[bb88]

Nothing against the GIMP here, but I gave up on the Gimp about 10 years ago now waiting for it to support color depths greater than 8. Gimp was a great program back in 1998-ish. But the lack of deep color depth support really hampered it.

[zerocrates]

Perhaps 10 years too late for you, but high bit depth is finally here in 2.10.

[bb88]

For me and everyone else it seems given the popularity of photoshop.

[soperj]

It's a free product, it's amazing that it's got this far.

[bb88]

Cinepaint had 16bit depth back in 2000.

[Grue3]

So why is it not as popular as Photoshop, or even GIMP?

[bb88]

Actually Cinepaint was used for a quite a while in the movies where it served it's purpose rather well. There was a point in time where studios I believe were funding the development of it because commercial offerings at the time were poor.

The list of movies is listed on the Cinepaint wikipedia page, and I'm not sure that's all of them. It seems like the last movie listed was back in 2003.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CinePaint

As to why it's not more popular? I'm guessing because studios switched over to commercial offering once Adobe and other software houses got their act together, and provided software with more features and support than Cinepaint.

Photoshop seems to have had high bit depth editing for at least the last decade, and possibly longer.