HowTo: Motion Picture Linux Paint and Retouching Tool

Have you been told that Holywood uses Linux tools and software too? Do you know one? Read on.

CinePaint is a painting and retouching tool primarily used for motion picture frame-by-frame retouching and dust-busting. CinePaint was used on THE LAST SAMURAI, HARRY POTTER and many other films. From The Last Samurai movie,CinePaint was used to add flying arrows. It's also being used by pro photographers who need greater color fidelity than is available in other tools.

CinePaint runs on all popular flavors of Linux and on Mac OS X as an X11 application. CinePaint for Windows is still on development as of this writing.

CinePaint is different from other painting tools because it supports deep color depth image formats up to 32 bits per channel deep. For comparison, GIMP is limited 8-bit, and Photoshop to 16-bit.

CinePaint was originally based on GIMP and consequently is a GTK1-based application. A new FLTK-based version of CinePaint, called Glasgow, is nearing alpha. There's also a new image core in development, called img_img, That will enable CinePaint to operate on images from the
command-line and to integrate with other projects such as Blender.

Top Reasons to Use CinePaint

1. Support for 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit color channels of deep paint.
2. High fidelity image file types such as DPX, OpenEXR and 16-bit TIFF. These files can't be opened in ordinary 8-bit image applications (e.g., GIMP) without crushing them.
3. High Dynamic Range. HDR images can go brighter than white. Ordinary images can't be brighter than a white sheet of paper (0=black, 1.0=white).
4. Gallery-quality printing. B&W photographs have only one color channel and degrade quickly when manipulated as 8-bit images. CinePaint has higher fidelity and offers a 16-bit printing path to the print-head using GutenPrint.
5. Color Management System. CinePaint uses LittleCMS.
6. Flipbook. Movie playback of short sequences of images in RAM.
7. Innovation. CinePaint offers features that go beyond ordinary painting tools.
8. It's used to make feature films at major studios.
9. Open Source. With various OSS licenses, because it uses code from various sources, including GPL, LGPL, BSD, and MPL.
10. Free.
11. Friendly professional developers. Polite discussion forums.
12. Being a CinePaint developer can be a good career move. CinePaint developers have gotten jobs at companies such as DreamWorks Animation, Sony Pictures Imageworks, and Apple.

Top Reasons Not to Use CinePaint

1. You're content with Adobe Photoshop, Corel Painter X, Corel Paint Shop Pro, GIMP, Krita, or Seashore.
2. No working Windows CinePaint version.
3. We're resolving build and packaging issues with the Mac version.
4. CinePaint originated as a rewrite of the GIMP 8-bit engine in 1998 and still superficially resembles GIMP. (CinePaint reuses code from many projects, not just GIMP.)


Cinema Paint Installation
Fedora Project supports Cinema Paint, and can be installed using yum like so

# yum -y install cinepaint

The above command downloads CinePaint binary installer which is about 5MB.

Binary CinePaint Launch

# cinepaint

At first run, the binary package prompts for installation folder destination, where in it will install itself. Simply supply your destination location.

If you deal on digital images, pictures, and photos on your daily basis, Cinema Paint is a great cool tool for you to start with for a better change. To know more of Cinema Paint and documentation, you can visit their site here.

CinePaint Webshots




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