In this years GSoC (a sponsorship program by Google that supports all kind of open source software) GIMP will be supported with 5 new coding projects!

All of these projects are really cool:

Adaptive Cloning

With Adaptive Cloning Barak Itkin (mentor: Michael Natterer) tries to enhance the cloning tool in GIMP by implementing a new algorithm that allows to clone parts seamlessly of one image to another one. The cloned parts should then have adapted lightning applied to it to fit the brightness and lightning situation of the destination image. Another task on this is to use hardware acceleration to make the adapted cloning perform well.

GtkEntry-Widget instead of GimpSizeEntry

The GimpSizeEntry Widget shall be replaced. Currently all entered values are managed externally, after switching to GtkEntry this would work directly and internal. (Student: Enrico Schröder, Mentor: Martin Nordholts)

iWarp as a tool

Michael Muré (who already successfully developed GIMPs new cage based transform tool in 2010) this time works on GIMPs iWarp-Filter, which should be turned into a tool that makes it possible to work directly on canvas like a painting tool (like the Liquify filter in Adobe Photoshop). The mentor for this project is Alexia Death.

GIMP Filters as GEGL operations

A very important thing for GIMPs filters is the porting of the old filters to new GEGL based operations. This is another step into GIMPs non destructive future which will be taken care of by Robert Sasu, mentored by Murkund Sivaraman.

OpenCL in GEGL

Victor Oliveira takes care of another very important project for GIMP namley the acceleration of GIMP through OpenCL via GEGL. The aim here is to use GPU shaders via OpenCL (if present or available by the graphics card), which would result in a massive performance boost due to parallel execution of multiple processes for a single task. All that should be managed by the use of GEGL operations that make it possible to parallelize work on tiles (tiles are sup-parts of an image that can be worked seperatley on). João S. O. Bueno is Victors mentor on this project!

The coding phase begins on May 23rd and ends in late August. Theoretically – if a project is very successful, and if there is still no feature freeze for 2.8 – it could be implemented into GIMP 2.8 which is currently aimed for late November 2011.

One thing left to say: The one that does not appreciate these 5 great coding projects

is not a real GIMP fan ;)

Thanks to our user Granner for informing us about the publishing of the GSoC projects.