Cinepaint

Because GIMP Won’t Support 16-bit Color

I’ve been using Cinepaint for some time because GIMP won’t support 16-bit color and still probably won’t for a while.  Cinepaint is quite old and not maintained much any more so it can be hard to find pre-built packages for your operating system.  Cinepaint only works on Linux and Mac OS at this time.

Cinepaint Features

  • 16-bit and floating point color channels
  • OpenEXR format, 16-bit tiffs, and raw camera formats
  • CMYK editing
  • HDR support
  • Export to 8-bit images such as PNG or JPG

Cinepaint has a long history and has been a professional graphics tool in the past for the film industry which has specialized requirements for handling many large images.

Cinepaint Versions

Cinepaint has the old pre-1.0 versions and a new 1.0 version.  The new version doesn’t seem to support many image formats (only XCF at this time) but is easier to compile on newer operating systems.  I have compiled both but I am using the pre-1.0 version because of its better compatibility with image formats.

Download Cinepaint