FF as a true stand-alone

i recently had a couple of filters rejected due to being something that photoshop can already easily do. and that's fine and it is true. and i know this is going to sound somewhat like a grousing over being rejected. well, ok. however, i would suggest that FF is powerful enough in a lot of cases to not even need photoshop or paint shop pro and that there are going to be folks that might buy FF solely for that reason, they dont need to buy photoshop or elements, etc, in order to do some of the simple things that most graphic editors can do.

i've made a combo filter already that does some of the basics in an all-in-one package. i dont need to import from psp or export back to psp. i can do it all from FF in an almost one step process. having hue, saturation, black & white points, threshhold, gamma and a host of other items all sitting there in one filter where i can just slide the sliders to adjust everything in one 'layer' is pretty powerful and it doesnt need psp to do it. i've made and posted several images done with FF filters where i didnt need my graphic editor at all.

normally, when i do editing in psp, i will apply one effect and duplicate that layer and apply the next filter or editing action. with FF you dont need the additional layers since you have the preview being done in real time. so, you can alter 10 different things to get the image how you want it and then apply the whole to the image. this makes FF pretty unique and IS a graphic editor in itself and does not need, in all cases, to have another graphic editor working with it.

so, even if i am grousing a bit at being rejected, the fact remains that FF can be used without an additional editor and can be marketed and sold as such. it's far more powerful than those little mini-apps that come with a printer, for instance, and you certainly dont need photoshop for those.

so, dont sell yourselves short here, devs. FF is a broad spectrum graphic editor and not just a plugin maker. it may not be a 'paint' program, but it is a graphic editor in its own right.

therefore, i'm arguing to remove that one criteria from your approval/disapproval criteria about duplicating some function that already exists in photoshop. photoshop is photoshop. FF is FF. FF does not have to be completely dependent on photoshop. FF is a graphic editor; it just happens to work well with photoshop and others.

and one last point here. by positioning FF as a solely dependent program, dependent on PS or some other editor, which is pretty much how it's been presented to the public so far, you are limiting your own sales pitch and thus your own sales. promote it as a graphic editor that can make it own filters AND can make plugins for other programs AND be used as a plugin itself and you've broaded the scope and thus your potential number of clients.

so, please forgive any grousing element here, but the other point is valid regardless.

craig

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Kraellin wrote: i recently had a couple of filters rejected due to being something that photoshop can already easily do. and that's fine and it is true. and i know this is going to sound somewhat like a grousing over being rejected.

Craig -- I hope we can eliminate the rejections from the submit process completely

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Vladimir Golovin wrote: What I also think is important here is that you will loose less information if you can do it all in one step due to the fact that FF works in floating point whilst if you do in in Photoshop one filter after another there's always the reduction to 8 (or 16) bits per channel once per step.

Yes, this is one of the benefits of the floating-point pipeline. Plus, if you can't do it in one step, you can save an OpenEXR (if my memory serves me well, it reduces the data to single-precision numbers, but that's still far better than 8 or 16 bit).

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Kraellin wrote: and i'm sure there are a lot of struggling artists that cant afford $700.00 for photoshop or even the $120.00 for psp, but $30 to $50 might just make it for a pre-made filter application.

Yup, but it is very hard to compete on price with GIMP

I doubt that professionals or semiprofessionals who are experts in photoshop or psp etc. would change their workflow for general image processing to ff just because they have one filter, doing all the job in one step. Beside that you dont have the exact control where you would like it to have, you can also generate e.g. actions in PS that do the job in one step (and you can exactly decide what the action does). And if you like you can restrict the action via masks and so on.

I think ff is great for special effects (not yet achieveable simply in other tools) and for generating (tileable) textures.

For the last purpose I dont see many advantages over the 3D-procedural shader. I dont think that sharpening or blurring effect play a great role in preprossing textures. The blurring effect is much more important in 3D-Rendering in the postprocess, when the depth map is generated and the blurring-process is guided by the depth-map of the szene.

Nevertheless ff has a great potential I think.
A great effort is probably nessesary to speed up rendertime which is still too slow I think.

3D-procedural shaders are all automatically seamless in infinite space! The render speed depends on the used components and their complexity to calculate - just as in FF. Its the same model!

FF just projects them flat - thats why it might be quicker and can additonally use sharpening and blurring.

Its not only Darktree that generates 3D-shader, most of the modern 3D-Modeller and Renderengines use that technique (cinema4D, 3DMax, VRay, FinalRender, ...). Some dont yet use the tree technique for combining effect, but you can achieve the same with different layers and adjustments (as in Photoshop e.g.). The trees are more elegant tough. I think the guys from SLA (smells like almonds provided the first 3D-shader several years ago

vladimir,

ok, it sounds like the current target market is being thought of as 'the professional graphic artist'. ALL i'm saying is, that FF, on the user side only, has a GREAT potential in the non-professional market. that's all. the folks who are NEVER going to use photoshop or psp or deep paint 2 or art rage or the gimp or any of the others, would find FF as something they might use. it's so simple and so powerful that even my mother could use it and have fun with it.

those folks are never going to download the gimp. they're not even sure how to use HP's red eye remover in the software that came with their digital camera. they paid $700 for photoshop and it's still sitting in the box on a shelf. that's the market i'm talking about.

FF is easy. load an image, pick a filter, move the sliders, print the results (if ff had a print feature).

so, that's all i'm talking about here.

craig