Category: Articles

We released GIMP 2.7.4 with minor improvements and bugfixes. Most improvements are related to user interface and usability, see here for detailed list of changes. Depending on amount of bugs we get reports on this could be the last version before 2.8 release candidates and 2.8 itself.

The other good news is that between 2.7.3 and 2.7.4 Michael Natterer considerably improved GTK+ for Mac, so GIMP is finally going to be first class citizen on that platform.

We also released new versions of GEGL and babl. Changes in babl are mostly improvements of the existing feature set, but GEGL got operations ported from GIMP filters by Robert Sasu during Google Summer of Code 2011, as well as some new operations written by the team.

Resampling was improved in GEGL thanks to Nicolas Robidoux and Adam Turcotte who added a lohalo resampler. There’s API and infrastructure for doing non-affine resampling in place now as well.

Finally, GeglView GTK widget was separated from GEGL into a new project called GEGL–GTK to simplify using GEGL from GTK+ applications. The work was done by Jon Nordby from MyPaint project. Jon started another project, GEGL-Qt, to do the same for Qt. Please read his blog for more details.

Victor Oliveira, our GSoC2011 student, is going to continue his work on getting OpenCL support in GEGL for hardware accelerated rendering and computations. AMD got interested in the project and agreed to sponsor it.

The plan is to implement GPU-side color conversions and compositing operations, as well as some basic filters. Victor is also planning to create a simple API for development of new OpenCL based filters for GEGL.

Currently estimated deadline is March 2012. GIMP already has an optional GEGL based projection rendering as well as an experimental tool to test GEGL operations, so hopefully we are going to see some exciting performance improvements soon.

Our mailing lists have moved to the GNOME list server. All previously subscribed users have automatically been added to the new lists.

The old list mail addresses are no longer valid, please use the new ones from now–note that in addition to the changed domain, the list names got a “-list” appended to them.

The subscription management pages are accessible via the following links:

• gimp-developer-list
• gimp-user-list
• gimp-docs-list
• gimp-web-list
• gegl-developer-list

The list archives will be restored at gnome.org as soon as we get the files.

The gimp-announce, gimp-film, and gimp-win-user lists don’t exist any longer.

The online docs and developer pages are available again:

• Online Docs (docs.gimp.org)
• Developer Pages (developer.gimp.org)

We managed to get FTP and Wiki back online:

• FTP Downloads (ftp.gimp.org)
• Developer Wiki (wiki.gimp.org)

Due to relocation onto a different server, the following services are currently not available:

• Mailing lists (lists.xcf.berkeley.edu)
• FTP Downloads (ftp.gimp.org)
• Documentation (docs.gimp.org)
• Developer website (developer.gimp.org)
• Developer Wiki (wiki.gimp.org)

Google Summer of Code 2011 is over, and all of our students have successfully finished their respective projects. All of the code is available in Git repositories, but not all of it is going to be part of the next released versions of GEGL and GIMP. Here is why.

Both new tools, Seamless Clone and Warp Transform, as well as new size entry widget are too late to become part of 2.8. We are planning to make them part of 2.10, when they are better tested for reliability and usability. The OpenCL project needs more work to become part of GEGL’s main development branch. However the project to port more GIMP filters to GEGL operations is already part of master branch in GEGL and will be available in the next version of GEGL.

Some of our students are taking a well deserved break from GSoC or are back to study, while others continue hacking on their projects. Michael Muré recently started work on undo/redo support in the Warp Transform tool and works now on extending GEGL’s capabilities regarding transformations. Barak Itkin continues working on his Seamless Paste tool and intends to make it usable with larger images as well as fix some bugs and make it more flexible. Victor Oliveira keep working on his OpenCL/GEGL project as well.

We are pleased to announce availability of a new development version that brings us closer to GIMP 2.8. This version is packed with important new features and improvements.

The most visible changes in 2.7.3 are the fully working single-window mode, including working session management, and the introduction of a new hybrid spinbutton/scale widget which takes less space in dockable dialogs.

For a complete list of changes since 2.7.2 please refer to NEWS page, while the release notes summarize changes in the whole 2.7.x series.

Please note that the whole 2.7.x series of versions is considered unstable and is not recommended for use in production even though it might just work for you. Our intention is to make development versions available for passionate users who can provide useful feedback to help us fix bugs and streamline implementation of some of the new features. The upcoming v2.8 also introduces a huge amount of API deprecations and additions that have the potential to break existing 3rd party scripts and plug-ins. Please file bugs for all plug-ins and scripts that do work in v2.6, but don’t work in 2.7.3. A migration guide for developers will be provided when v2.8 is out.

There is still a lot of work to do on v2.8. Please refer to this page to find out what the current estimation of v2.8 release is, and what bugs you can help us fixing to make the new stable version happen sooner.

While GEGL gradually replaces GIMP’s old core, it’s time for us to consider long-term strategy for improving performance. The trend these days seems to be a combination of multithreading, GPU-side processing and networks. Most of that can be handled thanks to OpenCL standard by Khronos Group.

Back in 2009 we already had a Google Summer of Code project by Jerson Michael Perpetua who introduced basics of GPU-side rendering to GEGL. This year we have even more progress. Another GSoC student, Victor Oliveira, has been working on support for OpenCL in GEGL since late May. If you are interested in details, please read his latest report.

The upcoming GIMP v2.8 isn’t going to do GPU-side rendering and processing, because it’s simply too late for this development cycle. The next version, v2.10, is going to feature all of our other GSoC projects this year and more API cleanup. With v3.0 we are doing the final switch to GEGL, and this is where we currently expect OpenCL support in GEGL to be mature enough to be used. For more details please refer to our feature roadmap.

We aim to make GIMP a state of the art image editing tool. We know that our past approach to development of new versions didn’t exactly encourage contributions that helped making it happen. This is why starting with v2.10 we are switching to a shorter development cycle. In other words, new stable versions will have less new features and will get released sooner, helping us to process queue of incoming new features much faster.

All major new features are now being developed in dedicated Git branches so that you could easily merge our latest upstream changes into your feature branches, and we then could easily review and merge your new features into upstream. If the new proposed workflow sounds appealing to you, and you are interested to contribute to the project, please let us know.

In the mean time we are preparing another development version of GIMP with quite a lot of fixes gathered over last 4 months. Stay tuned for more news.

We are glad to announce that all of our Google Summer of Code students have passed midterm evaluation. All the code is being maintained in respective Git branches of GEGL and GIMP.

As a reminder, this year Google Summer of Code is bringing us two new tools, Seamless Clone and Warp Transform, several GEGL operations, support for OpenCL based rendering in GEGL, and a new widget for size entry.

We also reviewed projected date of GIMP 2.8 release, and it still looks like end of 2011. This version is going to introduce dramatic user interface improvements as well as a multitude of new features including new Cage Transform tool and much more sophisticated painting options.