Re: [Gimp-developer] gimp.org tutorials



On 09/24/2015 03:42 PM, Pat David wrote:
All,

I am still trudging through the list of tutorials from the old site and
(slowly) migrating them one at a time to the new infrastructure.

That's a hugely impressive amount of hard work you've been doing.

I've noticed a couple of things, though.  Many of these tutorials are a)
copyrighted without notice of a more permissive licensing, and b) really
out of date.

So the question is, what should I do with them?  My first inclination is to
keep them and migrate them, but possibly to not link to them any longer?
This way the URI is consistent and stil working, but the pages won't be
reachable except through their direct url.

This seems like a good option. Dead links make a website look bad, and someone who reaches such a link won't know why the article is missing.

If this route is taken, it might be nice to put links to updated/more accurate articles at the top (if available), along with an explanation of why the tutorial was "retired" (copyright, out of date, wrong information, etc).

Another option is to simply not migrate some of them, given their copyright
limitations.

I am slowly trying to replace older tutorials with new ones that will be
free of the copyright issues, but it's slower going than moving the
website. :)

Also, I've included the complete list of tutorials, in case anyone wants to
point out some that we definitely won't need or care about migrating.


"Out of date" and "restrictrive or unclear copyrights" are two serious issues, it seems to me. Another issue is "technically incorrect information".

> http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Color2BW/index.html
> http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Digital_Black_and_White_Conversion/index.html

The above two articles contain technically incorrect information. In particular, the described procedures for converting from LAB Lightness to black and white produce an image with tonality that doesn't have anything whatsoever to do with the tonality of the LAB Lightness channel of the original color image (http://ninedegreesbelow.com/photography/lab-lightness-to-black-and-white-gimp28.html).

Similar comments apply to the articles' respective discussions of obtaining Luminance/Luminosity using GIMP 2.8.

Part of the problem is from limitations imposed by GIMP 2.8's 8-bit integer processing, which makes it impossible to obtain RGB Luminance and LAB Lightness wihtout also posterizing the RGB data. And any mention of "technically" or "mathematically" incorrect shouldn't be read to imply "aesthetically wrong".

It would be nice if officially hosted GIMP tutorials could be modified to include notes about "technically correct" vs "what can actually be done using GIMP 2.8".

Best,
Elle




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