Category: Software Announcements

GSoC2013 program is over now, and 3 out of 4 students successfully completed it.

Carlos Zubieta ported 13 GEGL operations to use GPU via OpenCL, and the gegl-random module used by noise generation operations, then made noise-hsv and noise-cie-lch operations use it. You can read his report.

Simon Lui ported the PSD plug-in to use GEGL. GIMP is now capable of loading 16bit and 32bit per color channel PSD files, saving those is a work in progress. The updated plug-in also reads additional data from PSD files (text, slicing information, layer effects), but cannot use it yet: text support needs the relevant API in GIMP, and layer effects and slicing aren’t implemented in GIMP yet, so there’s nothing to map the information to as of now. His public report is here.

Marek Dvorožňák implemented a new N-Point deformation tool that makes it possible to deform objects while preserve shapes consistency. You can watch a video demonstration of the tool on YouTube. The work is based on a “As-Rigid-As-Possible Image Registration for Hand-drawn Cartoon Animations” paper by Daniel Sykora et al.

Finally, Ajay Ramanathan attempted to merge selection tools into a single tool selection with modes (rectangular, ellipse, single row/column, N-side polygon selection modes).

All the source code created by our students is available in respective Git branches. We will review it and make sure we use the most of it. We thank Carlos, Simon, Marek, and Ajay for working with us over the summer and we are looking forward to working with them in the future!

Jehan Pagès, one of our active contributors, started a personal crowdfunding campaign to sponsor his work on symmetric painting in GIMP. You can find more information in his blog, and there’s a video of a proof-of-concept implementation on YouTube. If you care about GIMP as a tool for digital painting, supporting this project is likely to benefit your workflow.

While we are not ready for a full-fledged crowdfunding campaign for GIMP yet, we think that this kind of focused campaigns, tailored for particular audiences, definitely have merit.

The fourth issue of GIMP Magazine is now out and available as a digital download, a printed copy, and an e-zine for iPad. In just a year the project got a huge following, and now it’d a 100 pages large magazine with interviews, tutorials, a gallery section, and a graphic novel of its own.

Creating a full-fledged magazine takes a lot of time, so while GIMP Magazine is a free download, we kindly suggest you to consider premium options. That way you will ensure its continuity.

We just released GIMP 2.8.6! This is a release in the stable GIMP 2.8 series, featuring lots of bug fixes and translation updates. For the complete list of changes please see the NEWS file.