[Gimp-user] Looking back at 2013

From: Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre prokoudine gmail com>

To: "gimp-user-list gnome org" <gimp-user-list gnome org>, gimp-developer <gimp-developer-list gnome org>

Subject: [Gimp-user] Looking back at 2013

Date: Tue, 24 Dec 2013 16:54:21 +0400

Hi, Before you leave for the festive season, we’d like to share with you what’s been going on with GIMP for the past year. A lot of work has gone into completing the port of GIMP to GEGL, our new hi-end image processing engine. It’s a prerequisite for advanced features such as non-destructive editing, layer filters, advanced CMYK support, and more. Thanks to amazing work by Daniel Sabo and Téo Mazars, our new contributors, we got closer to releasing GIMP 2.10 in terms of porting GIMP plugins to GEGL operations. Please refer to the wiki (http://wiki.gimp.org/index.php/Hacking:Porting_filters_to_GEGL) for an overview of the progress. We also started working towards getting a baseline for Windows and Mac builds. We still need a server running OS X or a VM on such a server to run continuous builds. If this is something you could contribute, please talk to us on either IRC or the gimp-developer@ mailing list. In January/February, Michael Natterer and Michael Henning ported the FITS plug-in to GEGL and added support for more bit depth modes, namely 16 and 32 integers, 32bit floats, and double-precision floats. This makes it possible to study e.g. pictures taken by Chandra X-ray Observatory with full precision. In fact, the request for better FITS support in GIMP came from Joseph DePasquale, a science imager at Smithsonian astrophysical observatory, member of the Chandra team. Joseph maintains a series of FITS processing tutorials (http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/openFITS/casa.html) involving GIMP and G’MIC. In April, Michael Natterer implemented canvas rotation (https://vimeo.com/64481497) which makes it easier for painters to work on illustrations from different angles. This feature was inspired by a counterpart in the GIMP Painter fork and will be part of GIMP 2.10. In May, Mukund Sivaraman added a basic loader of OpenEXR loader which is another step towards making GIMP a hi-end tool for professionals in the CG industry. A few months later, Mike Henning added a basic loader/saver of WebP images. Also in May, Miroslav Talasek rewrote the foreground selection tool to use new matting operations created by Jan Ruegg. The updated tool makes it easy to e.g. extract hair from background — something that used to be very difficult to do before. At the same time, Michael Natterer merged Seamless Clone and Warp Transform tools into the main development branch of GIMP. Both tools still need a lot of work before that can be an official part of any future release. During the summer several students worked for us within the Google Summer of Code 2013 program: - Carlos Zubieta added an OpenCL version for over a dozen of GEGL operations, so that more processing could be done on a GPU. - Simon Lui ported the PSD plug-in to use GEGL. GIMP is now capable of loading 16bit and 32bit per color channel PSD files, and more PSD-specific features will be easily plugged in once a GIMP counterpart is available (such as layer effects). - 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. - Ajay Ramanathan attempted to merge selection tools into a single tool selection with modes (rectangular, ellipse, single row/column, N-side polygon selection modes). In August, Michael Natterer reduced the save/export friction by adding a simple way to jump from Save to Export dialog when users attempt to save images in JPEG, PNG, etc. The feature is now available in both stable and unstable versions of GIMP. In September, Jehan Pagès, another new active contributor to the project, started working on symmetric painting mode. He still needs funding to complete this as a personal paid project: http://funding.openinitiative.com/funding/1578/. His other contributions this year include configurable tabs position in single-window mode and numerous bugfixes. In October, Hartmut Kuhse and Michael Natterer added a new dialog for displaying Exif, XMP, and IPTC metadata. They also patched GIMP to preserve this kind of metadata while editing existing images in TIFF, JPEG, and PNG file formats. Around the same time Commons Machinery developers contacted us to touch base regarding support for preserving license and authorship metadata in collaborative works of art. Then a few weeks ago they posted a proof-of-concept version of GIMP (http://commonsmachinery.se/2013/12/rdf-metadata-support-in-gimp/) that makes it possible to reuse multiple images from different authors and automatically and properly credit them in a compound work of art. We are looking forward to further collaboration with Commons Machinery. In November, Pat David began updating the tutorials portfolio on the website, adding several new articles for both newbies and experienced users: - http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/GIMP_Quickies/ - http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Floating_Logo/ - http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Layer_Masks/ - http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Luminosity_Masks/ Throughout the year Elle Stone continued improving color management features and added black point compensation choice for color space conversions, as well as half-floating point support. We also thank the GIMP User Manual Team for their work on documenting all the changes in 2.8 and everyone involved with translating the user guide, as well as everyone who found the time and interest in cooking up patches to improve and/or fix GIMP. Last but not least, we want to thank Steve Czajka and all of the GIMP Magazine team for their tireless efforts in promoting GIMP. If you are not familiar with this project, check it out at http://gimpmagazine.org/. We don’t have a schedule for GIMP 2.10 release at this point. The best way to help us getting there is still contributing by porting more plugins to GEGL and making GEGL faster :) Alexandre Prokoudine, on behalf of the GIMP team