Image Editing

I've been a bit frustrated (so, what else is new?) by image manipulation software on Ubuntu. The GIMP makes even the simplest operations complicated. Imagemagick[sic] is sufficiently buggy as to occasionally be useless, though it usually works fine for simple things. I installed a KDE package on my work machine, but of course that comes with an amazing amount of baggage that stays resident after the program terminates. What's a guy to do? Grin and bear the GIMP? I don't think so. As a partial solution, I've installed a version of LView Pro that I registered (and paid for) in 1996 and used to use on Win95 and NT4. WINE certainly has improved in recent years. LView might be sufficient, except it doesn't deal with PNG or EPS images. Neither of these is a surprise: Windows has never had the Postscript support Unix folks assume, and whether PNG was around 13 years ago or not, I'd never heard of it. Still, the LView guys did a nice job with this program. My immediate plan is to use ImageMagick to convert among file formats and, whenever ImageMagick barfs on an image, use LView for the actual editing. We'll see how that goes...