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List:       koffice
Subject:    Krayon - More than a clone of a clone?
From:       Thomas Siegmund <sgmd () genetik ! biologie ! fu-berlin ! de>
Date:       2000-10-04 16:59:14
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Hi all,

I have read John Califfs recent report about the status of 
KImageshop/Krayon and the announcement from Shawn Gordon of 
TheCompany to support further development of this program.

Since Krayon seems to be in a very early stage, this might be a good 
time to suggest a feature which would most likely be very difficult 
to add later.

I'm talking about support for images with more than 8 bit grayscale 
or more than 24 bit color data.

In the days of Photoshop 2.5 and 3 it was criticized a lot for not 
supporting high-bit data. Today it has only limited support for 
48-bit-images. Gimp was designed as a free Photoshop clone primarily 
for web design and is limited to 24-bit RGB data. It would be a pity 
if you start writing a new image-editing application with a friendly 
KDE-interface, but without any real progress in this area.

There are quite a number of input-devices - flat bed scanners, 
digital cameras - which can deliver high-bit images. Due to limits in 
the imaging software this usually gets downscaled by the input driver 
to 8 or 24 bit. If you have to do tonal corrections after the scan, 
you throw away even more of the image quality.

There are also a lot of scientific and medical imaging devices - 
cooled CCD-cameras on microscopes, X-ray detectors, computer 
tomographs - which deliver 12, 14 or 16 bit grayscale images. For 
these kind of pictures it is crucial to handle more than eight bits 
per channel in the analysis software, even if you can display only 8 
bit grayscale on the screen.

You may think that this is purely academic, because there will be for 
quite a while no way to get such images into Krayon, but SANE already 
supports up to 16 bit per channel. Supporting this in Krayon from the 
start would give it a lead as the free application for high-quality 
and technical imaging.

I' not a programmer, so I don't know how difficult it would be to put 
at least the necessary basic hooks into the program. But if you were 
interested, I could do some research for real world applications, 
file format specifications and so on.

With best regards, and many thanks for the great KDE2

Thomas

-- 
----------------------------------
Thomas Siegmund

Institut fuer Genetik
Freie Universitaet Berlin
Arnimallee 7
14195 Berlin
Germany

phone +49 30 838 5 29 94
fax   +49 30 838 5 43 95

sgmd@genetik.biologie.fu-berlin.de

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