[Gimp-developer] Behavior when saving a selection to channel

[Rob Antonishen]

On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 6:07 AM, Sven Neumann  wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Sat, 2009-03-07 at 15:38 +0100, peter sikking wrote:
>
>> what I first of all think is that the channels dialog needs to be
>> split in two: a channels dialog and a stored-selections dialog.
>
> Having them in one dialog is admittedly somewhat confusing, but it is an
> established standard for pixel manipulation programs. I don't think we
> should change that. It would only waste space.
>

Though just because photoshop does it that way doesn't make it the
best way.  It seems to be a hugely confusing area for ps users, too.

It wasn't until I started digging into the PDB that I discovered that
channels are just greyscale drawables, and handled as such the
software.

I think that all of the "channel" use cases should be examined before
deciding how these should act.

My own experience with channels is limited to:
1) Image decomposition for masking/converting to greyscale
2) Saved selections

Possibly because that is all the gimp documentation talks about...

In the glossary,
http://docs.gimp.org/en/glossary.html#glossary-channels and
http://docs.gimp.org/en/glossary.html#glossary-masks it refers to
these two uses.

Sven mentioned other uses, like spot colour and halftoning.  I can't
find any references on using gimp channels for spot colour, in fact
google only finds me claims that a weakness of gimp is that it does
NOT support spot colours.

-Rob A>