Category: OSS

As 2013 is fast approaching, we’d like to take a quick look at 2012 and what we did during the year.

In May we released the long anticipated new stable version, v2.8, with many improvements such as layer groups, tagging of resources, new Cage transform tool and more.

We also started the final transition to GEGL as a new image processing core. All legacy from the libgimp has already been removed.

Unstable version of GIMP is now capable of working in 16 and 32 bit per channel modes, both integer and float. Color management has been improved as well, and thanks to support by AMD and Google the GEGL library can do GPU-side rendering and processing with OpenCL.

We successfully participated at Google Summer of Code 2012. Our students ported more GIMP filters to GEGL operations, created a node compositing application for testing GEGL, and implemented a unified transform tool for GIMP.

In past years we let our work with community slip, so this year we also tried to establish a better connection with our user base. Our Google+ page, where we now regularly share project news and useful GIMP tutorials we come across, is currently circled by ca. 22.000 people (as compared to 1.000 in January 2012).

Last, but not least, we are happy to see the community actively promoting GIMP of its own accord. E.g. this year the GIMP Magazine project was started, with two issues already published and the 3rd issue currently in the works.

Thanks to all contributors our project vision is becoming a reality. GIMP already works in HDR, partially uses GPU for rendering and processing, has better transformation tools.

Our primary focus for 2013 will be finishing the transition to GEGL. We don’t expect it to be an easy job: it’s likely to keep us busy most of 2013, if not longer. You can help us to boost the development. Come join us to complete the rewrite and deliver the new generation of GIMP as a polished stable product.

For the last few weeks GIMP has been capable of using ICC v4 color profiles thanks to a patch by Laurent Martelli who ported the color management plug-in to use LittleCMS v2.

There is also an ongoing work by Elle Stone to adapt that plug-in to the new GEGL-based architecture and make color space conversions just work between various bit depth precision levels — from 8-bit to 32-bit floating point.

Once it’s done, GIMP will be capable of converting images between different color spaces with little to no loss of color fidelity. In fact, it already works, with some caveats.

Meanwhile Michael Natterer is busy porting plug-ins for loading and saving files to GEGL and GIO. The latter means that GIMP doesn’t create temporary files anymore when loading files from remote locations, and previews in the Open File dialog 100% match actual images.

There is still a lot of work to do before GEGL-based version of GIMP is completely functional. We encourage you to join the team and help making the future closer.

Four out of five GIMP students successfully finished their work in the Google Summer of Code 2012 program. Unfortunately one of the students wasn’t able to complete all of the work.

The code written by the students has already been merged to main development branches and is expected to be available in the next releases of GIMP and GEGL.

While the first public version of the Unified Transform Tool will only be available in the 2.9.x series, new GEGL operations will be present in the next release of GEGL already.

The students ported the following GIMP filters to GEGL operations: Shift, Wind, Cartoon, Photocopy, Oilify, Softglow, and a variety of noise generators.

The GEGL-based node editor is a standalone project and will eventually be released separately.

It was a great summer. We thank all the students for participating and we would love to see them around in years to follow.

We’ve just released GIMP 2.8.2, the first update to the new stable version of GIMP. The update brings several dozens of fixes to various issues of all scales.

Most notorious bugs fixed are: not being able to remember JPEG saving options, slow canvas redraw, not showing page setup options on Windows. There’s also a workaround for the bug that used to cause showing incorrect file size values on Windows. For the complete list of changes please see the NEWS file.

Additionally we did a lot of work to make a native build of GIMP for Mac a possibility. The official GIMP.app will be available soon. Windows installers of v2.8.2 will be available from the usual location shortly.

Beginning with this version we are also switching to a new versions numbering scheme. Final releases now always have even number of the micro version, and the versions in Git always have an odd number.

It’s been a long time since we last had an active Windows-based developer. Consequently, GIMP has accumulated a plethora of bugs specific for that operating system. As much as we’d like to provide a smooth user experience for Windows users, we simply do not have the required human resources.

Hence, if you are an experienced Windows-based developer who is interested to help GIMP become a first-class citizen in the Windows world, please get in touch with us. Our main communication channels are the gimp-developer mailing list and IRC. Here is the list of all reported bugs for the Windows version of GIMP.

If you go for IRC, we recommend sticking there for several hours, since we are mostly Europe-based, and you maybe aren’t in the same timezones span. Most development talks happen on IRC anyway, so staying online helps the communication.

We are glad to announce that all of our Google Summer of Code 2012 students passed the midterm evaluation last week.

All projects are coming along nicely. The unified transform is already quite functional, the experimental GEGL editor is maturing, more filters were rewritten into GEGL operations, and more parts of GEGL were adapted for the new image processing core.

There’s also substantial progress with the Seamless Clone tool that was part of Google Summer of Code 2011 program. The tool relies on Poly2tri — a C++ library for generating constrained Delaunay triangulations. You can read more about this project in the developer’s blog.

The Poly2tri library is likely to be used by the next generation of the Cage Transform tool (available since v2.8). This is expected to simplify and hence speed up calculations which are currently slow when used on large images.

Since 2006 we’ve been improving GIMP’s user interface with help from Peter Sikking and his team at man + machine interface works. Some of the best improvements in GIMP’s UI over past several years are the direct result of our collaboration.

We are happy to announce that for the next 10 weeks Marinus Schraal is joining Peter Sikking to work on a concept of a new widget set for tools’ options in GIMP. The net outcome will be a functional spec for new UI elements that will be compact and easy to use.

By the way, recently Peter did another GIMP related interaction design course at the FH Vorarlberg, Austria. His students worked on possible new user interfaces for Liquid Rescale plug-in that implements content-aware scaling.