rootninja

Cinepaint feels intuitive and relatively easy to use given the awesome manipulative power you have at your fingertips. If it seems familiar to you, that might be because it’s a fork of GIMP 1.0.4

Features that set CinePaint apart from its photo-editing predecessor include the frame manager, onion skinning, and the ability to work with 16-bit and floating point pixels for high dynamic range imaging (HDR). CinePaint supports a 16-bit color managed workflow for photographers and printers, including CIE*Lab and CMYK editing. It supports the Cineon, DPX, and OpenEXR image file formats. HDR creation from bracketed exposures is easy.

Although it’s intended audience is video editors, you can use it for anything from gif, jpg, and tiff to cineon, hdr, xwd, xcf, and a long list of other formats. Cinepaint is for editing and touching up individual frames, not working with video files directly. Under its former name Film Gimp, CinePaint was used for films such as Scooby-Doo, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, The Last Samurai and Stuart Little.

Upon first startup, cinepaint will create a hidden .cinepaint directory to story configuration information. In it you’ll find a number of files including gtkrc, gimprc, printrc, etc. The nice part is it lets you know what it’s about to do before just going off and writing to your home directory. After you get through this, you will have 4 new windows open.

* Color Selection
* Layers & Channels
* Brush Selection
* Main toolbar

Each image you work on will open in its own new window making it easy to have multiple images open and available at any given time. The first three will stay above any image windows you open to make it easy to switch between tools.

Alternatives to cinepaint include GIMP, Corel’s Paintshop Pro, and Adobe’s Photoshop.