typical programmers.

While I’m planning to stick with CVS on SourceForge, that doesn’t mean Bazaar enthusiasts are out in the cold. There’s a Ubuntu Launchpad developers page for CinePaint:

http://launchpad.net/cinepaint

It provides a bridge from Launchpad CinePaint Bazaar to the SourceForge CinePaint CVS. When I get the new CVS up on SourceForge that will show up on Launchpad in Git.

Savvas Radevic has been tending the CinePaint Lauchpad page, not that much is going on there.  If anyone has suggestions what should happen on our Launchpad page, let me know. Savvas has a CinePaint packaging page and says he can help with Ubuntu packaging.

http://launchpad.net/~cinepaint

Photo courtesy of Pseudopanax at wikipedia.org.

By Robin Rowe

Image from "How to Draw the Head at Any Angle"

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 based on the code of another open source project, even was intended by some Hollywood sponsors of that work to be version 2.0 of that software, very little was changed on the outside. There’s a lot I’d like to do on the outside of CinePaint, but first let’s talk about the inside.

CinePaint  Multi-bit Image Engine

CinePaint will continue to have a multi-bit engine. Some programs support deep paint by setting bittishness at compile time. You can have an 8-bit or a 16-bit core in ImageMagick, for example, but not both. It depends upon how ImageMagick was compiled. CinePaint has a true multi-bit engine where bittishness is chosen at runtime depending on the needs of an image. When you open a JPEG,  CinePaint will allocate 8-bit channels for it because that’s what the image holds. When you open a 16-bit TIFF, it will allocate 16-bit channels.

At present, CinePaint supports unsigned 8-bit, binary fixed point 16-bit, half float 16-bit and float 32-bit. That’s a lot of flexibility in channel allocation, but not quite as much as we’d like. OpenEXR files may contain unsigned 32-bit channels and TIFF may have unsigned 64-bit channels. It would be nice to be able to open those in CinePaint without a loss of fidelity.

Comic Book, Anime and Fashion Illustration, Heads at Any Angle

Adding to ideas expressed in an earlier story, it would be nice to have an interface that supports pulling images from a library of art created by the artist, such as having a character’s head drawn at many different angles. This would enable an artist to quickly drag in previously drawn elements to quickly build an illustration. It would be nice to be able to mirror clone when half of a face is drawn in order to quickly draw the other half.

Architecture

There’s a lot that could be done to make architectural drawing easier. One would be a cross-hatch brush that would draw parrallel lines at a fixed separation locked to the background position so that drawing later with the same brush will line up perfectly. The angle of the cross-hatch would be a setting on the brush. Another important brush for architecture would be a perspective brush that draws straight lines according to the horizon specified by the artist for the picture. At zero degrees it would become a railings brush and have no crossing lines. There could also be brushes that draw boxes with proper geometry per the background horizon. There could be a clone brush that copies with perspective, whether it’s drawing bricks or a window that needs to be repeated across a building.

Roto and Tracking

Adobe After Effects has an excellent auto-roto feature that will separate foreground objects from their background. Surprisingly, Photoshop does not. It would be nice if CinePaint had auto-roto. It’s not surprising that Photoshop doesn’t have tracking and image stabilization like After Effects. It would be nice if CinePaint did.

Colorization

There’s a plug-in for painting colors from a similar photo onto a B&W image. Would be nice to have that type of thing as a standard clone brush feature.

Slides and Sequences

CinePaint’s flipbook can be used as a PowerPoint-style slide presenter. That could be further developed. While you can load a sequence of numbered images in CinePaint, there’s no way to save that sequence as a sequence. It would be nice if it would.

Brushes

In addition to the architecture brushes already described, it would be nice to have brushes that draw borders and to paint Apple-style liquid buttons. It would be nice to have a bucket brush that bucket fills but will not seek out through gaps smaller than the size of the brush. It would be nice to have a “sloppy” setting on the brush the can exaggerate or reduce the jitter with which a line is hand drawn, something like in Smart Sketch. There could be brushes that draw flowers or any randomly repeating “image tube” as in PaintShop Pro. As the brush paints it lays down the next image (or flower) in the tube. Another nice brush would be a human pores brush that adds pores to portraits that have been magnified.

Magnifier

It would be nice to have a magnifying glass like Apple Aperture.

Meta-data

It would be nice to support such things as keeping accounting data for the time spent working on an image.

Vector Graphics and Type

Artists seem to agree that moving between Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop is inconvenient, that we’d rather do to one app to paint. However, mixing vector graphics and rasters gets messy. A solution is to put vector objects, including type, in a separate layer.

Adjustment Layers and Nodes

It would be nice to have adjustment layers, that is, layers that dynamically enhance the image below instead of changing the layer with a filter. Layers and nodes can be thought of like waves and particles in physics. They’re two ways of looking at the same thing and yet seem quite different. It would be nice if CinePaint displayed nodes.

Scripting

CinePaint has supported many scripting languages, but it hasn’t been a satisfactory user experience. Preferably, CinePaint would record macros/scripts implicitly and at all times like Apple Shake. That would be a better solution than the Adobe Photoshop macro recorder that requires the user to decide when to record a macro first. Taking scripts a step further, it would be nice to have a text-based way to create image files. For example, to be able to quickly snap together a color bars image from a text description of the sizes and colors of the bars.

Sound

CinePaint has a flipbook movie player, but no sound. It would be nice to have JACK support so external JACK-compatible sound tools like Traverso would play in sync.

High Fidelity Color

CinePaint has a RGBA color space by default. Work’s been done to support advanced color management and other color spaces such as CMYK in CinePaint. It requires a domain expert in the printing industry to really get this right. Enhancements provided by a German open source developer have been difficult for CinePaint users to comprehend. To advance in this area we first need a color expert who speaks English, someone who can explain to me what we really need in the color interface and who can test that we got it implemented right.

By Robin Rowe

Node-based interface in Open Movie Editor

BATH, ENGLAND (CinePaint.org) 2011/12/19 – I got together on Saturday with 3D Magazine contributing editor Jim Thacker at the Westgate pub in Bath, England. He’d asked to interview me for an upcoming story in 3D World magazine, which is produced by the same publisher as LinuxFormat magazine. Here are some of the questions he asked…

1. Whats the history of CinePaint’?
2. What prompted to you restart active development on CinePaint now?
3. Who’s currently working on the project?
4. What contributions are they making?
5. What contact do you have with staff at visual effects studios and are they actively involved in development?
6. After the current round of bug fixes, what new features are a priority for development?
7. How does it benefit the visual effects industry to have a serious alternative to Photoshop for texturing and post work?
8. Why is it better that this alternative is open source?
9. If you weren’t constrained by resources and legacy code, what would CinePaint look like?

What are the answers to those questions? Look for 3D World on newsstands the end of January to see.

We also discussed CinePaint in relation to proprietary tools like Mari and Nuke from the UK company The Foundry. Mari is a new 3D paint app that also does 2D paint. Nuke is the compositor that was developed by Bill Spitzak at Digital Domain (Michael Bay’s post house). Bill also created the open source GUI toolkit FLTK that CinePaint is transitioning to.

Something unusual about Mari as a paint app is it offers a node-based interface like Nuke. While more users may be familiar with layer-based compositing interfaces as in Adobe After Effects, many find a node-based interface more powerful. Offering both seems ideal. Open Movie Editor features both a layer-based and node-based interface.

By Robin Rowe

HOLLYWOOD, CA (CinePaint.org) 2011/12/18 – The  CinePaint Users Group held it’s first meeting at Peets Coffee, 258 South Beverly Drive, Beverly Hills, California, from 7pm to 8pm on December 12th. CinePaint project manager Robin Rowe was there, as was CinePainter QA advisor Gabrielle Pantera.

Most of the discussion was suggestions for upcoming design enhancements.

1. Save state. Save the state of CinePaint from the last time it was run so all files and windows can be re-opened automatically.
2. Be able to save these states as workspaces and display them as a “bingo card” window like many web browsers display at startup. Be able to pin thumbnails on bingo card so some workspaces are sticky. If not pinned, the most recent workspace is shown first as with web browsers.
3. Push workspace states to the cloud and automatically replicate files in order to be able to continue work from home without the drudgery of packing up files.
4. Add colorize plug-in.
5. Add FFT plug-in.
6. Add  C++ stack tracer and crash reporter to automatically report bugs when there are user crashes.
7. Add “Tracing” to the menu. This is for users intimidated by layers or who just want to save a little time when doing a tracing. Clicking tracing on adds a layer called “Tracing” and ghosts the underlying layers by increasing transparency. The user can see the underlying image well enough to trace over it. Clicking Tracing again sets it to off and hides the underlying layers so you just see the tracing. This was Gabrielle Pantera’s idea.
8. Add vibrancy brush that will intensify colors.
9. Add “Auto-contrast” to menu. This will stretch the dynamic range of the image similar to what a user would do by hand using curves or levels.
10. Add motion capability so layers can move across frames. Add a size/orientation component to layers so they can be resized or rotated without crunching the raster.

@lmpizarro

4 hrs ago

cinema open source cinepaint compiled in debian testing (wheezy) and debian stable (squeeze) @cinepaint with little modifications

@lmpizarro

4 hrs ago

Cinepaint se usó en películas como Harry Potter, El señor de los anillos, El último Samurai

@lmpizarro

4 hrs ago

Software libre para cine. Cinepaint se usa para el retoque/correción de película digital. Simil photoshop, con alta profundidad de color

@lmpizarro

4 hrs ago

cine con software libre, cinepaint compilado en debian wheezy (testing) y debian squeeze (estable). cc @nickmontaggio @delavegaDanielS

@pardusbugzilla

6 hrs ago

[Bug 8655] Cinepaint resim işleme programı paket isteği http://t.co/MCjKNymT

@pardusbugzilla

20 hrs ago

[Bug 8655] Cinepaint resim işleme programı paket isteği http://t.co/MCjKNymT

@emilbarbest

20 hrs ago

http://t.co/MdY1zUhM CinePaint and Deep Paint Software Design

@cinepaint

21 hrs ago

News: CinePaint and http://t.co/OWfFJkPl Meeting on December 12th http://t.co/doX22wxL

@cinepaint

21 hrs ago

News: CinePaint and Deep Paint Software Design http://t.co/Kwu5jvSe

@nancynlvnv

1 d ago

CinePaint and The DC Comics Guide to Digitally Drawing Comics: Excellent book by DC Comics illustrator Frederick… http://t.co/HafAuROO

@DhilipSiva_linx

Degrees of SeparationPost Effect11 d ago

#linux #opensource CinePaint 1.0 http://t.co/sPrwH7sn #DhilipSiva

Reply

By Robin Rowe

HOLLYWOOD, CA (CinePaint.org) 2011/12/9 – The Linux Movies Group and the CinePaint Users Group will be getting together for an informal  meeting at Peets Coffee, 258 South Beverly Drive, Beverly Hills, California, from 7pm to 8pm on December 12th. CinePaint project manager Robin Rowe will be there. There’s no agenda except to talk about Linux as used in making major motion pictures, CinePaint and possibly field some questions about programming in C++.

Linux is used for visual effects and animation in virtually every blockbuster film released in the past ten years. It’s standard at Disney, DreamWorks Animation, ILM and Sony. CinePaint has been used in making the Harry Potter films and many other pictures.

By Robin Rowe

Vitascope motion picture projector, marketed by the Edison Manufacturing Co.

HOLLYWOOD, CA (CinePaint.org) – 2011/12/9 – As we near our next release it’s time to consider what features future CinePaint versions may offer.  Whatever your painting tool of choice, whether that’s CinePaint, Photoshop, Aperture or something else, please take a moment to post to our comments section at the end of this story to share what you think a deep paint tool should do.

Back in September I had a dialog about the future direction of CinePaint and paint software with designer Ian Cylkowski, better know as Izo of Design by Izo. He also posted the question to his fellow Twitter design buddies as a design discussion on Google+.

Izo: For any FOSS image editor to compete properly with Photoshop, it needs, and this is just off the top of my head with my particular case usage…

• 24-bit image editing
• Support for CMYK colour profiles right from the start, plus image conversion from RGB
• Support for Pantone CMS
• Non-destructive editing with tools like adjustment layers
• Comprehensive font management and type options with support for kerning, tracking, opentype subsets, text columns, proper justification and hyphenation options and so on
• Easy access to additional brushes, patterns and whatnot
• Scalable brushes

It would be rad if, when loading CinePaint, it presents to a grid view of your most recently accessed CinePaint projects. Any important projects can then be “pinned”. Think of how Google Chrome’s startup page works.

Robin: Tell me more about working with type. Do you like Inkscape?

Izo: In Inkscape I can kern individual letter pairs, adjust tracking, word spacing, basic rotation and so on. It’s better than the state of type editing currently in GIMP. Inkscape doesn’t support OpenTypesubsets though for using alternative ampersand glyphs or variant ligature glyphs and appears to miss certain weights of a font sometimes, which is frustrating if you know it exists! Inkscape also doesn’t really deal with text columns nor proper paragraph hyphenation.

Robin: An idea for CinePaint is vector layers, to build some Inkscape-like features into CinePaint as a layer type. You’ll be able to reselect and manipulate text or graphics in a vector layer, not have it mashed into a raster as it is now.

Izo: Pantone CMS support in CinePaint?

Robin: We have some CMS features implemented. I don’t fully understand what we have. We need a CMS domain expert to tell us what needs to be done in this area.

Robin: What would you like to see first in CinePaint?

Izo: A good start would be basic adjustment layers like Curves, Levels, Colour Balance, Brightness/Contrast, Hue/Saturation, Invert.

Robin: Were you able to download and build CinePaint?

Izo: I have heard of CinePaint but I’ve never really looked into it or used it at all. All went well until the make process. See http://paste.ubuntu.com/682516/

Robin: Yes, I know. Working on it. Thanks for your input!

Since September the bugs Izo reported in the CinePaint build process have been fixed and made into release 1.0.  While building CinePaint on Ubuntu is working better, the next CinePaint release due for Christmas will address build issues with other distros and enable installing on Ubuntu from deb files, not require building from source. After that, we can start implementing some new features as suggested by Izo and friends.

Vitascope advertisement image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

By Robin Rowe

The DC Comics Guide to Digitally Drawing Comics, book has clues how to improve CinePaint

HOLLYWOOD, CA (CinePaint.org) 2011/12/4 – DC Comics illustrator Frederieck E. Williams II uses many digital tools for creating comics including Adobe Photoshop and Google SketchUp. While artists like Williams must operate within the limits of what their tools are designed to do, CinePaint has the flexibility to have new features added through open source programming. This video from Williams gives an overview the process of using a master page template to create comic book pages for comic book publishers DC Comics, Dark Horse, Image Comics or Marvel.  This process is much the same no matter what tools you use. Williams has a free template in TIFF format that you can use in CinePaint.

The technique Williams teaches is to start with a very rough drawing then refine it by adding layer after layer. The lower rough layers are used as a guide then turned off to disappear from the final drawing. The most significant layers are Rough, Breakdown, Wireframe and Inking. Rough is just a doodle. Breakdown has the proportions of the final drawing. Wireframe is the image as line art with no shading. Inking adds shadows and shading. There are many more layers than these, such as Script and Reference layers. The Reference layer contains reference art from the artist’s library or other sources.  The Gesture layer looks like a storyboard, with a page of the script on the left and four or five panels of sketches down the right hand side.

Stat backgrounds are reusable backgrounds that characters can be moved in front of after characters have been made into cut-outs. To add half-tones, Zip-a-tones are added to selections made with the Lasso tool. These are newsprint-like dot patterns. Another trick is adding motion lines, a layer with a series of lines radiating from the vanishing point toward the viewer. Williams uses Transforms with warp for such tasks as exaggerating perspective on buildings and fitting superhero logos (e.g., the Superman “S”) onto uniforms. Another way he achieves perspective is to draw backgrounds in 3D using Google Sketch. To keep perspective under control in 2D, Williams uses a Perspective Path. More in this video…

Seems like a lot of work for the artist to do This is a good example of something we could implement better inside of CinePaint.

Actions (recorded macros) enable Photoshop to repeat tedious tasks to save time for the artist. Actions can be mapped to a function key or saved to a file as a Droplet. Once it’s a Droplet, you can drop image files onto the to automate the same task across many files without opening them one-by-one. Having a good macro-recorder in CinePaint is something I’d like to see finished soon.  Work on that was disrupted by the GTK1/GTK2/FLTK GUI coding challenges. The plan was to take CinePaint from GTK1 to FLTK, and when that got delayed CinePaint adopted GTK2 in the interim.  All the GUI work was vastly delayed by build system obstacles from legacy code in CinePaint. Enhancements are being made to the build system to overcome that.

Photoshop CS supports using JavaScript, which Williams says he doesn’t know how to use. Most artists are not programmers. CinePaint has a Scheme-based interpreter it can use or Perl or Python, but none of these are ideal. Many programmers are repelled by Scheme and using Perl and Python creates build and platform problems. Using JavaScript, Squirrel or UnderC would probably serve CinePaint better.  Adding embedded Java using JamVM was researched, but had enough technical obstacles to prevent going forward.  Using a small embedded language is key for making the build and portability reasonable.

Because CinePaint has similar features, any digital art tutorial tends to be a good source of inspiration for working in CinePaint. Here are some magazines that provide tutorials…

• 3D Artist
• Advanced Photoshop
• Photoshop User
• Practical Photoshop

By Robin Rowe

Navy Photo Archive: USS Abraham Lincoln in the Gulf of Oman

HOLLYWOOD, CA (CinePaint.org) 2011/12/2 “Good to see that there is a new version of CinePaint even there are mainly bug fixes and not new features,” says a CinePaint user. “I would like to know if you plan to develop CinePaint in the future or if this was just a bug fix release and that´ s all? I would love it, having CinePaint further developed.”

Yes, working on the next release. Everybody agrees, I assume, with Eric Raymond that it’s best to release early and release often. What Eric doesn’t say is how to do that when you take over a large project like CinePaint that had never had a proper release before and has such a complex build system that even small changes can mean a whole day of building and testing. To make release early/often more feasible, changes are being made to simplify the CinePaint build system.

Planned for CinePaint 1.1 on 2011/12/25

1. Build all code using stricter C++ rules to try to catch more bugs at compile time.
2. Fix build configure bugs reported in 1.0 to exist on distros other than Ubuntu.
3. Fix version # bug reported in 1.0.
4. Research libpng-1.5 bug reported in 1.0.
5. Test with Valgrind for memory leak reported in 1.0.
6. Test CinePaint on Lubuntu as in 1.0 and add testing for CentOS and FreeBSD.
7. Remove ScriptFu and other interpreter plug-ins. Python and Perl are too difficult to support. Researching adding Squirrel or JavaSccript.
8. Add a user registration dialog so we have a better idea who’s using CinePaint.
9. Debian deb

The next CinePaint release is expected  sometime before Christmas. Comments welcome.

Photo courtesy of U.S. Navy. The Gulf of Oman, Dec. 30, 2000 — USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) and her battle group sail in the waters of the Gulf of Oman after spending three months in the Persian Gulf in support of Operation Southern Watch. U.S Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 2nd Class Gabriel Wilson (photo # 001230-N-0147W-002).