Re: [Gimp-gui] Improving Export

[Liam R E Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Tue, 13 Oct 2015 00:12:49 +0200
Jehan <jehan girinstud io> wrote:

> There have been a recent feature request about having the open dialog as 
> a dock rather than a dialog: 
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=756197

Inkscape does this - I actually hate it, because (1) it takes up a lot of space when i dont' want it, and (2) 
it doesn't go away when the drawing is exported. So I go into the folder and check the file is there, outside 
Inkscape. Just as now, in GIMP, to know an image has been exported, I click on the [x] on its tab (in single 
window mode, or close its image window) and the dialogue box tells me whether the image has been exported.


My current workflow is to save an image at several sizes - very common for Web work, e.g. for "download" and 
"preview" and "thumbnail" versions of an image..

1. save archival PNG version (and also XCF if there's more than on elayer)
2. scale down
3. sharpen (e.g. unsharp mask; the older "sharpen" filter was actually slightly better for this for
   some of my images)
3. file->export brings up file chooser, then options
4. experiment with preview and options to minimize file size
5. enter quality settings into the JPEG comment field
6. OK, export the file
7. undo the sharpen
8. undo the scale
9. gaussian blur
10. scale down further
11. sharpen; may need to go back to 9 and repeat until OK
12 export again
13. undo lots,
14, gaussian blur more
15 scale down to 200 pixel preview
etc etc

It's possible to get OK results with nohalo or lohalo scaling instead of cubic, and not need to sharpen, but 
then it can easily take 10 minutes to scale an image instead of a matter or seconds.

Its pretty common to sharpen after scaling down. You can't re-open a JPEG file and sharpen it afterwards, as 
(1) you'd lose the benefits of the convenient workflow, and (2) it'll sharpen and increase the JPEG 
compression noise, and (3) you'll end up with a much larger file because of the increased high-frequency 
components around the compression artifacts. Although you could export to PNG and then reopen, I don't see 
any point - I'd stick with the "scale and undo" workflow.

Hope this helps,

Liam (ankh)

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/