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We are pleased to announce that we have five projects accepted for Google Summer of Code 2011 program:

• Adaptive cloning will provide means to paste an object from a different picture in a way that it will seamlessly blend into the new image, matching its brightness and color characteristics. This will be a very useful tool for users who do a lot of photo manipulation.
• New GimpSizeEntry widget will place unit selection inside the widget. The project will also bring major refactoring to the code.
• The iWarp filter as a tool project will make it possible to apply various local transformations right on canvas.
• Porting GIMP plugins to GEGL operations will boost long anticipated transition to GEGL.
• The OpenCL in GEGL project will bring to GEGL automatic memory management and migration of tiles between GPU and CPU, as well as possibility to write GEGL operations in OpenCL.

We are wishing our students success with their respective projects and we are looking forward to working with them.

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. For a complete list of changes since 2.7.1 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 2.7.2. 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.

One of the most common questions we keep hearing is when the next version of GIMP is released. While it’s difficult to define exact dates, it is possible to estimate how far away a new stable release from now is based on amount of work that has to be done. We intend to make development of GIMP as transparent as possible, so Martin Nordholts, our core team developer, created a web app that adds previously missing alpha channel to development process. If you want to track progress of v2.8 at any given time, please use this page for reference.

We have also finally revived the development wiki that contains introductional information for newly joined developers. Since we are still quite short-handed, that documentation should come in handy for anyone willing to make GIMP 2.8 a reality sooner than currently expected.

This year we are participating in the Google Summer of Code program again. If you are a student who is willing to improve GIMP and be financially rewarded ($5000), please have a look at the list of project ideas, pick one or come up with your own idea, then join #gimp IRC channel or gimp-developer@ mailing list and introduce yourself.

After a year of work new versions of GEGL, new non-destructive image processing core, and babl, a bitmap format conversion library, are out with several major changes.

The new version of GEGL features code created during Google Summer of Code 2010 by Danny Robson and Michael Muré. Danny Robson created GEGL operations for loading and saving RGBE images (HDR), merging exposure brackets into HDR and three tonemapping operations, as well as a matting operation. You can read more about his project here. Michael Muré created a new map-absolute operations that provides pixel mapping render capability for new Cage transform tool, expected in upcoming GIMP 2.8.

Another major change is support for pluggable buffers that will assist transition of GIMP to using GEGL buffers directly, as well as provide means of using arbitrary buffers (think Google Maps).

JPEG2000 and PPM loaders and savers for GEGL were contributed by Mukund Sivaraman, and some existing GIMP filters were ported to GEGL operations by Alexia Death, Barak Itkin and Andy Gill.

The babl library has less changes, but one of the important ones is support for n-component formats.

There’s still a lot of work to be done on GEGL. Øyvind Kolås created a list of high priority tasks that need solving. If you wish to contribute, don’t hesitate to join gegl-developer mailing list and/or IRC (#gegl on irc.gimp.org) and ask around.

Since 2006 our project has been collaborating with Peter Sikking of m+mi works to improve GIMP’s usability. Peter is behind many positive changes in GIMP’s UI, such as new selection tools in v2.4 and v2.6, as well as some new features in upcoming v2.8.

This year m+mi works is making a new step to further strengthen our partnership and is now looking for two interns to work on GIMP’s interaction design for 3-6 months. You will work in Berlin and as contributor to the GIMP project you will travel to Libre Graphics Meeting in May, in Montreal. Please read the full announcement for details and contacts.