CinePaint : Professional Open Source raster graphics editor

Some of my friends who work in the film industry asked my what open source can offer for them ?
So I decided to introduce some open-source tools available for Film industry (Hey the first OpenMovie is out there!)

CinePaint is an open source raster graphics editor, it is one of the most successful open tool in feature motion picture work today. CinePaint is started as a fork for Gimp 1.0.4 version. CinePaint has so far been used for films such as Scooby-Doo, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, The Last Samurai and Stuart Little.

Why CinePaint ?

The first reason for why I prefer it is because it is an open source software (think of Photoshop, Corel Draw,etc and their cost!), that means this is free and you can even customize it for your personal needs. And yeah we all know this is a good software since it is already used for several movie projects including the Harry Potter.Now it is your turn to find out why you need it, try it before you decide .

Features of CinePaint ?

CinePrint has vast dynamic range : 16-bits per channel (64-bit RGBA)

• that's more range that can be displayed on a computer monitor,since the computer monitors are 24-bit RGB, and it is important when working with a film.It helps to prevent loss while editing.

Still Photographers and CinePaint

• With 35mm support it helps still photographers too. Still photographers can think of CinePaint as having many more F-stops of range .CinePaint also handles 8-bit, 16-bit linear, and 16-bit float images.
• CinePaint features the support for loss less formats such as TIFF,RLE,Cineon, and EXR, this helps the photographers to preserve the details of their photos without any loss, remember some of these formats are not even supported by Photoshop Gimp or other tools.

Other Main Features

• Frame Manager
• Onion Skinning support
• 16-bit floating point support for HDR and 16-bit colour managed work flow for photographers and printers
• Available in the following platforms: Linux, Mac Native, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Windows XP (Windows version is however broken now, a new version is in progress.)

Cons of CinePaint

I just tried out Cine Paint for a little image editing and found it is a little bit cluttered while considering the GUI (even though with expose feature of mac we can take advantage of this).But still it is a pretty good tool with a lot of features and it is pretty easy to learn this software even without any help.

You can Download CinePaint here