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.