[geeks] Quick Photo Manipulation Program

[Joshua Boyd]

On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 11:34:45AM -0600, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> On Mon, 25 Feb 2008, Joshua Boyd wrote:
> 
> >The biggest complaint is that in the extended editing mode it is
> >rather sluggish to execute operations like freestyle rotate.
> 
> I see something of a theme here.  Photoshop's too slow[0], X11's too
> slow[1], etc.  Maybe your Mac is just ancient?  Or, possibly, the images
> you're working with are somewhat large?

Well, my Mac is ancient and the images tend to be large initially (12
mega pixels most of the time).  However, there are two types of slow.
There is slow to startup and there is slow to use.  So far, programs
that use X11 are both slow to startup and slow to use.  Photoshop is
slow to start up but perfectly acceptable to use once it is running. 

I think that if some programs can start quickly and other programs can
do the work quickly, then there should probably be a single program out
there that does a bare minimum of image work and both starts quickly and
does the work quickly.

> [0] It is something of a beast, but if you can express what you need to
>     do in the form of "Actions", you can set them up, point Photoshop at
>     a pile of images, and let it grind overnight.
> [1] Which gave me something of a double-take.  X11 startup time has been
>     nearly imperceptible on every Mac I've used since my blue-and-white.

Maybe it is just that Gimp and Inkscape themselves are very slow to
start on the Mac rather than X11.  Forgive me, but I'd assumed it was
X11 on OSX since neither program is as slow on a 550mhz p3 running Linux.