GIMP Can Now Finally Handle WebP Image FIles

[mmstick]

The last time I got really excited about an image format was when netpbm was release. Back in those days knew everyone that GIF stood for "girls in files" and JPEG was CPU-intensive and seemed to be as complicated as rocket science for a file format. netpbm allowed for an easy manipulation of images with scripts and it supported many formats while its own format was kept simple and anyone could adopt it. It is very easy to write C or C++ code and have it produce a netpbm-compatible file. No special library is required and no need to remember a hundred parameters. I still occasionally use ppm files for their simplicity.

While JPEG allows for a very high compression of images and therefore requires low bandwidths for them to be send over the Internet (I still remember how I, as a student, downloaded naked girls with a 9600bps modem over the telephone line) has it always only been a consumer-oriented file format, because its lossy compression means that any successive image manipulation will very likely cause further degeneration of the image.

So lately do I use PNG as my favourite storage format for images, next to DNG for the raw, unprocessed images of my camera. DNG itself is based on TIFF if I remember correctly... What I don't like about PNG is the compression time. So when I process images would I have to turn off the compression for intermediate files, and so do I not use it and rather fall back to netpbm or ImageMagick's internal format mpc, which is a raw format based on memory mappings.

What do I think about WebP? Honestly, I haven't heard about it until today. Not on a conscious level anyway. I have been quite happy with JPEG and PNG for the final images. Still, now that I read about it do I think it is a good idea simply because it promises a progress in compression efficiency. Images don't get smaller and devices support higher resolutions with almost every year now. It's almost as if I got my 1080p monitor only yesterday and I already want a new one with 4K resolution... And, no, not for porn.

For most image conversion tasks have I been using ImageMagick. It supports so many formats, and checking now does it support WebP, too, that I simply don't care any more what formats people use. I have been relying on ImageMagick's convert command to support them all.

Do I care about GIMP now being able to handle WebP images? Obviously not. What GIMP desperately needs is 16-bit colour depth support, which is said to be coming with 2.10. GIMP is a professional image manipulation software and yet editing images at only 8-bit colour depth has begun to feel wrong.

If you don't care, then why bother to comment? Webp is a great image format that replaces PNG nicely. I have 4K resolution PNGs that are 22MB, and after compressing with webp they become 4 MB. This is vitally important for increasing the speed of page loads on the web. The fact that it supports animated images means we no longer need to use crappy formats like GIF that have terrible compression and color. In addition, GIMP supports 64-bit color depth, which is well beyond 8-bit, and more than what Adobe provides.

[starshipeleven]

why my comments are unapproved ?

it's random, it happens to everyone. They will appear again within a day, but no notification will be sent to anyone so none will see them.

[sdack]

If you don't care, then why bother to comment?

Because I care for when Michael asks for comments. Why do you care for what I care?

[Marc Driftmeyer]

If you don't care, then why bother to comment? Webp is a great image format that replaces PNG nicely. I have 4K resolution PNGs that are 22MB, and after compressing with webp they become 4 MB. This is vitally important for increasing the speed of page loads on the web. The fact that it supports animated images means we no longer need to use crappy formats like GIF that have terrible compression and color. In addition, GIMP supports 64-bit color depth, which is well beyond 8-bit, and more than what Adobe provides.

16 bit per channel and PNG supports it as well.

[ElectricPrism]

why my comments are unapproved ?

That seems to happen to everybody. At least 10% of the posts seem to be complains about vbulletin swallowing posts. It has yet to happen to me though.

Phoronix Forums eating posts has taught me to Ctrl+C Copy my posts to clipboard OCD.

I think it might be related to DNS somehow but that's another story. If you post a placeholder comment and edit it it won't fail - I do that a lot.

Also after it says unapproved I think you can still hit the quote button on your own comment to get it to the clipboard even after the forum eats it. Good Luck.

[sdack]

16 bit per channel and PNG supports it as well.

GIMP 2.9 is only a development version and these have been unstable in the past that I avoid them for production. Further is the full support of 16-bit colour depth not yet complete from what I have read and not every module supports it. I then don't want to use a development version and having to find out the hard way which tool and module in GIMP fully supports 16-bit and which does not. The use of a single tool or module could end up destroying the lower 8 bits of the 16-bit depth and that may not always be easy to detect immediately. Nor does 16-bit colour depth make a lot of sense without full colour management, which is also still in development and also needs to be supported in full and not only in parts. So until this all works flawlessly in combination and without crashing and destroying my time do I not care for it. It is not like I couldn't suddenly live without having 16 bits when I have been quite happy with only 8. It's the fact then once I start caring for it do I want the whole deal and not just bits and pieces and scraps of it.

Having said this, please respect that not everyone is the same and understand that people have different reasons for what they care for and for what they don't. Don't take offense in it when somebody doesn't care for the same things as you do, especially when people are being asked explicitly to give their comments to a subject. This should be understood without the need for an explanation and without people getting trolled. The world won't end when everybody isn't like you or just isn't the same.

[starshipeleven]

If you post a placeholder comment and edit it it won't fail - I do that a lot.

There is no more edit button now unless youa re Premium subscriber, due to bots using the same trick to bypass vBullettin's great and powerful antispam filters.

[illwieckz]

it's random, it happens to everyone. They will appear again within a day, but no notification will be sent to anyone so none will see them.

So, it appeared there: post890324.

Phoronix Forums eating posts has taught me to Ctrl+C Copy my posts to clipboard OCD.

Hopefully I saved my text in a notepad first. Firefox taught me to do that some years ago when it was not stable. By the way, my post magically appeared while I were sleeping last night.

There is no more edit button now unless youa re Premium subscriber, due to bots using the same trick to bypass vBullettin's great and powerful antispam filters.

I noticed that too, I'm now only able to delete my own posts. I noticed the workaround before but it does not work anymore.

Since I can't edit my posts anymore, there was a sentence I wanted to add:

For an asset contributor, having editing tools handling WebP natively can allows me to generalize WebP usage in source tree, it's not an issue for the end-user too.

[Spazturtle]

Personally I am just waiting for FLIF to be finished, it already beats all other file formats in everything.

[torsionbar28]

These doted stars make jpeg algorithm crazy.

Yes, but look at the blue stars in the original vs. the WebP image. The WebP has omitted almost all traces of blue color from those stars. No such thing as a free lunch, it seems.