GIMP

GIMP 2.10.12 Released

Wilber — Wed, 12 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0200

GIMP 2.10.12 is mostly a bug fix release as some annoying bugs were discovered, which is to be expected after a 2.10.10 with so many changes!

“Don’t squash bugs… free them!”, by Aryeom, CC BY-SA 4.0 (a poetic approach to debugging)

Still, some very cool improvements are also available:

Improved Curves tool
Layers support for TIFF exporting
Support for user-installed fonts on Windows
Faster painting
Improved symmetry painting support
Incremental mode in the Dodge/Burn tool
Free Select tool now creates a preliminary selection
New Offset tool

Improvements and features¶

Improving curves editing and Curves tool¶

Generic curves interaction¶

The interaction with curves in general has been greatly enhanced, which is an improvement both to the Curves tool and all other places where curves need tweaking (currently paint dynamics and input device settings):

Relative motion when dragging points¶

When dragging an existing curve point, it won’t “jump” anymore to the cursor position upon pressing the button. Instead it will move relatively to its current position as the cursor moves. This allows selecting a point with a quick click without moving it, and adjusting a point position more easily.

Additionally, when the cursor hovers above a point, or when dragging a point, the coordinate indicator now show the point’s position, rather than the cursor’s.

Snap to curve when holding Ctrl¶

When holding down Ctrl while adding or dragging a point, the Y-coordinate will snap to the original curve. This is particularly useful for adding points along the curve.

Likewise, the coordinate indicator shows the snapped coordinates.

Curves tool specific interaction¶

Additionally, some improvements are specific to the Curves tool:

Numeric input of Curves tool points¶

Two new spin-buttons labelled “Input” and “Output” are now available in the Curves tool interface. They allow setting the selected point’s coordinates numerically and accurately if needed.

Add smooth or corner curve-point types¶

Control points can now be either smooth or corner points. Smooth points produce a smooth curve, while corner points result in sharp angles (previously, all points were smooth and this is still the default).

Corner points are displayed using a diamond shape, instead of a circle and the type can be changed in the Curves tool.

TIFF now has layer support!¶

Thanks to Tobias Ellinghaus, well known as a darktable developer, TIFF can now export images without merging layers.

Support of user-installed fonts on Windows¶

Though not fully tested, we now have a temporary support of a new Windows 10 feature. Windows 10 users indeed now have the ability to install fonts without admin permissions since a recent update.

Therefore we added this non-admin font folder to our search path when running GIMP. It should be only a temporary workaround since eventually this should be supported by fontconfig, the upstream library used to manage fonts.

Note also that it is not fully tested because of our lack of Windows developers. Therefore we are mostly hoping it will work as expected, and this is a good time to make a call again:

Are you a Windows developer? Do you love GIMP? Please contribute!

Seriously, none of our current developers use Windows and bugs are piling up in our bug tracker for this platform (same can be said on macOS by the way), whereas GIMP is so enjoyably stable on GNU/Linux. We are happy to do the occasional good deeds, but there are limits to what we can do for a platform we don’t use. On the other hands, we happily welcome patches and new contributors!

Faster painting¶

GIMP now doesn’t replace the paint buffer on every dab if the paint color/pixmap hasn’t changed. This results in faster painting on specific cases.

As a by-product of the change, the color-from-gradient dynamics is now fixed when the image has a color profile.

Incremental mode in the Dodge/Burn tool¶

The Dodge/Burn tool got a new “Incremental” option which, similarly to the Paintbrush, Pencil, and Eraser tools, applies the effect incrementally as the pointer moves.

Free Select tool creates preliminary selection¶

One of GIMP 2.10.0 changes which annoyed many people was that the Free Select tool was not creating a selection immediately when the region was closed. One was forced to perform an additional confirmation step (Enter or double-click).

This was done on purpose because we wanted to leave ability to tweak the polygonal selection that is built into the Free Select tool. Yet it could obviously be better, proof being the Rectangle Select tool which still allowed to edit the rectangle even though a selection was pre-created.

The Free Select tool now works the same way: even though a preliminary selection exists (allowing to directly copy or delete a contents without additional step), you will still be able to edit this free selection as long as you don’t start another selection nor change tools.

New Offset tool¶

New Offset tool shifts pixels and optionally wraps them around the edges so that you could create repeatable patterns.

New Offset tool used to make a repeatable heart pattern

There’s a simple on-canvas interaction available: just drag on the canvas to shift the layer.

You can activate the new filter either via Layer > Transform > Offset menu, or via Shift+Ctrl+O shortcut.

Moving an intersecting pair of guides¶

The Move tool can now move together an intersecting pair of guides. by dragging the guides at their point of intersection. This is useful when the guides are used to mark a point, rather than a pair of lines (e.g., as is the case for the mandala symmetry guides, which mark the symmetry’s point of origin).

Bug fixing¶

Many bugs were fixed, some more severe than others (in particular a few crashes), as well as some code cleaning, factorization, and so on. The usual deal!

More than the new features, we actually thought these issues were enough to warrant this new release.

Among most pesky bugs fixed:

crashes for various reasons, with more crashes to fix yet;
various color management related bugs;
unwanted change of foreground and background colors in tools’ presets;
brush transformation improved and fixed in various places in symmetry painting mode;
a few localization bugs, and most importantly broken translation display for several supported languages (so far, we believe it to be a bug in the Pango dependency);
some brush format bugs;
…

And more. GIMP 2.10.12 is the result of about 200 commits in 2 months! We will focus below on two specific bug fixing which deserve mentioning.

Improved symmetry painting support¶

The symmetry painting backend got some improvements, which resulted in a few fixes, in particular some artifacts could occur with big brushes or in the Clone/Heal tool when the brush was cropped to the bounds of a drawable. These are now fixed.

In the Ink tool as well, the brush shape was not properly transformed. This has been fixed as well.

Just open the Symmetry Painting dockable dialog, choose a type of symmetry and paint away!

Color space mixup on exporting images¶

Several people noticed that exporting some images ended up in washed-up colors sometimes. This was because in some cases, we were exporting by error sRGB colors with a linear profile (especially visible in GIMP 2.10.10 since we were exporting profiles by default even when using a default GIMP profile). We fixed this and took the opportunity to improve GIMP’s export logics.

Now we are always exporting an explicitly set profile as-is, and pixel colors are stored according to this profile expectation. If you manually assigned a profile, GIMP should indeed always follow your request.

On the other hand, if no explicit profile was set, we implemented various strategies depending on the format:

If the export format is able to store high-bit depth colors (e.g. PNG up to 16-bit and TIFF up to 64-bit), we follow the work format.
If the export format is 8-bit only (such as JPEG), we transform the data to sRGB in order to avoid posterization and shadow artifacts (except if your work format is 8-bit linear, then we leave it as 8-bit linear for minimal loss).

Note that there are still edge cases which we may not find optimal yet regarding how profiles are handled. These should all be greatly improved when we will merge the “Space Invasion” code (an ongoing mid-term project, as we were already talking about it when releasing GIMP 2.10.8). This code merge should hopefully happen soon enough!

Around GIMP¶

GEGL and babl¶

During this development span, GEGL 0.4.16 got released (91 commits), as well as babl 0.1.64 (31 commits) and 0.1.66 (7 commits).

The biggest user-visible change is probably the cubic sampler coefficient change, which used to produce smooth interpolation, suitable for some cases, but not as sharp as people would expect in most other cases. Now in all places where there is choice of interpolation (all transformation tools, Warp Transform tool, etc.), the result with cubic has changed and produces sharper results.

Another notable improvement in GEGL is an updated memory management, by conditionally freeing memory from the heap (thanks to manual calls of malloc_trim()), hence forcing the underlying libc to release memory more often. This behavior is especially suitable for long-running applications whose memory need can greatly vary, such as GIMP. In practice, it means that GIMP process’ memory size will now shrink much faster when you will close big images on supporting systems.

What’s next¶

Though it gets less visibility, work on upcoming GIMP 3 continues and is going well. We will give more news soon enough. For the time being, don’t forget you can donate to the project and personally fund several GIMP developers, as a way to give back and to accelerate GIMP development.

GIMP 2.10.10 Released

Wilber — Sun, 07 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0200

We haven’t had any updates for a few months but the wait is hopefully worth it! We’ve got many nice new features, optimizations, and stability fixes in this release!

Version 2.10.10 highlights include:

Line art detection in the Bucket Fill tool for comic artists
Various usability improvements in transformation tools
Sample Merged option added to the Heal tool and fixed in the Clone tool
Parametric brushes now have 32-bit per channel precision
Easier brush and pattern creation workflow
On-canvas layer selection
Faster saving/exporting and layer groups rendering
Initial DDS support
Many improvements in GEGL, the image processing engine

Notable improvements¶

Improved tools¶

Bucket Fill tool¶

The Bucket Fill tool got a bit of a revamp making it much easier to use. It also got a new “Fill by line art detection” mode (a.k.a. “Smart Colorization”)!

“Colors are hard”, by Aryeom, CC BY-SA 4.0

Quick Color picking¶

Similarly to painting tools, it is now possible to pick surrounding colors on canvas with the Ctrl modifier, without having to switch to Color Picker tool.

Click and drag to fill¶

In “Fill similar colors” and “Fill by line art detection” modes, you can now keep the mouse button down to continue filling more areas.

Fill by line art detection¶

Finally, the highlight change on the Bucket Fill tool is a new algorithm for painters, allowing to fill areas surrounded by “line arts”, while trying to leave no unfilled pixels near the lines, and closing potential zones.

This feature, originated from the G’MIC plug-in as a research paper, was contributed by Jehan as work for the IMAGE team of the GREYC laboratory (French Research Lab, affiliated to the CNRS, the University of Caen, and the engineering school ENSICAEN), with important interface input from Aryeom from ZeMarmot project.

Smart colorization in GIMP

Transformation tools¶

Ell improved various shortcomings on several transformation tools:

The Scale tool now scales from the center, even when using numeric input.
The Unified Transform tool defaults to preserving the aspect ratio when scaling up or down.
New “Constrain handles” and “Around center” options to the Perspective Transform tool’s GUI, which are similar to the corresponding options of the Unified Transform tool.
New “Readjust” button in several transformation tools to readjust transform handles based on the current zoom level.
Forward and backward transform directions can be linked, which allows moving the handles without affecting the transformation, letting you manually readjust their position.

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Heal and Clone tool¶

Michael Natterer improved the Heal tool by adding the “Sample merged” option which allows painting changes on a separate layer to keep the original data intact. The Clone tool already had the “Sample merged” option. It has been updated to also work similarly.

These changes are important for manipulating images without modifying original pixels in a non-destructive fashion.

Better brushes¶

32-bit parametric brushes¶

Michael Natterer and Ell worked a lot on a better brush support in GIMP. A major improvement for painters was making parametric brushes finally 32-bit float, following the high-bit depth move for color processing. The main advantage will be to avoid posterization on large brushes, especially with darker colors.

It is to be noted that raster brushes are still 8-bit. Promoting them to 32-bit float is also a planned future work.

Moreover, plug-ins only have access to 8-bit versions of high-precision brushes and patterns. A new API, not available yet, will be required to handle high-precision data.

Easy brush and pattern creation from clipboard¶

It was already possible to create new brushes and patterns on-the-fly from the clipboard (i.e. image copied, typically with a Ctrl-c shortcut). This was extremely practical, yet only allowed temporary brushes and patterns.

These temporary brushes and patterns can now be duplicated as any other data, therefore allowing to promote them to stored data for further reuse. Though simple looking, this change is the result of an important code migration into the core of GIMP (instead of being plug-in code), performed by Michael Natterer, which may have further happy consequences in a near future!

Open as Image¶

The “Brushes” dock now provides an “Open brush as image” button to quickly open a brush file, allowing easier brush edits.

On-canvas layer selection¶

Anyone working with a lot of layers has sometimes experienced the frustration of not finding a layer in the list, even though you see its pixels in front of your eyes.

Jehan implemented a new generic canvas modifier Alt + middle click allowing layers to be picked by clicking on pixels. The available layers will be looped through (starting from the upper one) while the Alt key is held and the picked layer name will be temporarily displayed in the status bar. The interaction choices heavily benefited from input by Aryeom, from the ZeMarmot project.

Layer picking on canvas with Alt + middle click

Faster and safer GIMP¶

As usual, many bugs were fixed and a lot of optimizations were made to existing part of the code. Of them these 2 improvements are particularly noteworthy:

Saving and exporting safer¶

Various parts of the file-writing code were made more robust by not overwriting the file when an error occured. In particular XCF saving and exporting to various image formats should be safer now.

Layer groups rendered faster¶

Layer groups are now rendered in bigger chunks rather than tile-by-tile (this used to pretty much eliminate multithreading for groups), which improves the rendering speed.

Improved macOS builds¶

HiDPI/Retina support was improved in the macOS/OSX build, fixing issues with blurry icons.

Moreover the macOS package is finally signed, thus making the installation process on this platform much less painful now!

And more!¶

In total, since GIMP 2.10.8, 775 commits were contributed (average of 5 commits a day) to the GIMP 2.10 branch (and more to other development branches). This means a lot of bugs were fixed (41 bug reports were closed during this development span), performance were improved, and your work is made safer…

And as we should also count babl (66 commits for babl 0.1.62) and GEGL (404 commits for GEGL 0.4.14), you can bet that this release is again as awesome as ever!

Moreover 21 translations were updated. So we also want to thank all the awesome translators who allow GIMP to be available in so many languages around the world.

Plug-ins¶

DDS support¶

The third-party DDS plug-in, originally developed by Shawn Kirst and Arne Reuter, is now part of the GIMP core plug-ins, allowing GIMP to load or export DDS files out of the box.

It is to be noted though that we are still looking for an active maintainer for this plug-in if you want to see it improved since we only fixed the minimum to get it up-to-date. If you want to step up, we welcome patches!

Rewritten Spyrogimp plug-in¶

Elad Shahar, original author of the Spyrogimp plug-in rewrote it from scratch completely, with more options and an automatic preview (by drawing directly on a temporary layer, not as a GEGL preview).

New Spyrogimp plug-in in GIMP

The old plug-in is still available, as its API may be used by existing scripts, but is not available in the menus anymore as it is replaced by the new version.

Filters¶

Circular, Linear, and Zoom Motion blurs got new on-canvas interactions (simple lines) allowing easier visual tweaking of the blur settings.

Around GIMP¶

GEGL and babl¶

This release of GIMP is accompanied by a hefty GEGL 0.4.14 release, featuring a handful of under-the-hood improvements, as well as new user-facing additions.

Most excitingly, the standalone gegl tool, which can be used to apply GEGL pipelines directly from the command-line, has seen a massive rework of its integrated GUI by Øyvind Kolås. The new UI doubles as an image viewer and a graph editor, allowing real-time non-destructive image manipulation.

The gegl binary features a reworked graphical editor

As well as acting as a non-destructive editor proof-of-concept, sporting such snazzy features as touch-oriented interaction and Lua-based per-operation UI, it also provides a testbed for new and existing GEGL features, such as mipmap rendering.

The editor can be extended using Lua, allowing for per-operation UI

Øyvind Kolås has also been working on more deeply-ingrained CMYK support in both babl, which saw its 0.1.62 release earlier this year, and GEGL. This includes support for CMYK ICC profiles in babl (at this point, through LCMS2), direct CMYK support as part of relevant GEGL functions and core operations, and support for reading/writing CMYK data in TIFF and JPEG files. While not done yet, this work goes towards adding first-class CMYK support to GIMP.

Behind the scenes, this release saw various bug fixes and performance improvements, including:

refactoring of the parallelization framework
swap tile-compression
removal of the deprecated iterator API
new operations in the workshop
improvements to existing operations

See the GEGL relase notes for more information.

Note for packagers: to build GEGL 0.4.14 on Win32, 2 commits will need cherry-picking: commits 141a7aa7 and b3ff0df0.

What’s next¶

As often, we remind that you can donate to the project and personally fund several of the people mentionned in this news. This is a way to give back if you appreciate the work and wish to help GIMP improve more!

Work on GIMP codebase is still going strong, not only for the stable GIMP 2.10.x branch, but also on the master branch with GTK+3 port. Hopefully we will soon have some nice things to announce on this less visible side of the development!

In the meantime, if you want to meet members of the GIMP team, as every year, several members will be present during the Libre Graphics Meeting 2019 in Saarbruecken, Germany, from May 29 to June 2. We have a few talks planned. Other than this, we will likely hang around, so do not hesitate to catch one of us for a talk!

GIMP and GEGL in 2018

Wilber — Wed, 02 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0100

In this post, we are looking back at 2018 and then forward to outline future work on GIMP, GEGL, and babl.

Version 2.10 release and point releases¶

In April, we released the much anticipated version 2.10, featuring updated user interface, high bit depth support, multi-threading, linear color space workflow, revamped color management, new transformation tools, and many more changes, as outlined in the release notes.

Given that the next big update, v3.0, is likely far ahead, we now also allow new features in the stable series (2.10.2, 2.10.4 etc.). Which means, you don’t have to wait years for new features anymore. Instead, we make a new release every 1-2 months, and it usually comes with many bugfixes as well as some new stuff.

Nightscape, by Filip Bulovic, CC BY-SA 4.0

Among the new features in 2.10 updates this year:

support for HEIF images
simple horizon straightening
vertical text
new filters

Development focus¶

So what have we been busy with after releasing 2.10?

Refactoring. Most work is happening in the main development branch leading up to version 3.0. GIMP 3.0 will be relying on GTK3, a much newer version of the toolkit. And we want to arrive to working on non-destructive editing with a much leaner code base. This means a lot still needs to change. The majority of changes here was contributed by GIMP maintainer Michael Natterer.

Usability. There have been numerous fixes to address various usability issues in GIMP. We eliminated duplicated file type selector in the exporting dialog, added an explanation for why a file might not be entirely readable in older versions of GIMP, and fixed quite a few other things.

Compatibility warning

Smart colorization. This major new feature greatly simplifies filling inked sketches with color, where areas are not completely closed. It was added by Jehan Pagès, with contributions from Ell, and will be available in GIMP 2.10.10.

Smart colorization demo

Extension management. ZeMarmot project has started implementing extension management within GIMP, which will allow to search, install, uninstall and update extensions directly within GIMP. An extension is meant to be any data already installable (manually currently) in GIMP, such as plug-ins, icons, brushes, and more.

Extensions dialog

Performance and async jobs. There are several attack vectors towards subpar performance of GIMP. Ell fixed some of the big issues by introducing async operations like lazy loading of fonts (which effectively fixed the long startup times for GIMP on Windows), and then moved all parallel processing in multiple threads over to GEGL. Both Ell and Øyvind Kolås contributed to improving performance of downscaling with bilinear and bicubic samplers and other aspects of GEGL and babl.

Space invasion. GIMP used to have the sRGB color space hardcoded into all processing. This couldn’t work for everyone, and we introduced some changes to support any RGB color spaces in 2.10. Space invasion is the next step towards that goal. The ‘master’ git branch of GIMP now allows taking an image that’s originally in e.g. ProPhotoRGB, processing it in a different color space (e.g. CIE LAB), and the resulted image will be in ProPhotoRGB again, with all color data correctly mapped to the original space / ICC profile. This isn’t yet polished and thus not read for prime-time use. Most of the work was done by Øyvind Kolås and Michael Natterer.

CMYK. Øyvind made CMYK a first-class citizen in GEGL, thus laying the foundation for respective changes in GIMP. GEGL now can e.g. open a CMYK JPEG file, composite an RGB PNG file with an alpha channel on top of it, then write a CMYK TIFF file to the output, tagged with a user-submitted CMYK ICC profile. This and other work can be sponsored by you via Patreon.

Bugfixing. This is the boring part that is, however, absolutely crucial for making any software usable. Due to the switch to GNOME-hosted Gitlab instance, we cannot give the exact number, but there have been a few hundreds of bugfixes done by many contributors throughout the year.

2019 outlook¶

We expect to be shipping 2.10.x updates throughout 2019, starting with the version 2.10.10 currently expected in January/February. This version will feature faster layer groups rendering, smart colorization with the Bucket Fill tool, and various usability improvements.

We are also planning the first unstable release of GIMP that will have version 2.99.2, eventually leading up to version 3.0. The prerequisite for releasing that version will be the completion of the space invasion (see above).

ZeMarmot project (which can be supported on Patreon or Tipeee) is also planning to focus a bit more on better canvas interactions, as well as animation support improvements, starting from merging existing work.

On the GEGL and babl front, we expect to continue working towards better CMYK support and performance.

Where help is wanted¶

There are many ways you can contribute to making GIMP better.

Usability. Historically, GIMP has been created by programmers rather than UI designers. Although we don’t have the manpower to implement every single proposal, we do appreciated structured proposals, explaining a problem and suggesting ways to fix it. We also welcome contributions improving the design of symbolic icons which have their usability issues.

User manual. Currently, most of the original writing is done by a single person, so the user manual is not yet complete to cover all changes in the version 2.10. You don’t need to know DocBook/XML to contribute (it’s not hard to learn though), we welcome new text submitted in any file format.

User interface translations. Out of 81 languages supported in the stable branch of GIMP, only 20 translations into other languages are currently more than 90% complete, and 15 translation are only 10% or less complete. If this is something you would like to work on, please join your local team and start contributing translation updates.

Tutorials. There will never be enough tutorials explaining how to use GIMP to accomplish various tasks, especially if we are talking about high-quality results. If you don’t like watching and making video tutorials, you can write text with illustrations. And if you don’t have your own blog, we are open to submissions for the official tutorials section at gimp.org too.

Programming. If you are interested in fun things, pretty much all of the Future section of the roadmap can be done for 3.0 and a lot — even for 2.10.x (do talk to us first just in case though). There are even more feature requests in the tracker. And one thing we are particularly interested in for 3.0 is fixing the broken Python support.

On top of that, we still need to make public API for text layers, so that the PSD plug-in could be patched to read and write text as text. And our EXR and RGBE plug-ins are currently rather simplistic, so that’s another area of improvement.

There are all sorts of other interesting ideas for plug-ins, like UV unwrapping from OBJ files for texturing. And we are still missing a developer with a game design bug to work on the DDS plug-in that currently lives in a dedicated git branch.

Donations¶

In August 2018, we received a $100K donation from Handshake.org via GNOME Foundation. So far, we are using this money for long overdue hardware upgrades.

Our core developers, Øyvind Kolås and Jehan Pagès, continue running their personal crowdfunding via Patreon, although in case of Jehan the money is actually split two-ways, because his campaign is targeted at funding a short anomation movie made with GIMP (development assists that project, like in Blender Institute’s open movies).

Team acknowledgment¶

While we often mention GIMP, GEGL, and babl separately, all work on GEGL and babl directly affects the evolution of GIMP, both in terms of features and performance. Thus, all GEGL and babl contributors are GIMP contributors too.

The vast majority of the work in GIMP’s git repository is currently done by Ell, Jehan Pagès, and Michael Natterer, who share a nearly equal percentage of commits and spend more or less the same amount of time hacking on the code. Additional contributions came from Simon Budig, Massimo Valentini, Ono Yoshio, and others.

Øyvind Kolås, Ell, and Debarshi Ray are major developers of GEGL. Additional contributions came from Thomas Manni, Félix Piédallu, Simon Budig, and others.

Most of the work on babl in 2018 was done by Øyvind Kolås, with contributions from Félix Piédallu and Debarshi Ray.

We thank Julien Hardelin for his tireless work on the user manual and all the translators who contribute their updates. We also thank Elle Stone on her insight into all things color management and contributions to making GIMP play better with CIE color spaces.

We thank Pat David and Michael Schumacher on both their work on the website and user support on various social channels.

We also thank Jernej Simončič and Alex Samorukov for providing Windows and macOS builds and fixing platform-specific bugs.

And we can’t thank enough all the translators who have been closely following development of GIMP to make the program perfectly available in their respective languages: Piotr Drąg, Nils Philippsen, Sveinn í Felli, Tim Sabsch, Marco Ciampa, Claude Paroz, Daniel Korostil, Alan Mortensen, Anders Jonsson, Dimitris Spingos, Snehalata B Shirude, Martin Srebotnjak, and others.

Happy Holidays, from GIMP and ZeMarmot team, by Aryeom

GIMP 2.10.8 Released

Wilber — Thu, 08 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0100

Though the updated GIMP release policy allows cool new features in micro releases, we also take pride on the stability of our software (so that you can edit images feeling that your work is safe).

In this spirit, GIMP 2.10.8 is mostly the result of dozens of bug fixes and optimizations.

Wilber and Co. strip, by Aryeom and Jehan, 2013

Notable improvements¶

In particular, chunk size of image projections are now determined dynamically depending on processing speed, allowing better responsiveness of GIMP on less powerful machines whereas processing would be faster on more powerful ones.

Moreover various tools have been added to generate performance logs, which will allow us to optimize GIMP even more in the future. As with most recent optimizations of GIMP, these are the results of Ell’s awesomeness. Thanks Ell!

In the meantime, various bugs have been fixed in wavelet-decompose, the new vertical text feature (including text along path), selection tools, and more. On Windows, we also improved RawTherapee detection (for RawTherapee 5.5 and over), working in sync with the developers of this very nice RAW processing software. And many, many more fixes, here and there…

The Save dialog also got a bit of retouching as it now shows more prominently the features preventing backward compatibility (in case you wish to send images to someone using an older version of GIMP). Of course, we want to stress that we absolutely recommend to always use the latest version of GIMP. But life is what it is, so we know that sometimes you have no choice. Now it will be easier to make your XCF backward compatible (which means, of course, that some new features must not be used).

Save dialog shows compatibility issues when applicable

Thanks to Ell, the Gradient tool now supports multi-color hard-edge gradient fills. This feature is available as a new Step gradient-segment blending mode. This creates a hard-edge transition between the two adjacent color stops at the midpoint.

Newly added Step blending in gradient fills

On the usability end of things, all transform tools now apply changes when you save or export/overwrite an image without pressing Enter first to confirm changes. Ell also fixed the color of selected text which wasn’t very visible when e.g. renaming a layer.

CIE xyY support¶

Thanks to Elle Stone, GIMP now features initial support for color readouts in the CIE xyY color space. You can see these values in the Info window of the Color Picker tool and in the Sample Points dock. Most of the related code went into the babl library.

Much like CIE LAB, this color space is a derivative of CIE XYZ. The Y channel separates luminance information from chromaticity information in the x and y channels. You might be (unknowingly) familiar with this color space if you ever looked at a horseshoe diagram of an ICC profile.

CIE xyY is useful to explore various color-related topics like the Abney effect. See this Pixls.us thread for an example of what people do with this kind of information.

Improved GIMP experience on macOS¶

Our new macOS contributor, Alex Samorukov, has been very hard at work improving the macOS/OSX package, debugging and patching both GIMP, GEGL, and the gtk-osx project.

Some of the macOS specific bugs he fixed are artifacts while zooming, the windows focus bug in plug-ins, and a non-functional support for some non-Wacom tablets. Jehan, Ell, and Øyvind actively participated in fixing these and other macOS issues.

We also thank CircleCI for providing their infrastructure to us free of charge. This helps us automatically building GIMP for macOS.

That said, please keep in mind that we have very few developers for macOS and Windows. If you want GIMP to be well supported on your operating system of choice, we do welcome new contributors!

Also, see the NEWS file for more information on the new GIMP release, and the commit history for even more details.

Around GIMP¶

GEGL and babl¶

The babl library got an important fix that directly affects GIMP users: the color of transparent pixels is now preserved during conversion to premultiplied alpha. This means all transform and deformation operations now maintain color for fully transparent pixels, making unerase and curves manipulation of alpha channel more reliable.

On the GEGL side, a new buffer iterator API was added (GIMP code has been ported to this improved interface as well). Additionally, new GEGL_TILE_COPY command was added to backends to make buffer duplication/copies more efficient.

Recently, Øyvind Kolås has been working again on multispectral/hyperspectral processing in GEGL, which happens to be the groundwork for CMYK processing. This is therefore the first steps for better CMYK support in GIMP! We hope that anyone who wants to see this happening will support Øyvind on Patreon!

GIMP in Université de Cergy-Pontoise¶

Aryeom, well known around here for being the director of ZeMarmot movie, a skilled illustrator, and a contributor to GIMP has given a graphics course with GIMP as a guest teacher for nearly a week at the Université de Cergy-Pontoise in France, mid-October.

She taught to two classes: a computer graphics class and a 3D heritage one, focusing on digital illustration for the former and retouching for the latter.

Aryeom and her students in University of Cergy-Pontoise

This is a good hint that GIMP is getting more recognition as it now gets taught in universities. Students were very happy overall, and we could conclude by quoting one of them at the end of a 3-day course:

I didn’t know that GIMP was the Blender for 2D; now this is one more software in my toolbox!

We remind that you can also support Aryeom’s work on Patreon, on Tipeee or by others means!

Flatpak statistics¶

Although Flathub does not (yet) provide any public statistics for packages, an internal source told us that there have been over 214,000 downloads of GIMP since its existence (October 2017). This is more than 500 downloads a day, and by far the most downloaded application there!

Flathub is a new kind of application repository for GNU/Linux, so of course these numbers are not representative of all downloads. In particular, we don’t have statistics for Windows and macOS. Even for Linux, every distribution out there makes its own package of GIMP.

So this is a small share, and a nice one at that, of the full usage of GIMP around the globe!

GIF is dead? Long live WebP!¶

The GIF format is the only animated image format which is visible in any web browser, making it the de-facto format for basic animation on the web, despite terrible quality (256 colors!), binary transparency (no partial transparency), and not so good compression.

Well, this may change! A few days ago, WebP reached support in most major browsers (Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera), when a 2-year old feature request for Mozilla Firefox got closed as “FIXED”. This will be available for Firefox 65.

Therefore, we surely hope web platforms will take this new format into consideration, and that everyone will stop creating GIF images now that there are actual alternatives in most browsers!

And last but not least, we remind everyone that GIMP has already had WebP support since GIMP 2.10.0!

A WebP animation (done in GIMP), by Aryeom, featuring ZeMarmot and a penguin.

Disclaimer: the GIMP team is neutral towards formats. We are aware of other animated image formats, such as APNG or MNG, and wish them all the best as well! We would also be very happy to support them in GIMP, if contributors show up with working patches.

What’s next¶

We’ve been running late with this release, so we haven’t included some of the improvements available in the main development branch of GIMP. And there are even more changes coming!

Here is what you can expect in GIMP 2.10.10 when it’s out.

ACES RRT display filter that can be used in scene-referred imaging workflows. Technically, it’s a luminance-only approximation of the ACES filmic HDR-to-SDR proofing mapping originally written in The Baking Lab project.
Space invasion: essentially you can now take an image that’s originally in e.g. ProPhotoRGB, process it in the CIE LAB color space, and the resulted image will be in ProPhotoRGB again, with all color data correctly mapped to the original space / ICC profile. This is a complicated topic, we’ll talk more about it when it’s time to release 2.10.10.

Another new feature we expect to merge to a public branch soon is smart colorization based on the original implementation in the ever-popular GMIC filter.

Given quickly approaching winter holidays and all the busy time that comes with it, we can’t 100% guarantee another stable release this year, but we’ll do our best to keep ‘em coming regularly!

Conclusion¶

We wish you a lot of fun with GIMP, as it becomes more stable every day!

GIMP receives a $100K donation

Wilber — Thu, 30 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0200

Earlier this month, GNOME Foundation announced that they received a $400,000 donation from Handshake.org, of which $100,000 they transferred to GIMP’s account.

We thank both Handshake.org and GNOME Foundation for the generous donation and will use the money to do much overdue hardware upgrade for the core team members and organize the next hackfest to bring the team together, as well as sponsor the next instance of Libre Graphics Meeting.

Handshake is a decentralized, permissionless naming protocol compatible with DNS where every peer is validating and in charge of managing the root zone with the goal of creating an alternative to existing Certificate Authorities. Its purpose is not to replace the DNS protocol, but to replace the root zone file and the root servers with a public commons.

GNOME Foundation is a non-profit organization that furthers the goals of the GNOME Project, helping it to create a free software computing platform for the general public that is designed to be elegant, efficient, and easy to use.

GIMP 2.10.6 Released

Wilber — Sun, 19 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0200

Almost four months have passed since GIMP 2.10.0 release, and this is already the fourth version in the series, bringing you bug fixes, optimizations, and new features.

The most notable changes are listed below (see also the NEWS file).

Main changes¶

Vertical text layers¶

GIMP finally gets support for vertical text (top-to-bottom writing)! This is a particularly anticipated feature for several East-Asian writing systems, but also for anyone wishing to design fancy vertical text.

Vertical text in GIMP 2.10.6.

For this reason, GIMP provides several variants of vertical text, with mixed orientation (as is typical in East-Asian vertical writing) or upright orientation (more common for Western vertical writing), with right-to-left, as well as left-to-right columns.

Thanks to Yoshio Ono for the vertical text implementation!

New filters¶

Two new filters make an entrance in this release:

Little Planet¶

This new filter is built on top of the pre-existing gegl:stereographic-projection operation and is finetuned to create “little planets” from 360×180° equirectangular panorama images.

Little Planet filter in GIMP 2.10.6.
Image on canvas: Luftbild Panorama der Isar bei Ettling in Niederbayern, by Simon Waldherr, (CC by-sa 4.0).

Long Shadow¶

This new GEGL-based filter simplifies creating long shadows in several visual styles.

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There is a handful of configurable options, all helping you to cut extra steps from getting the desired effect.

The feature was contributed by Ell.

Improved straightening in the Measure tool¶

A lot of people appreciated the new Horizon Straightening feature added in GIMP 2.10.4. Yet many of you wanted vertical straightening as well. This is now possible.

Vertical straightening in GIMP 2.10.6.
Image on canvas: View of the western enclosing wall of the Great Mosque of Kairouan, by Moumou82, (CC by-sa 2.0).

In the Auto mode (default), Straighten will snap to the smaller angle to decide for vertical or horizontal straightening. You can override this behavior by specifying explicitly which it should be.

Optimized drawable preview rendering¶

Most creators working on complex projects in GIMP have had bad days when there are many layers in a large image, and GIMP can’t keep up with scrolling the layers list or showing/hiding layers.

Part of the reason was that GIMP couldn’t update user interface until it was done rendering layer previews. Ell again did some miracles here by having most drawable previews render asynchronously.

For now, the only exception to that are layer groups. Rendering them asynchronously is still not possible, so until we deal with this too, we made it possible for you to disable rendering layer group previews completely. Head over to Preferences > Interface and tick off the respective checkbox.

Disable preview of layer groups in GIMP 2.10.6.

One more thing to mention here. For technically-minded users, the Dashboard dockable dialog (introduced in GIMP 2.10.0) now displays the number of async operations running in the Misc group.

A new localization: Marathi¶

GIMP was already available in 80 languages. Well, it’s 81 languages now!

A team from the North Maharashtra University, Jalgaon, worked on a Marathi translation and contributed a nearly full translation of GIMP.

Of course, we should not forget all the other translators who do a wonderful work on GIMP. In this release, 13 other translations were updated: Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Latvian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Swedish.

Thanks everyone!

Marathi translation in GIMP 2.10.6.

File dialog filtering simplified¶

A common cause of confusion in the file dialogs (opening, saving, exporting…) was the presence of two file format lists, one for displaying files with a specific extension, the other for the actual file format choice. So we streamlined this.

There is just one list available now, and it works as both the filter for displayed images and the file format selector for the image you are about to save or export.

File dialog in GIMP 2.10.6.

Additionally, a new checkbox allows you to display the full list of files, regardless of the currently chosen file format. This could be useful when you want to enforce an unusual file extension or reuse an existing file’s name by choosing it in the list and then appending your extension.

The end of DLL hell? A note to plug-in developers…¶

A major problem over the years, on Windows, was what developers call the DLL hell. This was mostly caused either by third-party software installing libraries in system folders or by third-party plug-ins installing themselves with shared libraries interfering with other plug-ins.

The former had already been mostly fixed by tweaking the DLL search priority order. This release provides an additional fix by taking into account 32-bit plug-ins running on 64-bit Windows systems (WoW64 mode).

The latter was fixed already since GIMP 2.10.0 if you installed your plug-ins in its own directory (which is not compulsory yet, but will be in GIMP 3).

E.g. if you have a plug-in named myplugin.exe, please install it under plug-ins/myplugin/myplugin.exe. This way, not only you won’t pollute other plug-ins if you ever included libraries, but your plug-in won’t be prevented from running by unwanted libraries as well. All our core plug-ins are now installed this way. Any third-party plug-ins should be as well.

Ongoing Development¶

Prepare for the space invasion!¶

Meanwhile, taking place simultaneously on the babl, GEGL, and GIMP 2.99 fronts, pippin and Mitch embarked on a project internally nicknamed the “space invasion“, the end goal of which is to simplify and improve color management in GIMP, as well as other GEGL-based projects.

Mutant goats from outer space, soon landing in GIMP.

About a year ago, babl, the library used by GIMP and GEGL to perform color conversions, gained the ability to tie arbitrary RGB color spaces to existing pixels formats. This, in turn, allowed GIMP to start using babl for performing conversions between certain classes of color profiles, instead of relying solely on the LCMS library, greatly improving performance. However, these conversions would only take place at the edges between the internal image representation used by GIMP, and the outside world; internally, the actual color profile of the image had limited effect, leading to inconsistent or incorrect results for certain image-processing operations.

The current effort seeks to change that, by having all image data carry around the information regarding its color profile internally. When properly handled by GEGL and GIMP, this allows babl to perform the right conversions at the right time, letting all image-processing operations be applied in the correct color space.

While the ongoing work toward this goal is already available in the mainline babl and GEGL versions, we are currently restricting it to the GIMP 2.99 development version (to become GIMP 3.0), but it will most likely make its way into a future GIMP 2.10.x release.

GIMP extensions¶

Lastly Jehan, from ZeMarmot project, has been working on extensions in GIMP. An extension could be anything from plug-ins to splash images, patterns, brushes, gradients… Basically anything which could be created and added by anyone. The end goal would be to allow creators of such extensions to upload them on public repositories, and for anyone to search and install them in a few clicks, with version management, updates, etc.

Extension manager in future GIMP

This work is also only in the development branch for the time being, but should make it to a GIMP 2.10.x release at some point in the future as well.

Helping development¶

Keep in mind that pippin and Jehan are able to work on GEGL and GIMP thanks to crowdfunding and the support of the community. Every little bit helps to support their work and helps to make GIMP/GEGL even more awesome! If you have a moment, check out their support pages:

pippin Patreon
Jehan Patreon (ZeMarmot)

Most importantly: have fun with GIMP everyone!

GIMP 2.10.4 Released

Alexandre Prokoudine — Wed, 04 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0200

The latest update of GIMP’s new stable series delivers bugfixes, simple horizon straightening, async fonts loading, fonts tagging, and more new features.

Simple Horizon Straightening¶

A common use case for the Measure tool is getting GIMP to calculate the angle of rotation, when horizon is uneven on a photo. GIMP now removes the extra step of performing rotation manually: after measuring the angle, just click the newly added Straighten button in the tool’s settings dialog.

Straightening images in GIMP 2.10.4.

Asynchronous Fonts Loading¶

Loading all available fonts on start-up can take quite a while, because as soon as you add new fonts or remove existing ones, fontconfig (a 3rd party utility GIMP uses) has to rebuild the fonts cache. Windows and macOS users suffered the most from it.

Thanks to Jehan Pagès and Ell, GIMP now performs the loading of fonts in a parallel process, which dramatically improves startup time. The caveat is that in case you need to immediately use the Text tool, you might have to wait till all fonts complete loading. GIMP will notify you of that.

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Fonts Tagging¶

Michael Natterer introduced some internal changes to make fonts taggable. The user interface is the same as for brushes, patterns, and gradients.

GIMP doesn’t yet automatically generate any tags from fonts metadata, but this is something we keep on our radar. Ideas and, better yet, patches are welcome!

Dashboard Updates¶

Ell added several new features to the Dashboard dockable dialog that helps debugging GIMP and GEGL or, for end-users, finetune the use of cache and swap.

New Memory group of widgets shows currently used memory size, the available physical memory size, and the total physical memory size. It can also show the tile-cache size, for comparison against the other memory stats.

Updated Dashboard in GIMP 2.10.4.

Note that the upper-bound of the meter is the physical memory size, so the memory usage may be over 100% when GIMP uses the swap.

The Swap group now features “read” and “written” fields which report the total amount of data read-from/written-to the tile swap, respectively. Additionally, the swap busy indicator has been improved, so that it’s active whenever data has been read-from/written-to the swap during the last sampling interval, rather than at the point of sampling.

PSD Loader Improvements¶

While we cannot yet support PSD features such as adjustment layers, there is one thing we can do for users who just need a file to render correctly in GIMP. Thanks to Ell, GIMP now can load a “merged”, pre-composited version of the image, that becomes available when a PSD file was saved with “Maximize Compatibility” option enabled in Photoshop.

This option is currently exposed as an additional file type (“Photoshop image (merged)”), which has to be explicitly selected from the filetype list when opening the image. GIMP then will render the file correctly, but drop certain additional data from the file, such as channels, paths, and guides, while retaining metadata.

Builds for macOS Make a Comeback¶

Beta builds of GIMP 2.10 for macOS are available now. We haven’t eliminated all issues yet, and we appreciate your feedback.

GEGL and babl¶

Ell further improved the Recursive Transform operation, allowing multiple transformations to be applied simultaneously. He also fixed the trimming of tile xache into the swap.

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New Selective Hue-Saturation operation by Miroslav Talasek is now available in the workshop. The idea is that you can choose a hue, then select width of the hues range around that base hue, then tweak saturation of all affected pixels.

Øyvind Kolås applied various fixes to the Pixelize operation and added the “needs-alpha” meta-data to Color to Alpha and svg-luminancetoalpha operations. He also added a Threshold setting to the Unsharp Mask filter (now called Sharpen (Unsharp Mask)) to restore and improve the legacy Unsharp Mask implementation from GIMP prior to v2.10.

In babl, Ell introduced various improvements to the babl-palette code, including making the default palette initialization thread-safe. Øyvind Kolås added an R~G~B~ set of spaces (which for all BablSpaces mean use sRGB TRC), definitions of ACEScg and ACES2065-1 spaces, and made various clean-ups. Elle Stone contributed a fix for fixed-to-double conversions.

Ongoing Development¶

While we spend as much time on bugfixing in 2.10.x as we can, our main goal is to complete the GTK+3 port as soon as possible. There is a side effect of this work: we keep discovering old subpar solutions that frustrate us until we fix them. So there is both GTK+3 porting and refactoring, which means we can’t predict when it’ll be done.

Recently, we also revitalized an outdated subproject called ‘gimp-data-extras’ with the sole purpose of keeping the Alpha-to-Logo scripts that we removed from 2.10 due to poor graphics quality. Since some users miss those scripts, there is now a simple way to get them back: download gimp-data-extras v2.0.4, unpack the archive, and copy all ‘.scm’ files from the ‘scripts’ folder to your local GIMP’s ‘scripts’ folder.

GIMP has moved to Gitlab

Alexandre Prokoudine — Thu, 31 May 2018 00:00:00 +0200

Along with the GEGL and babl libraries, GIMP has moved to a new collaborative programming infrastructure based on Gitlab and hosted by GNOME. The new URLs are:

On the end-user side, this mostly means an improved bug reporting experience. The submission is easier to fill in, and we provide two templates — one for bug reports and one for feature requests.

New issue form on Gitlab.

For developers, it means simplified contribution, as you can simply fork the GIMP repository, commit changes, and send a merge request. Please note that while we accept merge requests, we only do that in cases when patches can be fast-forwarded. That means you need to rebase your fork on the master branch (we’ll see if we can do merge requests for the ‘gimp-2-10’ branch).

In the meantime, work continues in both ‘master’ branch (GTK+3) porting and the ‘gimp-2-10’ branch. Most notably, Ell and Jehan Pagès have been improving the user-perceivable time it takes GIMP to load fonts by adding the asynchronous loading of resources on startup.

What it means is that font loading does not block startup anymore, but if you have a lot of fonts and you want to immediately use the Text tool, you might have to wait.

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The API is general rather than fonts-specific and can be further used to add the background loading of brushes, palettes, patterns etc.

GIMP 2.10.2 Released

Jehan Pagès — Sun, 20 May 2018 00:00:00 +0200

It’s barely been a month since we released GIMP 2.10.0, and the first bugfix version 2.10.2 is already there! Its main purpose is fixing the various bugs and issues which were to be expected after the 2.10.0 release.

Therefore, 44 bugs have been fixed in less than a month!

We have also been relaxing the policy for new features and this is the first time we will be applying this policy with features in a stable micro release! How cool is that?

For a complete list of changes please see NEWS.

New features¶

Added support for HEIF image format¶

This release brings HEIF image support, both for loading and export!

Thanks to Dirk Farin for the HEIF plug-in.

New filters¶

Two new filters have been added, based off GEGL operations:

Spherize filter to wrap an image around a spherical cap, based on the gegl:spherize operation.

Spherize filter in GIMP 2.10.2.
Original image CC-BY-SA by Aryeom Han.

Recursive Transform filter to create a Droste effect, based on the gegl:recursive-transform operation.

Recursive transform filter in GIMP 2.10.2, with a custom on-canvas interface.
Original image CC-BY by Philipp Haegi.

Noteworthy improvements¶

Better single-window screenshots on Windows¶

While the screenshot plug-in was already better in GIMP 2.10.0, we had a few issues with single-window screenshots on Windows when the target window was hidden behind other windows, partly off-screen, or when display scaling was activated.

All these issues have been fixed by our new contributor Gil Eliyahu.

Histogram computation improved¶

GIMP now calculates histograms in separate threads which eliminates some UI freezes. This has been implemented with some new internal APIs which may be reused later for other cases.

Working with third-parties¶

Packagers: set your bug tracker address¶

As you know, we now have a debug dialog which may pop-up when crashes occur with debug information. This dialog opens our bug tracker in a browser.

We realized that we get a lot of bugs from third-party builds, and a significant part of the bugs are package-specific. In order to relieve that burden a bit (because we are a very small team), we would appreciate if packagers could make a first triaging of bugs, reporting to us what looks like actual GIMP bugs, and taking care of their own packaging issues themselves.

This is why our configure script now has the --with-bug-report-url option, allowing you to set your own bug tracker web URL. This way, when people click the “Open Bug Tracker” button it will open the package bug tracker instead.

XCF-reader developers: format is documented¶

Since 2006, our work format, XCF, is documented thanks to the initial contribution of Henning Makholm. We have recently updated this document to integrate all the changes to the format since the GIMP 2.10.0 release.

Any third-party applications wishing to read XCF files can refer to this updated documentation. The git log view may actually be more interesting since you can more easily spot the changes and new features which have been documented recently.

Keep in mind that XCF is not meant to be an interchange format (unlike for instance OpenRaster) and this document is not a “specification”. The XCF reference document is the code itself. Nevertheless we are happy to help third-party applications, and if you spot any error or issues within this document feel free to open a bug report so we can fix it.

GIMP 3 is already on its way…¶

While GIMP 2.10.0 was still hot and barely released, our developers started working on GIMP 3. One of the main tasks is cleaning the code from the many deprecated pieces of code or data as well as from code made useless by the switch to GTK+ 3.x.

The deletion is really going full-speed with more than 200 commits made in less than a month on the gtk3-port git branch and with 5 times more lines deleted than inserted in the last few weeks.

Delete delete delete… exterminate!

Michael Natterer and Jehan portrayed by Aryeom.
It’s actually misses Simon Budig, a long time contributor who made a big comeback on the GTK+3 port with dozens of commits!

GIMP 2.10.0 Released

Wilber — Fri, 27 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0200

The long-awaited GIMP 2.10.0 is finally here! This is a huge release, which contains the result of 6 long years of work (GIMP 2.8 was released almost exactly 6 years ago!) by a small but dedicated core of contributors.

The Changes in short¶

We are not going to list the full changelog here, since you can get a better idea with our official GIMP 2.10 release notes. To get an even more detailed list of changes please see the NEWS file.

Still, to get you a quick taste of GIMP 2.10, here are some of the most notable changes:

Image processing nearly fully ported to GEGL, allowing high bit depth processing, multi-threaded and hardware accelerated pixel processing, and more.
Color management is a core feature now, most widgets and preview areas are color-managed.
Many improved tools, and several new and exciting tools, such as the Warp transform, the Unified transform and the Handle transform tools.
On-canvas preview for all filters ported to GEGL.
Improved digital painting with canvas rotation and flipping, symmetry painting, MyPaint brush support…
Support for several new image formats added (OpenEXR, RGBE, WebP, HGT), as well as improved support for many existing formats (in particular more robust PSD importing).
Metadata viewing and editing for Exif, XMP, IPTC, and DICOM.
Basic HiDPI support: automatic or user-selected icon size.
New themes for GIMP (Light, Gray, Dark, and System) and new symbolic icons meant to somewhat dim the environment and shift the focus towards content (former theme and color icons are still available in Preferences).
And more, better, more, and even more awesome!

» READ COMPLETE RELEASE NOTES «

Enjoy GIMP!¶

GIMP 2.10.0 Release Candidate 2 Released

Wilber — Tue, 17 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0200

Hot on the heels of the first release candidate, we’re happy to have a second RC ready! In the last 3 weeks since releasing GIMP 2.10.0-RC1, we’ve fixed 44 bugs and introduced important performance improvements.

As usual, for a complete list of changes please see NEWS.

Optimizations and multi-threading for painting and display¶

A major regression of GIMP 2.10, compared to 2.8, was slower painting. To address this issue, several contributors (Ell, Jehan, Massimo Valentini, Øyvind Kolås…) introduced improvements to the GIMP core, as well as to the GEGL and babl libraries. Additionally, Elle Stone and Jose Americo Gobbo contributed performance testing.

The speed problems pushed Ell to implement multi-threading within GIMP, so that painting and display are now run on separate threads, thus greatly speeding up feedback of the graphical interface.

The new parallelization framework is not painting-specific and could be used for improving other parts of GIMP.

Themes rewritten¶

Since the development version 2.9.4, we had new themes shipped with GIMP, and in particular dark themes (as is now common for creative applications). Unfortunately they were unmaintained, bugs kept piling up, and the user experience wasn’t exactly stellar.

Light, Gray, and Dark themes.

Our long-time contributor Ville Pätsi took up the task of creating brand new themes without any of the usability issues and glitches of previous ones. While cleaning up, only the Gray theme has been kept, whereas Light and Dark were rewritten from scratch. Darker and Lighter themes have been removed (they won’t likely reappear unless someone decides to rewrite and contribute them as well, and unless this person stays around for maintenance).

Gradient tool improved to work in linear color space¶

Thanks to Michael Natterer and Øyvind Kolås, the gradient tool can now work in either perceptual RGB, linear RGB, or CIE LAB color space at your preference.

Gradient tool in perceptual and linear spaces

We also used the opportunity to rename the tool, which used to be called “Blend tool” until now, even though barely anyone uses such name. “Gradient tool” is a much more understandable naming.

New on-canvas control for 3D rotation¶

A new widget for on-canvas interaction of 3D rotation (yaw, pitch, roll) has been implemented by Ell. This new widget is currently only used for the Panorama Projection filter.

Panorama projection filter (image: Hellbrunn Banquet Hall by Matthias Kabel (cba))

Improvements in handling masks, channels, and selections¶

GIMP doesn’t do any gamma conversion when converting between selection, channels, and masks anymore. This makes the selection -> channel -> selection roundtrips correct and predictable.

Additionally, for all >8-bit per channel images, GIMP now uses linear color space for channels. This and many other fixes in the new release were done by Michael Natterer.

Translations¶

8 translations have been updated between the two release candidates. We are very close to releasing the final version of GIMP 2.10.0. If you plan to update a translation into your language and be in time for the release, we recommend starting now.

GEGL changes¶

Mosty of the changes in GEGL since the release in March are performance improvements and micro-optimizations in display paths. Additionally, avoiding incorrectly gamma/ungamma correcting alpha in u8 formats provides a tiny 2-3% performance boost.

For further work on mipmaps support, GEGL now keeps track of valid/invalid areas on smaller granularity than tiles in mipmap.

The Panorama Projection operation got reverse transform, which permits using GIMP for retouching zenith, nadir or other arbitrary gaze directions in equirectangular, also known as 360×180 panoramas.

Finally, abyss policy support in the base class for scale operations now makes it possible to achieve hard edges on rescaled buffers.

What’s Next¶

We are now 7 blocker bugs away from the final release.

On your marks, get set…

Fun at SCaLE 2018

Pat David — Tue, 03 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0200

I am finally back and have a moment to write a bit about the wonderful time I had out in Pasadena at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE 16x)!

SCaLE has been held annualy in southern California for many years (the “16x” indicates this is the sixteenth annual meeting - though they’ve been holding meetings for longer as a LUG).

Libre Graphics Track¶

This year, Nate Willis reached out to see if we might be willing to help organize the first ever “Libre Graphics” track at the meeting. Usually the conference is geared towards enterprise technologies and users, but we thought it might be a nice opportunity to bring to light some of the awesome graphics projects that are out there.

It was an awesome opportunity to share the stage with some really talented folks. The days track and presentations can all be seen here:

Laidout
by Tom Lechner
Extending Inkscape with SVG Filters
by Ted Gould
Busting Things Up with the Fracture Modifier VFX Branch of Blender
by JT Nelson
Making freely licensed movies with freely licensed tools
by Matt Lee
Developers, Developers, Developers—How About Creatives
by Ryan Gorley
Why the GIMP Team Obviously Hates You
by Pat David
Git for Photographers
by Mica Semrick

Overall it was a great day filled with some really neat presentations. More importantly was the opportunity to demonstrate to the attendees that the world of Libre Graphics projects is alive and well! The talks were well attended (approx 30-40 visitors depending on the talk) and the interest and participation was quite nice. Each speaker found a receptive audience with interested follow-on questions (my presentation had about 12 minutes of questions at the end).

One of the most ineresting take-aways at the end of my presentation (and in the following weeks through email) was the astonishment people had at the size of the team working on GIMP. It seemed that the overall impression was that there was some large team of folks hacking on the project, and many people were amazed that the crew is actually as small as it is.

What was heartening was the number of attendees after my presentation who took the time to offer their help in some way. These were all offers to help with writing tutorials or other non-development roles. Possible tasking for various areas of help will be communicated to those offering which should result in some new and/or updated tutorials soon!

GIMP + Inkscape Expo Booth¶

Even better was the opportunity to share a booth at the Expo with the Inkscape team. Presenting is fantastic fun, and I love it, but it’s ridiculously humbling to get a chance to meet face-to-face with users (in the booth on the expo floor) and to hear their stories, soak in their praise, or deflect their anger to someone else while quietly sneaking away (kidding of course).

Thanks to the great work of Ryan Gorley we even had a pair of fantastic banners to hang in the booth:

Ryan Gorley was kind enough to design this pair of banners we hung in the booth.

There was great foot traffic during the expo and we had an opportunity to meet with and chat with quite a few folks making their way through the expo floor. There were even a few folks who had heard of GIMP but hadn’t really taken the time to look at it (which was a great opportunity to talk about the project and what they could do with it). Everyone was extremely kind and gracious.

The booth! With yours truly in the bottom left.

Overall the conference was a success, I’d say! We had an opportunity to help represent the world of Free Software graphics applications and to showcase works using these tools to an audience that might not have otherwise considered them. There were quite a few attendees who were surprised to see us and very engaged both in the booth and during the Libre Graphics track and we sparked a nice interest in people volunteering to help with non-programming related tasks (whose willingness to help out is greatly appreciated).

GIMP 2.10.0 Release Candidate 1 Released

Wilber — Mon, 26 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0200

Newly released GIMP 2.10.0-RC1 is the first release candidate before the GIMP 2.10.0 stable release. With 142 bugs fixed and more than 750 commits since the 2.9.8 development version from mid-December, the focus has really been on getting the last details right.

All the new features we added for this release are instrumental in either improving how GIMP handles system resources, or helping you to report bugs and recover lost data. For a complete list of changes please see NEWS.

(Update): Thanks to Ell the windows installer (64-bit) is now available from the Development Downloads page.

New features¶

Dashboard dockable¶

A new Dashboard dock helps with monitoring GIMP’s resource usage to keep things in check, allowing you to make more educated decisions about various configuration options.

On the developer side, it also helps us in debugging and profiling various operations or parts of the interface, which is important in our constant quest to improve GIMP and GEGL, and detect which parts are the biggest bottlenecks.

The feature was contributed by Ell — one of GIMP’s most productive developers of late.

Debug dialog¶

What we consistently hear from users is that they have had zero GIMP crashes in years of using it. Still, as with any software, it is not exempt from bugs, and unfortunately sometimes might even crash.

While we encourage you to report all bugs you encounter, we do admit that producing useful information for a report can be difficult, and there is little we can do about a complaint that says “GIMP crashed. I don’t know what I was doing and I have no logs”.

So GIMP now ships with a built-in debugging system that gathers technical details on errors and crashes.

On development versions, the dialog will be raised on all kind of errors (even minor ones). On stable releases, it will be raised only during crashes. The default behavior can be customized in Edit > Preferences > Debugging.

Note: you are still expected to write down contextual information when you report bugs, i.e.: What were you doing when the bug happened? If possible, step by step reproduction procedures are a must.

The feature was contributed by Jehan Pages from ZeMarmot project.

Image recovery after crash¶

With the debugging system in place to detect a crash, it was easy enough to add crash recovery. In case of a crash, GIMP will now attempt to backup all images with unsaved changes, then suggest to reopen them the next time you start the application.

This is not a 100%-guaranteed procedure, since a program state during a crash is unstable by nature, so backing up images might not always succeed. What matters is that it will succeed sometimes, and this might rescue your unsaved work!

This feature was also contributed by the ZeMarmot project.

Shadows-Highlights¶

This new filter is now available in GIMP in the Colors menu thanks to a contribution by Thomas Manni who created a likewise named GEGL operation.

The filter allows adjusting shadows and highlights in an image separately, with some options available. The implementation closely follows its counterpart in the darktable digital photography software.

Completed features¶

Layer masks on layer groups¶

Masks on layer groups are finally possible! This work, started years ago, has now been finalized by Ell. Group-layer masks work similarly to ordinary-layer masks, with the following considerations.

The group’s mask size is the same as group’s size (i.e., the bounding box of its children) at all times. When the group’s size changes, the mask is cropped to the new size — areas of the mask that fall outside of the new bounds are discarded, and newly added areas are filled with black (and hence are transparent by default).

JPEG 2000 support ported to OpenJPEG¶

JPEG 2000 images importing was already supported, using the library called Jasper. Yet this library is now deprecated and slowly disappearing from most distributions. This is why we moved to OpenJPEG.

The port was initially started by Mukund Sivaraman. It was later completed by Darshan Kadu, under the FSF internship program, and mentored by Jehan who polished it up.

In particular, now GIMP can properly import JPEG 2000 images in any bit depth (over 32-bit per channel will be clamped to 32-bit and non-multiple of 8-bit will be promoted, for instance 12-bit will end up as 16-bit per channel in GIMP). Images in YCbCr and xvYCC color spaces will be converted to sRGB.

JPEG 2000 codestream files are also supported. While color space can be detected for JPEG 2000 images, for codestream files you will be asked to specify the color space.

Linear workflow updates¶

Curves and Levels filters have been updated to have a switch between linear and perceptual (non-linear) modes, depending on which one you need.

You can apply Levels in perceptual mode to a linear image, or Curves in linear mode to a perceptual image — whichever suits you best for the task at hand.

The same switch in the Histogram dock has been updated accordingly.

Screenshot and color-picking¶

On Linux, taking screenshots with the Freedesktop API has been implemented. This should become the preferred API in the hopefully near future, especially because it is meant to work inside sandboxed applications. Though for the time being, it is still not given priority because it lacks some basic features and is not color-managed in any implementation we know of, which makes it a regression compared to other implementations.

On Windows, Simon Mueller has improved the screenshot plug-in to handle hardware-accelerated software and multi-monitor displays.

On macOS, color picking with the Color dock is now color-managed.

Metadata preferences¶

Settings were added for metadata export handling in the “Image Import & Export” page of the Preferences dialog. By default, the settings are checked, which means that GIMP will export all metadata, but you can uncheck them (since metadata can often contain a lot of sensitive private information).

Note that these options can also be changed per format (“Load Defaults” and “Save Defaults” button), and of course per file during exporting, just like any other option.

Lock brush to view¶

GIMP finally gives you a choice whether you want a brush locked to a certain zoom level and rotation angle of the canvas.

The option is available for all painting tools that use a brush except for the MyPaint Brush tool.

Missing icons¶

8 new icons were added by Alexandre Prokoudine, Aryeom Han (ZeMarmot film director), and Ell.

Various GUI refining¶

Many last-minute details have been handled, such as renaming the composite modes to be more descriptive, shortened color channel labels with their conventional 1- or 2-letter abbreviations, color models rearranged in the Color dock, and much more!

Translations¶

String freeze has started and GIMP has received updates from: Basque, Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, Chinese (Taiwan), Danish, Esperanto, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish.

The Windows installer is now also localized with gettext.

GEGL changes¶

The GEGL library now used by GIMP for all image processing has also received numerous updates.

Most importantly, all scaling for display is now done on linear data. This produces more accurate scaled-down thumbnails and more valid results of mipmap computations. GIMP 2.10.0-RC1 doesn’t use mipmaps yet, but it will further down the line.

More work has been done to improve performance of GEGL across many parts of the source code. Improvements to pixel data fetching and setting functions have led to performance boosts across many GEGL operations (in particular, Gaussian blur), and for some performance-critical display cases, performance should have improved two- to three-fold since the release in December 2017.

There are 5 new operations in the workshop now. Among those, enlarge and inpaint are part of the new experimental inpainting framework by Øyvind Kolås, domain transform by Felipe Einsfeld Kersting is an edge-preserving smoothing filter, and recursive-transform is Ell’s take on the famous Droste effect.

Helping GIMP¶

We’d like to remind you that GIMP is free software. Therefore the first way to help is to contribute your time. You can report bugs and send patches, whether they are code patches, icons, brushes, documentation, tutorials, translations, etc.

In this release for instance, about 15% of changes were done by non-regular contributors.

You can also contribute tutorials or news for our website, as Pat David explained so well in his talk Why the GIMP Team Obviously Hates You. Pat David is himself one of the important GIMP contributors on the community side (he also created our current website back in 2015).

Last but not least, we remind that you can contribute financially in a few ways. You can donate to the project itself, or you can support the core team developers who raise funds individually, in particular Øyvind Kolås for his work on GEGL, GIMP graphics engine, and ZeMarmot project (Aryeom & Jehan) for their work on GIMP itself (about 35% of this release is contributed by their project).

What’s Next¶

This is the last stretch before the final GIMP 2.10.0 release. There are a few more changes planned before we wrap it up. For instance, Americo Gobbo is working (with minor help from ZeMarmot) on improving our default brush set. His work will be available either in another release candidate (if we make another one) or in the final release.

We are currently 12 blocker bugs away from making the final release. We’ll do our best to make it quick!

Libre Graphics Meeting + SCaLE 2018

Pat David — Tue, 09 Jan 2018 11:51:30 -0600

This year is starting off great with not one, but two libre graphics oriented events (one in Europe and the other in North America - for even better coverage)! Now you can double your opportunities to visit like-minded Free Software graphic artists, photographers, and developers.

Libre Graphics Meeting 2018 in Seville¶

Come and join us for the 13^th annual Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) being held April 26–30 in Seville, Spain! LGM is a wonderful opportunity for artists, developers, and contributors to meet face-to-face and share/learn from each other. Several GIMP developers will be holding an annual team meeting there (as usual), so come and say hello!

The main programme this year is focusing on:

Technical presentations and workshops for developers.
Showcases of excellent work made using libre graphics tools.
New tools and workflows for graphics and code.
Reflections on the activities of existing Free/Libre and Open Source communities.
Reflections and practical sessions on promoting the philosophy and use of Libre Graphics tools.

Libre Graphics at Southern California Linux Expo¶

For the first time this year there will be a dedicated Libre Graphics track at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE) 16x!

SCaLE 16x will be held March 8–11 in Pasadena, California (USA) at the Pasadena Convention Center, and the Libre Graphics track in particular will be on Friday, March 9^th.

Pat David will be presenting on the state of GIMP (looking forward) and including GIMP as part of a photography workflow.

There is a Call for Participation out for those that would be interested in talking more about their art or involvement in the Free Software graphics world. If you’d like to participate submit a proposal to graphics-cfp@socallinuxexpo.org!

GIMP and GEGL in 2017

Wilber — Sun, 31 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0100

When you say you mostly do bugfixing now, seven kinds of new features will crawl under your bed and bite your silly toes off. If we were to come up with a short summary for 2017, it would be along those very lines.

So yes, we ended up with more new features that, however, make GIMP faster and improve workflows. Here’s just a quick list of the top v2.10 parole violators: multi-threading via GEGL, linear color space workflow, better support for CIE LCH and CIE LAB color spaces, much faster on-canvas Warp Transform tool, complete on-canvas gradients editing, better PSD support, metadata viewing and editing, under- and overexposure warning on the canvas.

All of the above features (and many more) are available in GIMP 2.9.8 released earlier this month. We are now in the strings freeze mode which means there will be very few changes to the user interface so that translators could safely do their job in time for the v2.10 release.

Everyone is pretty tired of not having GIMP 2.10 out by now, so we only work on bugs that block the v2.10 release. There are currently 25 such bugs. Some are relatively easy to fix, some require more time and effort. Some have patches or there is work in progress, and some need further investigation. We will get there faster, if more people join to hack on GIMP.

Speaking of which, one thing that has changed in the GIMP project for the better this year is the workload among top contributors. Michael Natterer is still responsible for 33% of all GIMP commits in the past 12 months, but that’s a ca. 30% decrease from the last year. Jehan Pagès and Ell now have a 38% share of all contributions, and Øyvind Kolås tops that with his 5% thanks to the work on layers blending/compositing and linear color space workflow in GIMP.

In particular, Ell committed the most between 2.9.6 and 2.9.8, implemented on-canvas gradients editing, introduced other enhancements, and did a lot of work on tuning performance in both GIMP and GEGL. We want to thank him especially for being the most prolific developer of GIMP for this last development release!

Another increasingly active contributor in the GEGL project is Debarshi Ray who uses the library for his project, GNOME Photos. Debarshi focused mostly on GEGL operations useful for digital photography such as exposure and shadows-highlights, and did quite a lot of bugfixing. We also got a fair share of contributions from Thomas Manni who added some interesting experimental filters like SLIC (Simple Linear Iterative Clustering) and improved existing filters.

Changes in GEGL and babl in 2017 included (but are not limited to) 15 new filters, improvements in mipmap processing and multi-threading computations, a video editing engine called gcut, more fast paths to convert pixel data between various color spaces, support for custom RGB primaries and TRC, ICC color profiles parsing and generation, and numerous bugfixes.

At least some of the work done by Øyvind Kolås on both GEGL, babl, and GIMP this year was sponsored by you, the GIMP community, via Patreon and Liberapay platforms. Please see his post on 2017 crowdfunding results for details and consider supporting him. Improving GEGL is crucial for GIMP to become a state-of-the art professional image editing program. Over the course of 2017, programming activity in GEGL and babl increased by 120% and 102% respectively in terms of commits, and we’d love to see the dynamics keep up in 2018 and onwards.

Even though the focus of another crowdfunded effort by Jehan Pagès and Aryeom Han is to create an animated short movie, Jehan Pagès contributed roughly 1/5 of code changes this year, fixing bugs, improving painting-related features, maintaining GIMP official Flatpak, and these statistics don’t even count the work on a much more sophisticated animation plug-in currently available in a dedicated Git branch. Hence supporting this project results in better user experience for GIMP users. You can help fund Jehan and Aryeom on Liberapay, Patreon or Tipeee. You can also read their end-of-2017 report.

We also want to thank Julien Hardelin who has been a great help in updating the user manual for upcoming v2.10, as well as all the translators and people who contributed patches. Moreover, we thank Pat David for further work on the new website, and Michael Schumacher for tireless bug triaging. They all don’t get nearly as much praise as they deserve.

Happy 2018!

Strings Freeze For GIMP 2.10 Is Now On

Alexandre Prokoudine — Thu, 21 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0100

GIMP’s user interface is currently available in 80 languages. So far ca. 20 translations have been updated in the unstable branch since the beginning of the work on v2.10, and only 8 translations in the ‘po’ directory (where most translatable messages reside) are at least 90% complete. So clearly we need to give our translators a head start.

This is why GIMP’s master branch is now entering a tentative strings freeze phase in preparation for 2.10 release. We expect further changes between today and the v2.10 final release to affect no more than 1% of translatable messages. So it’s safe to start updating user interface translations now.

If you are interested, how complete the translation into your language is, check out the current stats. To start updating it, please contact your local team.

We would also like to remind translators that we are relaxing the release policy for the stable branch. Starting with v2.10, stable releases may have minor new features. This makes changes and the introduction of new strings more likely than in previous stable branches, where the only changes allowed were bug fixes (and which introduced only few string changes).

GIMP 2.9.8 Released

Alexandre Prokoudine — Tue, 12 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0100

Newly released GIMP 2.9.8 introduces on-canvas gradient editing and various enhancements while focusing on bugfixing and stability. For a complete list of changes please see NEWS.

On-Canvas Gradient Editing¶

One of the most user-visible changes in 2.9.8 is the updated Blend tool. Here’s what’s new about it.

First of all, it pretty much eliminates the need for the old Gradient Editor dialog, as all of the dialog’s features are now available directly on the canvas. You can create and delete color stops, select and shift them, assign colors to color stops, change blending and coloring for segments between color stops, create new color stops from midpoints.

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Secondly, default gradients are now “editable”. As you probably know, the reason most resources such as brushes, painting dynamics, and gradients are not direclty editable is that they are typically installed into a system directory where non-privileged user can’t make any changes.

Now when you try to change an existing gradient from a system folder, GIMP will create a copy of it, call it a Custom Gradient and preserve it across sessions. Unless, of course, you edit another ‘system’ gradient, in which case it will become the new custom gradient.

Since this feature is useful for more than just gradients, it was made generic enough to be used for brushes and other types of resources in the future. We expect to revisit this in the future releases of GIMP.

Now that 2.9.8 is out with the updated Blend tool, we are interested in your feedback, as we still expect some cleanup and enhancements to be done there.

Most of the programming was done by Ell, however we also want to acknowledge two other people who contributed to that effort one way or another.

Michael Henning improved the Blend tool for 2.9.2, making the position of its endpoints editable before applying the gradient fill.

Michael Natterer refactored source code of GIMP’s tools to make them reuse one another’s on-canvas handles. That greatly simplified adding on-canvas handles for color stops. He also added the generic on-canvas dialog with the most important options for tools.

Clip Warning¶

Ell also implemented a feature request made in our public mailing list, where Elle Stone asked for some way to visualize underexposed and overexposed areas of a photo, which is a common feature in digital photography tools such as darktable and RawTherapee.

The new Clip Warning display filter targets that use case and fills underexposed and overexposed areas with user-configurable colors. For now, it’s mostly geared towards images where colors are stored with floating point precision. You will mostly benefit from this, if you work on 16/32 bit per channel float images such as EXR and TIFF.

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Implementing this feature as a display filter has certain disadvantages such as having to go through the whole routine of adding a display filter for every image. We are thinking of better ways to do this.

Color Management¶

GIMP now uses the babl library for doing conversion of images between color spaces when matrix-based ICC profiles are used. This leads to completing transforms ca. 5 times faster in comparison to LittleCMS v2 on a few test images we tried this on. We expect to make further use of babl for doing color transforms once the library supports ICC profiles based on lookup tables.

Wayland support¶

While we already had the screenshot plug-in working under GNOME/Wayland, we now implemented screenshots for KDE/Wayland (though it misses rectangular area selection).

The Color Picker widget will now also work in KDE/Wayland. Note that there is still no color-picking interface in GNOME for Wayland, so as a workaround, color picking will only work inside GIMP windows for this platform.

Color-picked and screenshot pixels are not color-managed yet in Wayland.

Paste in Place¶

Michael Natterer implemented another small feature request from a user who asked for an Inkscape-like Paste in Place command. The idea is that GIMP should be able to paste contents of the clipboard at exact coordinates the contents was originally copied from. This feature is available for both the regular clipboard and named buffers.

Paste in Place complements the usual Paste command which places contents of the clipboard into the center of the viewport.

GUI and Usability¶

The spinscale widget now highlights vertical parts of the slider section differently to hint that position of cursor above the widget matters. When changing values in the lower step section, the pointer will be wrapped around the screen so that you could continue adjusting the value without interruptions.

When using transform tools, you can now press a modifier key before or after pressing/releasing a mouse button.

The Info window for the color picker now remembers the modes across session. So if you prefer seeing LAB values, that’s what you will see every time until you choose something else.

Canvas rotation and flip information is now visible in the status bar, as angle value and flip icon. Clicking on these canvas statuses will respectively raise the Select Rotation Angle dialog or unflip the canvas.

Help Manuals¶

Upon detection of locally installed manuals in several languages, GIMP will now allow selection of the preferred manual language in the Preferences dialog (Interface > Help System).

Manual localization settings in GIMP’s preferences

This is especially useful since GIMP’s interface is available in 80 languages, while its manual is translated to only 17 languages. You may therefore not have a choice of viewing the manual in your preferred language.

Moreover, some people choose English over their native language for user interfaces, while sticking to their native language for reading documentation. This is another case where choosing preferred language for the user manual might come in handy.

Improved Wavelet Decompose Filter¶

The much demanded Wavelet Decompose filter got a small round of updates and gained a couple of new options: placing decomposition stack into its own layer group and adding a layer mask to each scales layers. It also produces more expected results now.

File Formats¶

The PSD plug-in was fixed to properly handle Photoshop files with deeply nested layer groups and preserve expanded state of groups for both importing and exporting. Additional changes fix mask position and improve layer opacity for importing/exporting.

The PDF plug-in now supports loading password-protected files by promting the user for password.

HGT files can now be imported. HGT is the format for Digital Elevation Model data by the NASA and other space agencies. GIMP now supports both the SRTM-1 and SRTM-3 types (as far as we know, the only two variants) which will be imported as grayscale RGB images.

NASA HGT file import followed by appropriate “Gradient Map” filtering

In order to obtain more visible relief information, you will want to map altitudes to colors, for instance with the “Gradient Map” filter as we did in the example image above (see also this explicative post on the process).

Translations¶

Translation of GIMP was updated for 13 languages: Catalan, Croatian, Galician, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.

What’s Next¶

We’ll enter strings freeze soon so that translators could safely finalize their work for 2.10. Following that we expect to start making release candidates of GIMP 2.10.

GIMP 2.9.6 Released

Alexandre Prokoudine — Thu, 24 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0200

After more than a year of hard work we are excited to release GIMP 2.9.6 featuring many improvements, some new features, translation updates for 23 languages, and 204 bug fixes.

As usual, for a complete list of changes please see NEWS. Here we’d like to focus on the most important changes.

Performance¶

GIMP now has support for experimental multi-threading in GEGL and will try to use as many cores as are available on your computer.

We know GIMP can explode when using more than one core, but we keep it that way so that we get as many bug reports as possible for this officially unstable development version. This is because we really, really want to ship GIMP 2.10 with usable parallel processing.

On the other hand, you can always set the amount of cores to 1 if you couldn’t be bothered to report bugs. For that, please tweak the amount of threads on the System Resources page of the Preferences dialog.

GUI, Usability, and Configurability¶

Benoit Touchette improved mask creation workflow for users who use a ton of masks in their projects. Now GIMP remembers the last type of mask initialization, and you can use key modifiers + mouse click on layer previews to create, apply, or remove masks. There’s a new button in the Layers dockable dialog for that as well.

To make that feature possible, Michael Natterer introduced saving of last dialogs’ settings across sessions and made these defaults configurable via the new Interface / Dialog Defaults page in the Preferences dialog.

Additionally, the Preferences dialog got a vertical scrollbar where applicable to keep its height more sensible, and settings on individual pages of the dialog can be reset separately now.

The Quit dialog got a few updates: automatically exiting when all the images in the list have been saved, and a Save As button for every opened image (clicking an image in the list will raise it easy checks).

Yet another new feature is an option (on the screenshot above) to choose fill color or pattern for empty spaces after resizing the canvas.

Better Hi-DPI Support¶

While most changes for better Hi-DPI displays support are planned for v3.0, when GIMP is expected to be based on either GTK+3 or GTK+4, we were able to remove at least some of the friction by introducing icon sizes at different resolutions and a switch for icon sizes on the Icon Theme page of the Preferences dialog.

On-canvas Interaction Changes¶

Michael Natterer did a huge under-the-hood work that is likely to affect user interaction with GIMP bigly. Simply put, he moved a lot of on-canvas code from tools like Rectangle Select, Measure and Path into reusable code.

The effect of that is multifold:

New tools can reuse on-canvas elements of other tools (adding shape drawing tools should be easier now, although we are not planning that for 2.10, unless someone sends a clean patch).
GEGL-based filters can be interacted with directly on the canvas (Spiral and Supernova so far as test case).

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So far one still needs to write C code to make a GEGL-based filter use on-canvas interaction. We expect to spend some time figuring out a way to simplify this, possibly using the GUM language (see below).

Layers, Linear and Perceptual Workflows¶

Since we want to make workflows in linear color spaces more prominent in GIMP, it was time to update the blend modes code. You can now switch between two sets of layer modes: legacy (perceptual) and default (linear). The user interface for switching was a quick design, we’d like to come up with something better, so we are interested in your input.

Moreover, we made both compositing of layers and blending color space configurable, should you have the need to use that for advanced image manipulation.

We also added a new Colors -> Linear Invert command to provide radiometrically correct color inversion. And the histogram dialog now features a toggle between gamma and linear modes—again, it’s a design we’d like to improve.

Thanks to Øyvind Kolås and his Patreon supporters, GIMP now also has a simple ‘blendfun’ framework that greatly simplifies implementing new color modes. Ell made use of that by adding Linear Burn, Vivid Light, Linear Light, Pin Light, Hard Mix, Exclusion, Merge, Split, and Luminance (RGB) blending modes (most of them now also supported in the PSD plug-in).

Another prominent change is the introduction of the Pass Through mode for layer groups. When this mode is used instead of any other one, GIMP mixes layers inside that group directly to the layers below, skipping creation of the group projection. The feature was implemented by Ell. The screenshot below features a user-submitted PSD file that has TEXTURES layer group in the Pass Through mode, as opened in GIMP 2.9.4 (left) and GIMP 2.9.6 (right).

Newly added color tags simplify managing large projects with a lot of layers and layer groups. The screenshot below is a real-life PSD file opened in GIMP 2.9.6.

To make more use of that feature, we need someone to step up and implement multiple layers selection. For an initial research, see this wiki page.

For full access to all the new features, we updated the Layer Attributes dialog to provide the single UI for setting layer’s name, blending mode, opacity, and offset, toggling visibility, link status, various locks, color tags.

CIE LCH and CIE LAB¶

Under the influence of Elle Stone (and with her code contributions), CIE LCH and CIE LAB color spaces are finding more use in GIMP now.

Color dialogs now have an LCH color selector that, in due time, will most likely replace outdated HSV selector for reasons outlined by Elle in this article. The LCH selector also supports gamut checking.

A new Hue-Chroma filter in the Colors menu works much like Hue-Saturation, but operates in CIE LCH color space. Moreover, the Fuzzy Select and the Bucket Fill tool now can select colors by CIE L, C, and H.

Finally, both the Color Picker and the Sample Points dialog now display pixel values in CIE LAB and CIE LCH.

Tools¶

New Handle Transform tool contributed by Johannes Matschke in 2015 has been finally cleaned up by Michael Natterer and available by default. It’s a little tricky to get used to, but we hear reports that once you get the hang of it, you love it.

Thanks to Ell, the Warp Transform tool is now a lot faster, partially thanks to a switch that toggles high-quality preview that isn’t always necessary.

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All transformation tools don’t display grid by default anymore, and during an interactive transformation the original layer gets hidden now. The latter greatly simplifies transforming upper layer in relation to a lower layer. Before that, the original layer used to block the view.

Free Select tool now waits for Enter being pressed to confirm selection, which enables you to tweak positions of polygonal selection.

Painting¶

An important new feature that is somewhat easy to overlook is being able to paint on transparent layers with modes other than normal.

Thanks to shark0r, the Smudge tool now has a Flow control that allows mixing in both constant and gradient color while smudging. There’s another new option to never decrease alpha of existing pixels while smudging in the tools options now as well. For more on this, please read this forum thread.

Canvas rotation has been improved: it got snappier in certain cases, and rulers, scrollbars, as well as the Navigation dialog follow the rotation now.

Alexia introduced some improvements to the brush engine. For bitmap brushes, GIMP now caches hardness and disables dynamic change of hardness to improve painting performance. Bitmap brushes also don’t get clipped anymore, when hardness is less than 100. Plus there’s a specialized convolution algorithm for the hardness blur to make it faster now.

Processing Raw Images¶

Since 2.9.4, GIMP is capable of opening raw (digital camera) images via darktable, and the plan was to open it up to more plug-in developers, because nothing sparks a thoughtful, civil conversation like a raw processor of choice.

This is now possible: 2.9.6 ships with a RawTherapee plug-in (v5.2 or newer should be installed) and a new file-raw-placeholder plug-in that registers itself for loading all raw formats, but does nothing except returning an error message pointing to darktable and RawTherapee, if neither is installed.

Moreover, you can now choose preferred raw plug-in, when multiple options are available on your computer. For this, open the Preferences dialog and go to the Image Import page, then click on the plug-in you prefer and click OK to confirm your choice. You will need to restart GIMP.

Better PSD Support¶

The PSD plug-in now supports a wider range of blending modes for layers, at both importing and exporting: Linear Burn, Linear Light, Vivid Light, Pin Light, and Hard Mix blending modes. It also finally supports exporting layer groups and reads/writes the Pass Through mode in those. Additionally, GIMP now imports and exports color tags from/to PSD files.

WebP support¶

We already shipped GIMP 2.9.2 with initial support for opening and exporting WebP files, however the plug-in was missing a number of essential features. Last year, we replaced it with a pre-existing plug-in initially written by Nathan Osman back in 2011 and maintained through the years. We now ship it by default as part of GIMP.

The new plug-in received additional contributions from Benoit Touchette and Pascal Massimino and supports both ICC profiles, metadata loading/exporting, and animation.

Metadata Viewing and Editing¶

Thanks to Benoit Touchette, GIMP now ships a new metadata viewer that uses Exiv2 to display Exif, XMP, IPTC, and DICOM metadata (the latter is displayed on the XMP tab).

Moreover, Benoit implemented a much anticipated metadata editor that supports adding/editing writing XMP, IPTC, DICOM, and GPS/Exif metadata, as well as loading/exporting metadata from/to XMP files.

Filters¶

Thanks to contributions from Thomas Manni and Ell, GIMP now has 9 more GEGL-based filters, including much anticipated Wavelet Decompose, as well as an Extract Component plug-in that simplifies fetching e.g. CMYK’s K channel or LAB’s L* channel from an image.

Another new feature that we expect to develop further is GUM—a simple metadata language that helps automatically building more sensible UI for GEGL filters. Here’s a quick video:

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Resources and Presets¶

To make GIMP more useful by default, we now ship it with some basic presets for the Crop tool: 2×3, 3×4, 16:10, 16:9, and Square.

Documents templates have been updated and now feature popular, contemporary presets for both print and digital media.

What’s Next¶

We still have a bunch of bugs to fix before we can release 2.10 and we appreciate all the huge and tiny useful patches contributors send us to that effect.

GIMP 2.9.8 is expected to ship with more bug fixes and an updated Blend (Gradient Fill) tool that works completely on canvas, including adding and removing color stops and assigning colors.

An Interview with Michael Schumacher, GIMP administrator

Jehan — Mon, 15 May 2017 00:00:00 +0200

This is the second of a series of interviews of various people surrounding GIMP development and community. See also the interview of Mitch, GIMP maintainer

GIMP is made not only by hard-core developers but also through the hard work of many less technically-inclined contributors. Michael Schumacher, aka Schumaml, is a great example of an important core contributor who has been with the project for over 10 years. Mostly known as the project administrator, nowadays he takes care of everything but programming: administrative tasks, management, PR, support…

Schumaml was recently named the maintainer of the 2.8 branch, the stable version of GIMP which only receives bugfixes, showing that it does not require a developer to manage important roles successfully.

This interview was held on Saturday, February 4, 2017, at about 12:27 AM in front of a fireplace and after a day of hacking at Wilber Week. With us were several team members, including Debarshi Ray (Rishi (R)), Øyvind Kolås (pippin (P)) and Simon Budig who also asked questions.

Schumaml, GIMP administrator (photo by antenne used by permission (cba))

Jehan: Hello Michael. You are the GIMP administrator, at least that’s what everybody says.

Schumaml: That’s what everybody says, yes.

J: How would you describe your contribution to the GIMP project?

S: I don’t do much coding. It’s just that so many people — from my perspective — do coding on GIMP already and have a better grasp of the source code and how it is made up. So I don’t think I can contribute much in that regard. I try to do administrative stuff like handling the monetary aspect of the project such as telling GNOME that we need money for events like Wilber Week or for LGM reimbursements… I also care about the bug reports we have. I try to have them categorized, have a proper status, make sure that they get replies, and that we don’t leave a bug report unattended for a long time. Also, I have administrative privileges on the GIMP web server, on mailing lists, and… what else. Do I forget anything? That’s about it, yeah.

I’ve been called the tie-wearing GIMP office manager and I even got a t-shirt with a printed tie and a “TWOM” label, because I’ve actually been wearing a proper shirt (made to measure) at one GIMP meeting during the Libre Graphics Meeting 2012 in Vienna.

Schumaml, the tie-wearing GIMP office manager (photo by houz (cba)).

J: How long have you been contributing?

S: I think I started somewhere between 2001 and 2004. The first contributions were probably getting GIMP buildable on MSYS, the minimal GNU build system on the Windows platform. Because I was annoyed that there were only GIMP builds for releases and not for every commit in between.

J: Was it like nightly builds?

S: No it was not like nightly builds. I just wanted to be able to have a current build for the MS Windows platform and also made on the MS Windows platform, so that I could build on my Windows system I was using at the time. Just to be able to follow GIMP development more closely than using a build someone made for a development release.

J: So you mostly use GIMP on Windows?

S: Back more than 10 years ago, I did use Windows exclusively. So basically, back then I had done the porting of GIMP to the Windows platform.

J: Do you use GIMP?

S: I use GIMP. Not as much as many other people but I use it to test many things of GIMP itself. I use it to edit photos I make. I don’t publish many of the images because when I’m editing them, I print them or I use them for some documentation work, so it goes to a customer. I even still use it on MS Windows, but now my main platform is Linux.

J: What kind of job do you do?

S: I’m working for a company that used to be a part of Siemens, which had been carved out by now. We are selling communication systems - in the past, you would have called these telephony systems. Nowadays this stuff is called “Communication Enabled Business Processes”, like everything which has to do with communication: calling someone or texting someone or exchanging chats or whatever. We are providing the software, the service, and the consulting.

J: Why do you contribute to GIMP?

S: It started due to pure selfishness: being able to have the most current GIMP available to me.

Since then, a lot has changed: I believe in Free Software. I believe software should be available for everyone for every purpose. GIMP is a Free Software project. Around the time I got hooked up with GIMP, I also got hooked up with Wikipedia, which follows the same approach towards knowledge. I feel like — yeah well — I’m contributing to something that helps a lot of people all over the world. I think that’s a good thing. GIMP happens to be the the first major project I contributed to, and I like it. It’s also in-line with the topics I specialized in at university: image synthesis, image manipulation. It kind of seemed like a logical extension.

Not the Formula One driver. (Photo by Pat David (cba))

Rishi: What do you think of Michael Schumacher?

S: (laughs) The formula one driver?

R: Yeah.

S: First thing, you know about his current condition, like probably still in the coma. I hope that he will get better. He probably won’t make it to his former self but at least to a state allowing him to live in a somewhat decent way. He got famous when I was in the so-called German “Gymnasium” (part of secondary education). It was a bit of an annoyance then - I got the same nickname - “Schumi” - as he had. I didn’t follow his career too closely, but knew about every race he won because I would be congratulated at school.

pippin: Have you ever made use of sharing the name?

S: No I haven’t. It got me an interview opportunity with a locale radio station because they were calling all people who had the name “Michael Schumacher” and they were asking them “How hard does this affect your personal life? Has it ever affected you?“. Once, I almost had an appointment canceled because someone thought I was mocking them, but that was the only incident ever.

I’ve never used it. I’ve never abused it. Nowadays, after the end of his professional racing career, it basically didn’t matter anymore.

P: Any controversial theme you wish to be asked?

S: Like the fact that I would like to kill spammers? (Maintain several mailing lists, one forum, be a recipient for “can we haz ads on gimp.org, plz?“, and you’ll know what I mean)

Simon: Not very controversial.

J: What do you want to see in GIMP?

S: Feature-wise, I’m quite OK with what GIMP is right now. I have to admit that some of the current stuff in the GIMP development version is still above my head - for example, I have no real concept yet of the difference between compositing and blending. Learning that it was 2 different things was quite useful. I hope that we can get the documentation of GIMP up-to-speed in time.

I’m more concerned about the project management. As in: how do we decide what new features go into GIMP, how they get into GIMP, and what GIMP development will look like. Particularly post-2.10. You can see it yourself: Right now, our release cycles are much too long. Even the fact that we have actual release cycles is probably bad. If you have a look at services like Twitter or similar, they are constantly releasing. They just push new features out to the people and there is a constant review “this is working, this is not working“. With our long release cycles, users get surprised by “Oh this does not work as it used to. Why have they changed it?“.

The project is still a bit old-fashioned in regard to releases. We are trailing current development models. “Development models” is the term I use because I’m not sure how to refer to this. I’m intrigued by the idea of having stable branches with continuously added new features, but I’m not quite sure if I want 2.10 to be constantly evolving. I would prefer to have 2.12. That’s details.

J: How do you see GIMP in 20 years?

S: First thing: in 20 years, I’ll be 60 (laughs). So I’m not even sure how I see myself at that point. I very much would like to still be part of the project in 20 years. I would still like to be able to see it as an image manipulation program. One of the major Free Software ones. I have no idea at all what it will look like (laughs) because there is so much that can change. Especially in the user interaction. How people interact with software might be the defining factor for how applications will look in 20 years.

J: What’s the feature you are really waiting for?

S: The feature I’m really waiting for… It’s not a feature of painting or image manipulation. It’s about organization. This thing we want to do, Plug-in or Resource Registry 2.0. Properly built and really managed. The thing we talked so much about, have so many great ideas, but always seem to lack the time to do. This is the feature I would like to see.

J: Do you contribute under influence?

S: Yeah, have a look at the 2.8.20 NEWS file. At the typos, which I totally didn’t notice. So now I prefer to not contribute under influence.

J: Indeed you are now the maintainer of the 2.8 branch, or at least the releaser. If not mistaken, you took care of 2.8.18 and 2.8.20 releases. What can you say about this?

S: I guess I should start at why I am doing more 2.8 releases. As I explained before, I’m not interested in coding that much but more engaged in user support and maintenance. Approximately one month before the release of 2.8.18, we had received a report about a security issue in the XCF loading code. It was fixed quickly, for both the development and 2.8 branches, but there was no plan to do a 2.8 release. We have instructions for this, and mitch replied “Just do it!” when I asked about it.

It still felt like flying blind. Had I done the version changes - to 2.8.18, and afterwards advancing to 2.8.19 - correctly? Was the tarball made correctly? Would it build on any other system than mine? It did, but I had still missed two action: the release tag is supposed to be signed (i.e. git tag -s) and the GNOME translations teams should be notified about planned releases with a string freeze be put in place until the release to make it easy for them to complete translations. 2.8.20 was much better prepared and even had an extra long string freeze. I had planned to do it in October 2016, but had to delay it to February 2017, during Wilber Week.

Releasing is definitely something you want to do right, and this means taking a moment of uninterrupted time to do it. My approach towards bug handling has changed a bit, too. I pay much more attention to bugs with attached patches, and try to apply and test those (we really neglected to do this) in order to get them into a stable release.

J: This was a good interview.

S: Thank you for doing it.

GIMP 2.8.22 Released

Wilber — Thu, 11 May 2017 00:00:00 +0200

We are releasing GIMP 2.8.22 with various bug fixes.

All platforms will benefit from a change to the image window hierarchy in single window mode, which improves painting performance when certain GTK+ themes are used.

This version fixes an ancient CVE bug, CVE-2007-3126. Due to this bug, the ICO file import plug-in could be crashed by specially crafted image files. Our attempts to reproduce the bug failed with 2.8 and thus the impact had likely been minimal for years, but now it is gone for good.

Users on the Apple macOS platforms will benefit from fixes for crashes during drag&drop and copy&paste operations. On the Microsoft Windows platforms, crashes encountered when using the color picker with special multi-screen setups are gone, and picking the actual color instead of black from anywhere on the screen should finally be possible.

Check out the full list of fixed issues since 2.8.20.

The source code, the Microsoft Windows installer and the Apple Disk Image for GIMP 2.8.22 are available from our downloads page; so yes, this time we made an effort to publish everything in one go :)

An Interview with Michael Natterer, GIMP maintainer

Jehan — Wed, 01 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0100

GIMP is Free Software, but even before this, it is people: the ones who create it, the ones who create with it… We don’t have accurate statistics and we take pride on not gathering your data. Yet we know (through other websites that have logged partial statistics over the years) that this is a widely used piece of software, by millions of people around the world. So wouldn’t it be neat to meet some of the individuals who make this project come alive?

Some people think there’s a huge company behind GIMP. This is not the case. GIMP has always been developed by a handful of random people scattered around the world. Most of them are volunteers and none of them work on it full-time. As an insider myself, I’ve wanted to launch a series of interviews with the many awesome people I’ve met since I started contributing. So who better to start with than our own benevolent dictator, GIMP maintainer, and the biggest code contributor: Michael Natterer, aka “mitch”.

This interview was held on Friday, February 3, 2017 at around 3AM in front of a fireplace and after a day of hacking at Wilber Week. With us were several team members, including Michael Schumacher (schumaml (S)) and Øyvind Kolås (pippin (P)), who also asked questions.

Mitch. The man. The myth. The legend.
The reason your commit probably got reverted.

Jehan: Hello Mitch! In a few words, what’s the close future of GIMP?

Mitch: In 2.10, there is the GEGL port. Then the GTK+3 port immediately after, which will go as fast as possible. We don’t plan many features during the GTK+3 port.

J: What are your preferred features of 2.10?

M: High bit depth, on-canvas filter previews… I don’t actually remember the features of 2.8 [to compare] because I never use it.

J: You use 2.10 instead?

M: Yes.

J: Do you use GIMP often?

M: Mostly for testing what I implement, and also for making postcards I sell in my family business. That’s the only thing I use it for.

A maintainer¶

J: How did you start hacking GIMP?

M: There was this code that saved the user-assigned keyboard shortcuts for menu actions. The code had an escaping bug where you couldn’t have a hyphen as an accelerator. So I wrote code for escaping the string. That was my first GIMP patch in 1997 or 1998.

J: How did you become the maintainer?

M: I killed the previous maintainer. He is now in my cave in boxes.

Schumaml: Have you ever met the original authors (Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis)?

M: No. Has anyone?

S: Have they ever contacted you?

M: Yes, they sent me a few plugins which I pushed. Neon, photocopy and cartoon. It was around 10 years after they left the project, one of them comes to me and says “Hey Mitch, I coded 3 plugins, here they are”. Everything looked perfect so I just pushed them as-is, and they still exist.

These days, they’ve been reimplemented in GEGL, but the new versions give different results, so the old plugins are still in the menu.

J: Why do you continue working on GIMP?

M: That’s a good question. (laughs) I don’t know. You guys, perhaps? It can be really annoying sometimes. Why do you guys continue?

J: Me? It’s fun.

M: It’s fun yes but sometimes it’s not fun and you do it anyway.

GIMPers at Montserrat.

J: Where do you see GIMP 20 years from now?

M: It will probably end up in a pile of bits rotting in some corner. I may have been thinking the same thing twenty years ago, though, so you never know.

A hacker¶

J: What do you think of Free Software?

M: It’s the way to go, but you need to use the software which is available for a task, so for some tasks you have no choice but to use something that’s not exactly free.

For example: [pointing to nomis trying to make a label printer work on a GNU/Linux distribution] if you were using the closed-source driver for that, it would work.

*: (laughs)

J: What’s your operating system, distribution, desktop…?

M: Debian Unstable, GNOME 3.

J: You often complain about all these though.

M: Because it’s all shit. Just because you have the least shitty [software] doesn’t mean it’s not all shit. Like autotools. They are shit, but it’s the best shit we have. There is no software that isn’t shit, except perhaps the most simple of software which does one task.

J: What’s your development environment or text editor of choice?

M: Terminal & emacs.

J: How do you like to hack?

M: It depends. Sometimes I need silence and sometimes a crowded room.

J: You are your own boss in a shop. But we see commits from you all the time. Are you hacking in your bookstore when you get free time and don’t have to take care of your employees or customers?

M: Sometimes, but very rarely. I’m mostly hacking in the evenings, or I commit something during the daytime that I worked on the night before until 2AM. If I think “I better go to sleep before I push this”, then I’ll wait until the next day when I’m awake to check it once more before I do.

But I don’t have time to do 5-hour long patches during working hours.

J: You don’t sleep?

M: I don’t really sleep, no.

S: What channels do you use to communicate on behalf or in the project?

M: IRC, and IRC.

pippin: What was the first computer you programmed?

M: It was a Schneider CPC, a variation of the Amstrad. At 15 or 16?

S: How did you write your first hello world?

M: In BASIC of course. My programming languages were BASIC, Assembly, Pascal, Modula-2, C, in that weird order. :) Plus some others at university nobody cares about. :)

J: Do you code under the influence?

M: Always! That’s the only way to code.

Obligatory XKCD, by Randall Munroe (Creative Commons By-NC 2.5).

GIMP: present¶

J: So all software is shit, but in the list of shitty software, is GIMP not so bad?

M: I hope so, but of course it’s shitty. We’re just a handful of volunteers doing what companies with hundreds of (paid) people do.

J: But sometimes we do things not so bad, right?

M: Yes, but there is nobody to make sure of it. It’s not often that someone spends the time and effort to make a plugin perfect. Sometimes it happens, but usually it gets dumped on us and that’s it. Ten years later, we look at the code again and say “oh my god, this is complete garbage”. Very rarely do people maintain their code long term and we cannot seriously expect that to happen with everyone being a volunteer here.

S: Is there something you’d like to do much more in the project, apart from coding?

M: In the project? No, coding is fun. I’m happy that I don’t have to do that much administrative work.

S: When will 2.10 be released?

M: Oh go away! The answer is “go away!”. Read my lips: “go away”. When it’s ready.

S: Do you expect it to be this year?

M: Yes of course.

J: So we have a promise!

*: (laughs)

GIMP: future¶

S: There was this thing that the UI should use Python and the core should use C.

M: Python for the user interface. Horrible! Why?

S: This is something we had discussed.

M: Yes but in the past people wanted to use JavaScript. The year before they wanted to use Java, the year before they wanted to use this, and the year after they want to use that. Now they’re all gone.

Everyone who ever said “I want to use this or that”, and “It’s all shit, let’s use JavaScript”, none of them are still in the project, so…

S: So you don’t see any big changes regarding GIMP in the near future?

M: In the near future definitely not because we need to get some releases out. Unless, of course, there is a well-done patch that doesn’t need weeks of discussion and back-and-forth negotiations on how things should be done.

About using other languages: why not? There is Rust. There is maybe simpler stuff for doing user interfaces, but making such decisions for a codebase the size of GIMP is not something we can decide based on “the latest hot stuff”.

I mean, look at this javascript mess. Is that really better? Just because it’s easier? Easier just means that more clueless people can write code, and they are clueless enough already. So making it easier doesn’t make it better. Arrogant but true.

S: Anything else you want to change?

M: Yes a lot of stuff as long as I don’t have to do all the changes, because I really have enough things to do already (laughs).

You can be the maintainer of whatever subpart, please. Please. Take away the work from me. All contributors need to realize that if they do something really well, they will be in charge of that part.

J: That’s a very good point.

M: If you do it right, then you’ll be in charge of the part you are doing right. It always works like that.

S: They don’t need a blessing from you, right?

M: I don’t do blessings. (laughs)

J: GTK+ comes from GIMP. What do you think of GTK+ now?

M: They lost their minds, but they are also doing really good work. I don’t really understand some of their decisions.

On the other hand, look at the mails we get. People say exactly the same about GIMP: “Have the GIMP devs lost their minds?!?”. I was involved with GTK+ for a long time and people thought that I had lost my mind, which was (and is) probably true. Bottom line is that all is fine between GTK+ and GIMP, I just reserve the right to complain for myself.

S: So we will release GIMP 3 with GTK+3 or 4?

M: They just branched for GTK+ 4.x, so that’s not going to happen overnight.

P: It won’t hurt to suddenly have GIMP 4 instead of 3.

M: No it wouldn’t. If they are done in a few weeks, we’d go for GIMP 4 right away. So why not. That would be cool. (laughs) Or GIMP 5!

J: GIMP 10?

M: GIMP X!

Various rants¶

S: If you happen to be in a conversation with people talking about GIMP, but they don’t know that you are involved, do you come out as the GIMP principal developer?

M: Only if they start talking utter bullshit, or if things simply need clarification. It has happened, of course. A guy wanted to convert me to GIMP once and I had to tell him: yeah you don’t need to. It was in a non-hacker situation.

J: Who is Wilber?

M: Nobody knows. Wilber is a GIMP.

S: What special device would you like to see GIMP on?

M: This cool Microsoft thing (Surface Studio PC) where they have this hyped video online, and it looks super slick with touch and everything. It’s an ad like Apple used to do in the past and now Microsoft does it, which is a bit weird. The official Microsoft YouTube video makes you want to have one of these things.

S: What advice you would like to give to someone who would want to contribute? What to do and what not to do?

M: Listen to advice and be persistent.

Don’t give up because somebody says “this patch isn’t quite right”, most of the time it won’t be. My first commit to GIMP was reverted immediately.

S: I think you also reverted my first.

M: Yes, that’s kind of a tradition. Everybody fucks up on their first commit and it gets reverted. That’s a good standard.

S: So do not be afraid of errors?

M: Yes exactly. Unless they jeopardize the fate of humanity or something. That’s unlikely.

*: Thanks for the interview.

M: You are welcome!

Images in this post are courtesy of antenne and used by permission (cba).

GIMP 2.8.20 Packages for macOS and Microsoft Windows are available

Wilber — Tue, 07 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0100

Thanks to Kristian Rietveld’s and Jernej Simončič’s effort, we can now offer GIMP 2.8.20 packages for macOS and Microsoft Windows from our downloads page. There is a number of interesting bug fixes, and we are eager to hear about your experiences with this release.

GIMP 2.10 blockers and the road to 3.0

Alexandre Prokoudine — Thu, 02 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0100

During WilberWeek 2017 in Barcelona, the GEGL/GIMP team discussed further development plans.

What’s Blocking The 2.10 Release¶

Deprecation of libgimp API. Some functions in libgimp need to be deprecated, and capable replacements need to be introduced. We started this shortly before WilberWeek, a lot more work needs to be done.

Introduction of the linear workflow. Currently GIMP has a few loose ends with regards to linear pixel data workflow introduced by Michael Natterer and Øyvind Kolås. The Linear switch in the histogram dialog is more of a prototype and needs a better implementation. Both the Curve and the Levels tools have to be adjusted to work on linear data and need a simple way to switch between linear/gamma-corrected modes. And there’s more work to be done here.

Rework of the layer modes. Michael and Øyvind introduced significant changes to how layer modes are stored in XCF. We now have legacy modes (from GIMP 2.8 and earlier), gamma-corrected modes and linear modes. We have a prototype UI to switch between these sets, but we need a more solid implementation that we’d be happy to ship in 2.10. And there’s more internal work to do.

Icon and UI themes. With dark themes, insensitive menu items are brighter than sensitive menu items. The problem may lie with the GTK+ pixbuf engine. We need to investigate that further. The new symbolic icon theme has design issues and is incomplete. Our current stance is that we may likely revert to color icons and a light theme as a default one (though we will still release symbolic icons and dark themes as alternatives settable in Preferences), unless dedicated designers step up to complete themes and icons.

Color management. While most of GIMP is now color-managed, the big missing bit is complete implementation of color management for GEGL-based filters. Currently it’s slow and clutters the UI. We need to fix that.

Warp Transform tool. The tool works well enough for small images, but lags on larger ones. We need to make it faster.

The usual bugfix routine. Currently, we have ca. 60 bug reports with the 2.10 milestone. Some of them are not essential and can be safely reassigned to the next milestone, but some definitey need our attention.

GTK+3 Port May Prove to Be A Bigger Change Than Expected¶

We have barely touched the ‘gtk3-port’ branch since 2012, while most of GIMP’s source code is actually related to UI.

The GTK+3 port compiles and appears to work at least for some users. However we need to sit down and do a complete code audit to figure out, how much work needs to be done to finish the port. We can’t provide any completion estimations at this time.

Depending on how much time this takes, we may end up switching to GTK+4 (we do like some aspects of the GTK+ Scene Graph Kit). This will be decided upon in due time.

Relaxing The No-New-Features Policy¶

We pride ourselves at releasing software that is very stable, although not state-of-the-art fast. This is because for stable releases, we have a policy of not introducing new features to keep the releases as bug-free as possible. Yet this policy proved a blocker for 2.10 since we have too many incomplete features, started by contributors, promising, yet not in release-shape.

We decided that these features should be disabled in 2.10, but can be added later in the stable branch, if they reach the stable state. This way, we don’t block exciting new features arrival for years, while still being able to ship regular releases. This would make our blocker list much smaller, and we could work in smaller steps.

Therefore if the GTK+3 port proves to be too long of a journey, we will start adding new features to 2.10 or launch a 2.11.x/2.12 series. This is too early to talk about it, but we think we need to be transparent about it.

How You Can Contribute¶

One of the reasons development of GIMP isn’t moving as fast as we’d like to is that we are stuck with completing v2.10, and we have a mostly featureless v3.0 ahead of us. We realize that it doesn’t motivate new developers to join and work on new features, but there is no easy solution. 2.10 has to be released, and the GTK+3 port has to be done.

However we see some ways to help contributors making GIMP better without waiting for the opening of the 3.1/3.2 series. One of the most common questions we hear is how to find bugs that are easy to fix to get started with hacking on GIMP. To amend that, we are tagging such bug reports as ‘newcomers‘, following recommendations of the GNOME Newcomers Initiative. You are welcome to come on IRC to discuss patches directly with the GIMP team. Jehan is also available for questions as the mentor for newcomers, if you feel lost.

If you do not write code, we shall soon be releasing Flatpak builds of GIMP, so you can help testing and providing feedback. This is currently in works by Jehan Pagès.

We shall post a complete report on WilberWeek 2017 once the event is over.

GIMP 2.8.20 Released

Wilber — Wed, 01 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0100

We are releasing GIMP 2.8.20 with various bug fixes—the most noticeable one being changes to the weird initial user interface language selection on macOS to make it use the user’s preferred language.

Also, for users on the Microsoft Windows platforms, an annoying oscillating switching between different input devices has been fixed, this should make using a tablet more reliable.

Check out the full list of fixed issues since 2.8.18.

The source code for GIMP 2.8.20 is available from our downloads page; pre-built packages for Microsoft Windows and macOS will follow shortly.

WilberWeek 2017

Alexandre Prokoudine — Wed, 18 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0100

On January 27 - February 5, the team is meeting in Barcelona for WilberWeek—a week of project planning and vicious hacking.

This meeting is possible thanks to continuos donations from our community.

So far the agenda includes, but is not limited to:

preparing the 2.10 release;
working on the new GIMP plugins/asset interface + architecture;
reviewing all current patches in bugzilla and giving them a proper status;
doing interviews with developers/project members;
performing all kinds of project administrativa;
discussing how post-2.10 GIMP development is going to be done;
updating docs.gimp.org.

Expected participants are:

Michael Natterer, principal developer of GIMP
Øyvind Kolås, principal developer of GEGL
Michael Schumacher, project administrator
Ville Pätsi, GIMP contributor
Simon Budig, GIMP contributor
Jehan Pagès, GIMP and GEGL contributor
Thomas Manni, GIMP and GEGL contributor
Mukund Sivaraman, GIMP and GEGL contributor
Debarshi Ray, GNOME Photos lead developer, GEGL contributor
Jon Nordby, GIMP, GEGL, MyPaint contributor, imgflo / Flowhub developer
Aryeom Han, artist, animator
Antenne Springborn, media artist

The event is taking place in Can Serrat art centre in El Bruc, near Barcelona.

We invite local GIMP users to drop by for a chat and mutual insights.

Community-supported development of GEGL now live

Alexandre Prokoudine — Mon, 16 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0100

Almost every new major feature people have been asking us for, be it high bit depth support, or full CMYK support, or layer effects, would be impossible without having a robust, capable image processing core.

Øyvind Kolås picked up GEGL in mid-2000s and has been working on it in his spare time ever since. He is the author of 42% of commits in GEGL and 50% of commits in babl (pixel data conversion library).

Thanks to his work, we shall be shipping GIMP 2.10 with 16/32-bit per color channel precision, linear pixel data workflow, and filters that have an on-canvas preview.

But we always need more from both GEGL and babl:

better performance (always);
more sophisticated use of GPU;
support for arbitrary RGB primaries and TRC (think using wide-gamut RGB, like rec2020);
support for CMYK and spot colors;
more GIMP filters available as GEGL operations.

And the list go on.

Which is why we ask you to support Øyvind via his Patreon page, so that the development of new features requested by you, our community, could go faster.

2016 in review

Alexandre Prokoudine — Sun, 15 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0100

When we released GIMP 2.9.2 in late 2015 and stepped over into 2016, we already knew that we’d be doing mostly polishing. This turned out to be true to a larger extent, and most of the work we did was under-the-hood changes.

But quite a few new features slipped in. So, what are the big user-visible changes for GIMP in 2016?

Better Handling of Layers, Channels, Masks, and Paths¶

Michael Natterer eliminated one of the big issues with the clipboard: not having an easy way to copy/paste layers and layer groups from one project to another. Now you can just select a layer or a layer group in the ”Layers” dialog, press ”’Ctrl+C”’, switch to a different project and press ”’Ctrl+V”’.

The ”Layer Attributes” dialog, which hasn’t been very useful, now provides the single UI for setting layer’s name, changing blending mode and opacity setting offset in X/Y, toggling visibility, link status, various locks.

Newly added color tags improve layers management and can be set via ”Layers” menu, ”Layer Attributes” dialog. They are also accessible via shortcuts and available for channels and paths (we don’t expect people to use it a lot, but it was too easy to implement).

The color tags feature is currently not very useful without multiple layers selection. This is something we’ve been meaning to do for quite a while. Last year we did a basic research on that, but we don’t expect to accomplish this task in time for GIMP 2.10, unless someone contributes a very good patch. If you are interested in helping out, please talk to us.

Moreover, for people who use a lot of masks, the workflow has been streamlined. Now GIMP remembers the last type of mask initialization, and you can use key modifiers + mouse click on layer previews to create, apply, or remove masks. Additionally, there’s a new button for that as well.

Remembering Defaults Across Sessions, Improved Configurability¶

We had to figure out a sane way for GIMP to remember last mask initialization settings, so we devised a whole new infrastructure to remember settings of various dialogs. The user interface to adjust those settings is now live on the new ”Interface -> Dialog Defaults” page in the ”Preferences” dialog. See the Making settings persistent in GIMP post for more details.

We also made various GIMP settings resettable in the ”Preferences” dialog. And since GIMP is a huge app, where settings tend to accumulate over the years, we added a vertical scrollbar to keep the height of the dialog sensible. Additionally, we reorganized some of the settings, e.g. on the ”Color Management” page.

Color Management¶

We already introduced a handful of changes to the color management implementation in 2015, when the code was rewritten by Michael Natterer pretty much from scratch become a core feature rather than a plug-in. But there was more to follow.

Now everything is color-managed in GIMP: all sorts of previews, the Color Picker tool, the painting tools etc. The only missing bit is the on-canvas preview for GEGL-based filters. Color transforms are extremely slow with LittleCMS, so we shall need more time to figure this out.

On a related matter, the Color Management section of the Preferences dialog now features new options to toggle color transforms optimization, so that you could choose between performance and color fidelity.

Additionally, toggling soft-proofing is just a few clicks away in the ‘View -> Color Management’ submenu now, along with rendering intent settings.

Better Tools¶

While we didn’t intend to work on tools a lot, there have been several interesting updates:

The ”Align” tool now has vertical offset setting (contributed by Jonathan Tait).
The ”Move” tool shows relative coordinates when moving guides and sample points (bug #770911).
The ”Text” tool got improved support for languages using Input Method Engines (contributed by Jehan Pages).
Both the ”Bucket Fill” and the ”Fuzzy Select” tool have a new ”Diagonal neighbors” option to select diagonally neighboring pixels (contributed by Ell).
The ”Intelligent Scissors” tool now allows to remove the last added segment with the ”’Backspace”’ key.

Split preview for GEGL-based filters¶

Michael Natterer added a new on-canvas preview feature for GEGL-based filters: splitting the view to compare the image before and after applying the filter. You can drag the ‘curtain’ to adjust the view and use key modifiers to swap before/after sides and the direction of the split (horizontal/vertical).

darktable¶

Tobias Ellinghaus of the darktable project contributed a new plug-in to load raw files into GIMP by having them developed in darktable. This is only available on platforms supported by darktable, i.e. Linux and macOS.

Since there is more than one raw processing plug-in out there, we intend to eventually add a way to set preferred raw plug-in. You can contribute a patch for that.

WebP support¶

Pascal Massimino and Benoit Touchette contributed a new WebP plug-in that supports loading/exporting of WebP files, along with ICC profiles, Exif and XMP metadata. The plug-in also supports animation.

Painting¶

In early 2016, we finally merged the branch by Jehan Pagès that introduces symmetric painting to all painting tools (Paintbrush, MyPaint Brush, Eraser etc.). The feature is available via a dedicated dockable dialog on per-image basis. Modes: Mirror, Tiling, Mandala (Kaleidoscope). The work on this feature was directly sponsored by the part of the community that uses GIMP for digital painting.

For bitmap brushes, GIMP now caches hardness and disables dynamic change of hardness to improve painting performance. Bitmap brushes also don’t get clipped anymore, when hardness is less than 100.

User Interfaces Changes¶

One of the most visible changes in GIMP is the new user interface themes along with new icon themes, available since v2.9.4 released last summer. We now ship GIMP with “Dark” theme and “Symbolic” icon theme enabled by default.

GIMP ships with 5 new themes (lighter, light, gray, dark, darker) overall. For users who prefer the old UI, we still ship the old default UI theme along with old colorful icons. There’s also some ongoing work on vector-based icons for better Hi-DPI displays compatibility.

We also fixed a number of usability issues. E.g. toolbox buttons do not grab focus anymore, which used to break the use of the ”’Tab”’ key and other canvas-related shortcuts after changing tools with a pointing device click.

GEGL and babl¶

GEGL and babl got their fair share of development focus. We only added a handful of new operations (”Saturation”, ”Gaussian Selective Blur” etc.), because most work on GEGL was performance improvements, house cleaning etc.

One interesting change, though, is the new ”gegl_operation_progress” function to report processing progress. It’s useful for reporting processing progress to a GEGL-based editor such as GIMP. For now, we use it in ”cartoon” and ”distance-transform” operations, but expect to use it in many more ops.

For babl, most changes were about improving performance (creating fast pixel data conversion paths and caching them) and fixing bugs.

What’s Next for GIMP¶

There are still many bugs to fix before we can release 2.10. In the mean time, we are planning to hold a week long developers meet-up in Barcelona at end of January. One of the topics will be cleaning up libgimp to get it into the releasable state for 2.10. We shall soon announce the full agenda for the Wilberweek.

Another upcoming major change is how linear/gamma-corrected workflows are implemented in GIMP. Since early January, Michael Natterer and Øyvind Kolås have been hacking on GIMP to make layer modes work on both linear and gamma-corrected image data correctly. This involved a lot of source code reorganization, and a major part of that work is already done.

Additional changes currently live in the ‘pippin/linear-is-the-new-black’ Git branch soon to be merged, and we hear good reports about it from some of our most sceptical users already.

Some other exciting news deserve a separate announcement.

We expect to ship GIMP 2.10 with 16/32-bit per color channel support, new color management implementation, and a great many improvements overall later this year. Our next focus will be completing the GTK+3 port to make the graphic tablets support fully functional on all supported platforms again and prepare GIMP for even more long overdue changes such as non-destructive image editing.

Making settings persistent in GIMP

Alexandre Prokoudine — Thu, 06 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0200

Until fairly recently GIMP didn’t do a very good job of remembering all the types of customizations. If you applied a filter to an image and liked the combination of options that you used, there was no way you could save that combination for a later use. If you carefully chose selection stroking options, the next time you had to stroke a selection, you had to define settings all over again.

Upcoming v2.10 has some major improvements in that department.

Early in the current development cycle we started porting existing GIMP filters to GEGL operations and using the GEGL tool skeleton to wrap their GUIs into. This made it possible to automatically save each used combination as preset with a timestamp for a name, or manually—as a named preset. If you’ve been using v2.9.2 or v2.9.4, you most likely benefit from that already.

The second part of improvements started with reviewing a patch submitted by Benoit Touchette. As a professional photographer, he regularly works on hundreds of photos daily and has an extensive use of masks, so he needs to get from A to B extremely fast. Benoit came up with a clever idea to simplify adding new masks: clicking on layers’ previews. Various modifier keys would additionally define whether you apply and remove the mask or just drop the mask entirely.

The difficult part was to come up with a way to remember the last used mask initiation setting not just within one session, but across sessions. So instead of creating a special case for just the Add Layer Mask dialog, Michael Natterer added a whole new infrastructure to automatically save and load the settings of dialogs.

All the dialog defaults are stored in the gimprc configuration file. To give you an idea, this is how stroking options are saved in gimprc:

(stroke-options
    (style solid)
    (antialias yes)
    (method line)
    (width 6.000000)
    (unit pixels)
    (cap-style butt)
    (join-style miter)
    (miter-limit 10.000000)
    (dash-offset 0.000000)
    (dash-info 0)
    (emulate-brush-dynamics no))

The options are preserved for dialogs like New Channel, Feather Selection, Stroke Path and others. To give you visual control over the settings, Michael created a new page in the Preferences dialog called Dialog Defaults.

You may have noticed a few more new things about the Preferences dialog. There is now a scrollbar on large pages to make the dialog fit small screens like the still popular 1366x768 on lower-end laptops (quite a few GIMP users reported that Preferences was getting too big). Additionally, some pages now feature a reset button that restores default settings.

The dialog defaults feature will be available in GIMP 2.9.6 and, eventually, in GIMP 2.10.

The introduction of filter presets and dialog defaults gets us closer to resolving #63610, #120829, and #599573, filed in 2001, 2003, and 2009 respectively. If you think that more dialogs could benefit from either saving their settings as defaults or getting named presets, please drop by on IRC or the mailing list for developers and tell us.

If you are interested in helping out with getting GIMP 2.10 released, please check out the TODO page.

GIMP 2.8.18 Released

Wilber — Thu, 14 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0200

We are releasing GIMP 2.8.18 to fix a vulnerability in the XCF loading code (CVE-2016-4994). With special XCF files, GIMP can be caused to crash, and possibly be made to execute arbitrary code provided by the attacker.

This release includes additional bug fixes since 2.8.16. An important change has happened to the initial startup experience on Microsoft Windows and OS X platforms - any “GIMP is not responding” errors encountered there should be gone.

The source code for GIMP 2.8.18 is available from our downloads page; pre-built packages for Microsoft Windows and OS X will follow shortly.

GIMP 2.9.4 Released

Wilber — Wed, 13 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0200

We have just released the second development version of GIMP in the 2.9.x series. After half a year in the works, GIMP 2.9.4 delivers a massive update: revamped look and feel, major improvements in color management, as well as production-ready MyPaint Brush tool, symmetric painting, and split preview for GEGL-based filters. Additionally, dozens of bugs have been fixed, and numerous small improvements have been applied.

GIMP 2.9.4 is quite reliable for production work, but there are still loose ends to tie, which is why releasing stable v2.10 will take a while. Please refer to the Roadmap for the list of major pending changes.

Revamped User Interface and Usability Changes¶

The new version features several new themes by Benoit Touchette in various shades of gray: Lighter, Light, Gray, Dark, Darker. The system theme has been preserved for users who prefer a completely consistent look of user interfaces across all desktop applications.

Note that we still consider this feature a work in progress, as dark themes still need some fine-tuning (especially regarding the color of inactive menu items).

The new UI themes are accompanied by symbolic icons originally created by Barbara Muraus and Jakub Steiner, and heavily updated and completed by Klaus Staedtler. The existing icon theme from past releases of GIMP has also been preserved, and users can freely switch between available icon themes and easily add their own ones.

Note that themes and icon themes are now separate: you can easily mix your favorite UI with various icon sets. Also since most 2.8 themes would end up broken in 2.9.x, themes are not migrated from GIMP < 2.9. Users who want custom themes will have to install ones specifically made for GIMP 2.9/2.10.

All work on icons by Klaus Staedtler is made on vector (SVG) images, which should allow better support for HiDPI displays (also commonly known as Retina) soon. Vector icons are an experimental feature, available after using the --enable-vector-icons build configure option. Note that this option does not allow HiDPI support at this time.

We cleaned the Preferences dialog a little and reordered options in a more logical manner. The Color Management page was redesigned following both internal and user-visible changes in relevant parts of GIMP (see below), and the Snap Distance options have been moved to a dedicated Snapping page.

Additionally, it is now possible to configure the size of undo step previews in the Undo dialog via the Preferences dialog, which was previously only possible by manually editing GIMP’s configuration file GIMP’s configuration file, by a complete oversight on our part.

The startup splash screen now features a pulsing progress bar to indicate that GIMP is not frozen. This, as well as initializing fontconfig in the background (also a new feature in 2.9.4), is meant to address a common issue where rebuilding the fonts cache (or building it for the first time) can take a lot of time hence making an impression that GIMP freezes at startup. We acknowledge that this is a workaround. Fixing the actual reason involves hacking on fontconfig. If you are interested, there is a bug report on that.

Color Management Improvements¶

The color management implementation got a complete overhaul in this version of GIMP. Instead of being a pluggable module, it is now a core feature. Moreover, we added an abstraction layer that makes GIMP less dependent on LittleCMS. This means that in the future GIMP could use native APIs on Windows and OS X, and/or use OCIO.

For now, it has helped us to clean up the code a lot and introduce a clean implementation of color management to various bits of GIMP such as: previews for color swatches and gradients, patterns, various color widgets (including the drag-and-drop color widget), the Color Picker tool, layer and image preview etc. The only unmanaged bit for now is the color widget in the Script-Fu and Python-Fu plug-ins. Moreover, GIMP will track which monitor the widget is currently on (different monitors would have different ICC profiles assigned to them) and color-correct it accordingly.

Grayscale images are first class citizens in GIMP once again: since v2.9.4, GIMP can color-manage them as well.

Since GIMP currently relies on sRGB (this is bound to change in future versions of GIMP), we decided to expose that in the user interface. So currently GIMP has an option called ‘Color-manage this image’ in two places: the New Image dialog and the Image > Color Management submenu. What it means is that instead of taking into consideration the ICC profile embedded into an image (whichever profile it is) it will just treat everything as sRGB. Please note that we are likely to reword the option to make it even more explicit about what it does.

Additionally, there’s now a View > Color Management submenu where you can enable and control softproofing.

The Color Management section of the Preferences dialog has been reorganized to reflect recent changes and provide more consistent wording of options.

Since color management comes with a speed penalty (at least with LittleCMS), there’s a new option that enables you to choose either better color fidelity of faster processing depending on the kind of work you usually do.

Among smaller changes there’s a new Image > Color Management > Save Color Profile to File... command that does exactly what it says: it dumps an embedded ICC profile to disk as a file. Note that copyright restrictions on ICC profiles may apply, so please be careful.

GEGL¶

GIMP now keeps track of all GEGL-based filters that you used within one session and allows re-running them via the Filters > Recently Used submenu, just like old GIMP plug-ins.

The Posterize and Desaturate color tools have been converted to regular GEGL-based filters, and both the Tile and Pagecurl filters have been converted to use GEGL buffers. A quite popular “photographic” Highpass filter commonly used for enhancing details was added to the Filters > Enhance submenu.

A way more noticeable new feature, however, is split preview for GEGL-based filters. You can compare before/after versions right on canvas and move a “curtain” around to see more of “before” or “after”, and swap their positions (Shift + click on the guide). You can also switch between vertical and horizontal division (Ctrl + click).

darktable as Raw Processing Plug-in¶

On Linux, GIMP is now capable of using darktable for pre-processing raw images from DSLRs (Canon CR2, Nikon NEF etc.). darktable is an amazing project whose developers stick around at our IRC channel and even contribute to GIMP (most recently, they added reading various metadata from EXR files).

Note that the file-darktable plug-in is activated only when darktable is built with Lua support. Make sure your build of darktable for Linux is feature-complete.

It is still possible to use other raw development plug-ins like UFRaw. For cases when multiple plug-ins are installed in your system, we intend to add a preference option.

Screenshots¶

The code for capturing screenshots has undergone a major reorganization. It’s now split into a front-end and several back-ends specific for Windows, OS X, Wayland and X.org (Linux and UNIX systems).

While there are no immediate user-visible changes, this reorganization will greatly simplify further improvements, hence improving user experience on different operating systems.

Painting¶

MyPaint Brush Tool¶

The new MyPaint Brush tool is now enabled by default. Daniel Sabo and Michael Natterer improved its performance and made MyPaint brushes available via an already familiar dockable dialog interface, with previews and tagging.

Jehan Pagès collaborated with the MyPaint team: he ported libmypaint to autotools, allowing, in particular, standard builds on all platforms, and work is being done to turn the default brushes into a separately shipped package.

Symmetry Painting¶

Another major new feature is symmetric painting mode, also developed by Jehan Pagès with financial support from the GIMP community. It can be activated through the new Symmetry Painting dockable dialog and allows to use all paint tools with various symmetries (mirror, mandala, tiling…).

“Mirror” allows to paint with horizontal, vertical (axial), and/or central symmetry. The symmetry guides can be placed anywhere on canvas.
“Mandala” is a rotational symmetry of any order. The center can be placed anywhere on canvas.
“Tiling” is a translational symmetry, which can be finite (with a maximum of strokes) or infinite. In the latter case, it is the perfect tool to create patterns or seamless tiles, with instant rendering of what it will look like, at painting time.

Quick 1-minute test by Aryeom Han:

Tool Options¶

The mouse scroll-wheel action mappings have been improved, allowing, in combination with various modifiers, to do useful things on the currently selected tool’s options:

Alt + Mousewheel: opacity increase/decrease;
Shift + Primary + Mousewheel: aspect increase/decrease;
Shift + Alt + Mousewheel: angle increase/decrease;
Primary + Alt + Mousewheel: size increase/decrease;
Shift + Primary + Alt + Mousewheel: spacing increase/decrease.

Note: the Primary modifier is usually Ctrl or Cmd, depending on your platform.

Selections¶

For cases when your selection has a lot of small unselected regions, you can now use the Select > Remove Holes command.

The Select > Border... dialog now provides several border style options: hard, smooth, and feathered. Feathered creates a selection which goes gradually from 1 to 0 the farther you get from the middle of the border. Smooth preserves partial selection (antialiasing) along the edges of the selection.

Better Tools¶

The Fuzzy Select and Bucket Fill tools got a new feature for selecting/filling diagonally neighboring pixels.

The Blend tool got shapeburst fills resurrected, and allows the placement of their handles on the canvas, outside of the image area. Additionally, the Blend tool now displays its progress thanks to a new GEGL feature available in several GEGL operations including gegl:distance-transform.

The Text tool now fully supports advanced input methods for CJK and other non-western languages. Minimal support already existed, but the pre-edit text was displayed in a floating pop-up instead of inline, within the text tool box, and without any preview styling. It is now displayed just as expected, depending on your platform and Input Method Engine. Several input method-related bugs and crashes have also been fixed.

Batch Processing on Command Line¶

A new macro with-files is now available in order to easily process multiple files through GIMP from the command line, which was a much awaited feature.

For instance, if you want to invert the colors of all PNG images in the current folder, then save them as JPEG, you could run the following from the command line:

gimp -i -b '(with-files "*.png"
                (gimp-invert layer)
                (gimp-file-save 1 image layer
                    (string-append basename ".jpg")
                    (string-append basename ".jpg")
                )
            )
            (gimp-quit 0)'

Note: the name of the macro may change before the release of v2.10.

Email Plug-in Resurrected¶

The File > Send by email… dialog will open your default email client with an attached copy of the current image, to share your work-in-progress with a single click. This is available only on operating systems with xdg-email (likely GNU/Linux, BSD only).

The original implementation using sendmail is also available. Yet since it requires a properly configured sendmail, which is not common on desktop machines, the explicit --with-sendmail option has to be set at build time to replace the xdg-email implementation.

Debugging Facilities for Windows¶

In the unlikely event that GIMP crashes, we need as much information as possible to find out the actual bug. The raw crash log is one such source of information. Windows builds can now generate backtrace logs upon a crash with Dr.MinGW’s ExcHndl library, which must be available at build time. The logs will be stored in %APPDATA%\GIMP\2.9\CrashLog\.

What’s Left To Do for GIMP 2.10¶

Since the release of v2.9.2 we have been mostly fixing bugs and completing the work we had started earlier. We are not planning to add any major new features in v2.10. If you are interested in helping us release v2.10 earlier, you can find the list of bug reports in our bugtracker.

Some Statistics on Our Awesome Contributors¶

GIMP 2.9.2 was released on November 27, 2015. Since then, the work to reach GIMP 2.9.4 was done in 1348 commits, making an average of 5.9 commits a day, of which 894 are (mostly) code-related, 241 are icon-related, and 213 are translation updates.

As usual, the GIMP team is small yet as dedicated as ever: more than a third of the commits have been done by Michael Natterer (514), the next biggest contributors being Jehan Pagès (192) and Klaus Staedtler (187). The three of them represent 66% of all commits.

Note: contributions by Jehan Pagès were made on behalf of ZeMarmot Open Movie project: symmetry painting, MyPaint library integration, email plugin, Input Methods, management of the new themes and icons contributions, and more…

We have prolific newcomers among developers:

Ell joined us with significant code contributions (32 commits), such as the diagonal neighbours, the “Remove Hole” command, and many other fixes;
Tobias Ellinghaus, a darktable developer, contributed 14 commits on darktable integration and improving EXR and PNM support.

Of course, we also have our usual suspects with 10+ code commits: Alexandre Prokoudine, Daniel Sabo, Kristian Rietveld, Massimo Valentini, and Michael Henning.

And since no patch is too small, it would be completely unfair to forget all other code contributors: Adrian Likins, A S Alam, Carol Spears, Eugene Kuligin, Jasper Krijgsman, João S. O. Bueno, nmat, Richard Kreckel, saul, Shmuel H, Jonathan Tait, Michael Schumacher, Pedro Gimeno, Richard Hughes, Benoit Touchette, Hartmut Kuhse, Kevin Cozens, Elle Stone, Mukund Sivaraman, Øyvind Kolås, Sven Claussner, Thomas Manni, Alexia Death, Andrew Worsley, Simon Budig, and Piotr Drąg.

New icons are a big work in progress, with 241 commits, mostly by Klaus Staedtler, with additional contributions from Aryeom Han, Benoit Touchette, Jehan, Kevin Payne, Michael Natterer and Øyvind Kolås. We should not forget Benoit Touchette for his work in progress on themes, as well as some code contribution.

We would like to thank as well every 30 translators: Alexandre Prokoudine, Ask Hjorth Larsen, Balázs Meskó, Balázs Úr, Christian Kirbach, Cédric Valmary, Daniel Korostil, Daniel Mustieles, Dimitris Spingos, Dušan Kazik, Gábor Kelemen, Hartmut Kuhse, J.M. Ruetter, Jordi Mas, Khaled Hosny, Marco Ciampa, Mario Blättermann, Martin Srebotnjak, Mónica Canizo, Necdet Yücel, Pedro Albuquerque, Piotr Drąg, Rūdolfs Mazurs, Sebastian Rasmussen, Sveinn í Felli, Tiago Santos, Yolanda Álvarez Pérez, Klaus Staedtler, kolbjoern, and Милош Поповић.

Note: Statistics based on the number of commits provide valuable information regarding the activity of a project, yet they are not always a perfect indicator of contribution, so the goal of this section is not to have any kind of contributor rank. For instance, one commit could be a one-liner, whereas another could contain several hundreds of lines (and even this may not always be a good indicator of the time spent on and the difficulty of the fix).

Moreover we should not forget all the “shadow contributors”, whose contributions cannot be counted as easily, working on things such as code review (which Massimo Valentini should be especially commended for), bug triaging and follow-up (Michael Schumacher here would get a prize!), community, website, and communication (Akkana Peck, Patrick David, and others)…

We sincerely hope we did not forget anyone, and we want to say: thank you.

Downloads¶

The source code is available from the Downloads page. An installer for Windows will be available shortly. A build for Mac OS X is not available at this time.

GIMPers at Texas Linux Fest 2016

Pat David — Mon, 04 Jul 2016 08:00:00 -0500

If you happen to be anywhere near Austin, TX next weekend (July 8-9) then mosey on down to Texas Linux Fest 2016 and meet some of your friendly neighborhood GIMP crew!

Akkana Peck and Pat David will be hosting a photowalk from 0900-1100 on Friday, July 8^th (first day of the meeting) to socialize, talk photography, and capture some images for their workshop sessions later that same day. Pat will be talking about various Free Software photography tools and using them to create high quality results. Akkana will focus on using GIMP as a primary photo editing tool.

Both sessions will be immediately following the photowalk, before and after lunch. They will also be in attendance for the “Graphics Hackathon” at the end of the first day.

They are part of a full “open graphics” track on the first day that includes Ted Gould creating technical diagrams using Inkscape, Brian Beck doing a Blender tutorial, and Jonathon Thomas showing off OpenShot 2.0!

More information can be found on the 2016 Texas Linux Fest website. We look forward to seeing you there!

GEGL 0.3.8 and babl 0.1.18 Released

Alexandre Prokoudine — Tue, 14 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0200

New version of GEGL and babl are out with new features, minor improvements, and fixes. These releases in particular are intended to accomodate upcoming GIMP 2.9.4 that depends on several important bugfixes from both babl and GEGL. However there have been some interesting new features.

First of all, now GEGL operations can report processing progress so that GIMP or e.g. GNOME Photos could correctly render progress indication. So far this is only used in two operations, gegl:cartoon and gegl:distance-transform. We expect to propagate this new feature to more operations in the coming releases.

Secondly, linear and cubic resamplers provide better default image quality at downscaling now. In terms of quality, the output is comparable to that of NoHalo and LoHalo samplers, but processing time is shorter.

Additionally, file handlers finally register MIME types for loaders and try to guess file types by analyzing file content before falling back to file extension detection. This makes the file loading routine a little smarter.

Finally, the ‘gegl’ binary keeps getting more features like simple video filtering and encoding audio alongside video.

For the first time in quite a while a new GEGL release contains no new ports of existing GIMP filters. This is because there have been no related contributions for the last few months. There is still a lot of work to do, and we greatly appreciate your help with getting more filters ready for non-destructive workflows.

The complete list of changes is available in the NEWS file. Tarballs are up at download.gimp.org/.

Updated 2.8.16 Installer with a Major Bugfix Released

Michael Schumacher — Sun, 05 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0200

With the past few releases, users on the 32-bit versions of Microsoft Windows platforms were plagued by an annoying bug — resizing a window crashed GIMP. We believe this to be fixed, and have released an updated installer.

The crash was caused by a problem in libpixman, and is fixed in current version of this library. This has been packaged, so if you were suffering from this issue, you can get an updated installer from our downloads page.

Call for GIMP 2.10 Documentation Update

Alexandre Prokoudine — Mon, 23 May 2016 00:00:00 +0200

With the upcoming GIMP 2.10 release we intend to finally close the time gap between releases of source code, installers, and the user manual. This means that we need a more coordinated effort between the GIMP developers team and the GIMP User Manual team.

For the past several months we’ve already been working on GIMP mostly in bugfix mode. It’s time to start updating the user manual to match all the changes in GIMP 2.10, and we would appreciate your help with that.

What Needs Doing¶

Updating the content. There have been a lot of changes since 2.8. For quite a while, we’ve been maintaining a structured list of changes in 2.10 specifically to assist technical writers in updating the user manual.
Translating the content. At some point we’d like to “freeze” the documentation so that translators could start updating localized versions of the user manual. Since GIMP is hosted at GNOME, you would have to contact your local GNOME translation team to get involved.
Resurrecting PDF builds. Years ago we chose DocBook/XML as a way to build both web (HTML) and printable (PDF) copies of the user manual from a single source. Unfortunately, there appear to be some issues with building PDF files presently. Someone would have to investigate, what’s causing this, and act accordingly.
Adding Search to the Online Docs. We’ve heard a number of requests to add basic search to the online docs. If you have an idea how to do that, please contact us.

How To Contribute¶

Technical documentation on hacking on the user manual is available in the respective Git repository.

The primary communication environment for all things documentation in the project is the gimp-docs@ mailing list. We encourage you to talk to fellow team members publicly about which part of the documentation you are hacking on. This is because efficient collaborative effort requires full transparence.

If you have technical questions about features in GIMP 2.10, you can use either gimp-docs@ mailing list or join the IRC channel, ask your question, and stick around for the answer.

We do not yet have an estimated time of arrival for GIMP 2.10, but there’s only so much time we can spend on completing this release before we can move to the next development cycle.

Revamping Tutorials

Pat David — Thu, 05 May 2016 00:00:00 +0200

As part of building a new GIMP website we had to sort through all of the legacy pages in order to migrate content properly. A nice side effect of this sorting included addressing tutorials that were out of date (or in some cases, really out of date). This gave us an opportunity to re-build the tutorials index to focus on (more) current content as well as ensure that everything is being licensed in a permissive manner.

Cool URIs don’t change¶

It was true in 1998 and is still just as true today. Possibly more so. Great care was taken to make sure that we didn’t break all of the inbound links to the old tutorials during the site update.

This means that if there were any links to the previous tutorials they will still work. They are still at the same URL they had always been. What we did change was the listing of tutorials on the index page:

www.gimp.org/tutorials/

That list now includes only more current content that has been permissively licensed for use. If you need the deprecated tutorials for some reason, see the complete list.

An unfortunate side-effect of pruning old material is that we are now a little light on good tutorials…

Help Write More Tutorials¶

Which is where you, the community, comes in! If you were looking for a way to contribute to the project, and you don’t feel up to coding^*, this is a great way to share and help others learn GIMP. We encourage you to come tell us about your tutorial on the gimp-user mailing list or, even better, drop by the IRC channel and let us know what you’re thinking (this is strongly encouraged to make sure there’s not something already being worked on)!

^*Of course, if you do feel up to coding we’d love to hear from you too!

There’s usually helpful team members around who can guide you with both ideas and content if needed. We have a tutorial template, and you can find the markdown file used to generate it in git.

We can use tutorials of all types and skill levels, so don’t feel intimidated by what you might see on the current tutorials page. Indeed many common questions we see might have solutions that are not obvious to others - the perfect opportunity to write a tutorial about it! We’ll absolutely consider all proposed tutorials.

New Tutorial - Tone Mapping with Levels¶

Speaking of tutorials, Elle Stone has just published a new tutorial on doing some simple tone mapping and shadow recovery of images using high bit depth GIMP and the GEGL Exposure operation.

The GEGL Exposure dialog.

The tutorial covers a method for adding exposure compensation to an image’s shadows and midtones while retaining highlight details. She does this using Exposure and combining the results with a mask based on a grayscale version of the working image (similar to using a luminosity mask). This is also one of the first tutorials using the high bit depth version of GIMP. Head over to the tutorials page and have a look:

Tone Mapping and Shadow Recovery Using GIMP’s ‘Colors/Exposure’

Updated Windows Installer Signature

Michael Schumacher — Sun, 27 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0100

We have published an updated installer package for the Microsoft Windows platforms. If you have experienced problems in the past few weeks due to corrupt installer warnings, please go to our downloads and try again.

Corrupt Windows Installer Warnings

Michael Schumacher — Thu, 17 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0100

For the past few weeks, we have been receiving reports that some users can’t download our installer packages for the Microsoft Windows platforms. Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer 11 mark them as corrupt and discourage users from running them.

Turns out this is a policy change by Microsoft, gone into effect on January 1, 2016. The new policy affects all kinds of security certificates as of specific deadlines, and this includes code signing certificates. Jernej Simončič, who creates the Windows installer packages, signs them to make their authenticity verifiable. But the way this signature is done is no longer considered safe by Microsoft, and there are justified technical reasons for that.

Administrators and users of Microsoft Windows systems are well advised to make themselves familiar with the implications of this policy; the TechNet article on the subject is available at Windows Enforcement of Authenticode Code Signing and Timestamping.

We are working to resolve the issue — this requires a more recent code-signing certificate and signing the installer packages with it. Stay tuned for updates.

As a temporary workaround, you can use other web browsers to download the installer packages.

GEGL 0.3.6 Released

Alexandre Prokoudine — Tue, 15 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0100

Last weekend, we released a new version of GEGL, graph based image processing framework used by GIMP and other free/libre graphics applications. Here are some of the most important changes.

There are two new operations: Saturation (works in both CIE LAB and CIE LCH color spaces) and the port of GIMP’s Selective Gaussian Blur filter. The operations for loading and saving video frames have been updated to work with FFmpeg 3.0. We also disabled the dcraw-based operation for loading raw images by default: the LibRaw-based operation does the job just as well and provides a better API.

Additionally, there have been some improvements in the ‘gegl’ binary: now you can change graph composition (namely, connect buffers to aux and other input pads) via the command line, and when a project is loaded for viewing, you can zoom in/out at cursor position on scroll wheel events. Moreover, you can now specify properties of operations on the command line, e.g.:

$ gegl input.png -o output.png -- threshold value=0.23

Among general improvements, copy-on-write handling for the gegl_buffer_clear function is now available. This should make clearing of buffers an initially cheaper and faster operation, with the actual allocation of tile memory (copying) amortised over subsequent pixel data writes to the buffer.

GEGL 0.3.6 is available at download.gimp.org.

There are still many GIMP filters to be rewritten as GEGL operations. Contributions are welcome!

StreamComputing launches GEGL-OpenCL project

Alexandre Prokoudine — Thu, 28 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0100

This week, StreamComputing launches an educational initiative that aims to get more developers to study and use OpenCL in their projects. Within this project, up to 20 collaborators will port as many GEGL operations to OpenCL as possible.

Vincent Hindriksen and Adel Johar who organize this project seek a way for the group to educate themselves. One of the ways is to gamify the porting by benchmarking the kernels and defining winners, and another way is to optimize kernels within StreamComputing to push the limits. Victor Oliveira, who wrote most of the OpenCL code in GEGL, joined the GEGL-OpenCL project to advise.

So far 7 participants have joined the project, so if you are interested in learning OpenCL and helping GEGL and GIMP get hardware acceleration for more of their features, email Vincent.

All work is being done on GitHub (check out the project’s description there for information on porting and benchmarking). The communication between participants is taking place in a dedicated Slack channel (request an invite from Vincent or Adel).

StreamComputing is a Dutch software development company that provides training and consulting services in the area of GPU programming and parallel processing.

GEGL is a free/libre graph based image processing framework used by GIMP, GNOME Photos, and other free software projects.

Libre Graphics Meeting 2016

Pat David — Tue, 12 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0100

Join us April 15-18 at the 11th annual Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) hosted by the Westminster School of Media Arts and Design, University of Westminster, in London, UK. Come and meet developers of free graphics software, participate in a workshop, or collaborate with other visual artists who choose to work in free software.

LGM is an amazing opportunity for developers, contributors, visual artists, and supporters of free software projects to come together to work, discuss, and learn from each other. The meeting will have multiple days of presentations, birds of a feather meetings, and many types of wonderful workshops. There’s also an opportunity to meet some of the GIMP team as well!

This year the host is the Westminster School of Media Arts and Design, University of Westminster at their Harrow Campus:

Harrow Campus Watford Road Northwick Park Middlesex HA1 3TP

View Larger Map

If you are unable to join us at the meeting, please consider donating something to help offset the costs of project participants to make the trip out to collaborate with so many other awesome projects! LGM has a Pledgie campaign running to assist with travel costs for participants:

Funds from their Pledgie go towards helping contributors from all around the world converge at the meeting to share and present their work with others.

Special Focus: Other Dimensions¶

For the 2016 edition of LGM, they are looking at a different aspect of Libre Graphics, Other Dimensions:

For the 2016 edition of LGM we continue speculating and will expand Libre Graphics into Other Dimensions. We are looking for presentations and workshops that explore the dimensions of space and material: 3D modelling and animation, Libre architecture, Open Source product design and other fields of digital making and manufacture. We are also seeking contributions that offer reflections on the ‘other dimensions’ of open source communities and that engage with FLOSS tools in various contexts including but not limited to teaching, learning, practice and co-production. This represents a desire to address the future sustainability of the Libre Graphics movement, through a growth of the core projects and topics that will, we hope, allow us to welcome more and more FLOSS projects and participants to our community.

A History of GIMP + LGM¶

Over 10 years ago the annual meetings of GIMP developers branched out to LGM, and we have been attending the event every year since. It’s an opportunity to hold project meetings, talk to fellow contributors to other libre projects, and to get inspired by the work that you, our users, create.

At the 2014 LGM in Leipzig, Germany, members of the GIMP team were cornered for a few moments to capture some portraits. Here are just some of the faces you might get to see at LGM 2016!

Bring this image along as a reference when you want to buy a round of drinks!
For complaints, see this guy.

If you’d like an opportunity to show off your work, come check out others awesome results, or are just curious what’s new and interesting in the world of free software, graphics, and visual art - then we encourage you to come attend LGM2016.

We’ll be excited to meet you in person!

GIMP and GEGL in 2015

Alexandre Prokoudine — Thu, 31 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0100

We hope you are having great holidays. Here is our annual report about project activities in 2015.

It’s been an interesting year for GIMP. For the most part, we focused on completing the GEGL port which involved rewriting all the source code related to color management. The vast majority of this work was done by Michael Natterer between April and November. The new implementation is much cleaner and is built right into the core of GIMP. Here are some of the new features:

pasting an image into another image that has a different color space just works now;
GIMP detects color space defined in Exif 2.21/DCF 2.0 option files;
greyscale images are finally color-managed;
layer and image previews are color managed too now.

The few missing features are color management for the color picker tool and color selection dialogs. This will be completed before the final v2.10 release.

Michael Natterer also resurrected Intelligent Scissors selection tool—the last one that wasn’t ported to GEGL—and added undo support for selections in progress.

Elle Stone added decomposition and composition of images to/from CIE LCH, a perceptually uniform color space that includes all perceivable colors and thus has a gamut larger than color spaces based on RGB and CMYK color models.

Rupert Weber, Jörn Meier, Massimo Valentini, Elle Stone, Thomas Manni, and Michael Natterer introduced a few improvements to the blending modes:

The Overlay mode is not identical to Soft Light mode anymore and relies on a widely used formula from both PDF AND W3C’s “Compositing and Blending Level 1” specification now.
There are CIE LCH based version of Hue, Chroma, Color, and Lightness blending modes available now in addition to their HSV based versions. See an explanation by Elle Stone for details.

Another development focus was on painting features. As requested by people using GIMP for digital painting, Jehan Pagès and Michael Natterer added the automatic saving of used colors into a new Color History palette. The palette is also part of the color selection dialog and the FG/BG dockable dialog.

In early 2015, Michael Natterer added a quick first version of MyPaint Brush tool that used MyPaint’s brush engine available separately. Daniel Sabo, Alexia, and Jehan Pagès revisited this mini-project in December and vastly improved it by making its performance comparable to GIMP’s own brush engine and adding support for smoothing brush strokes. Michael also made it possible to tag and filter MyPaint brushes. The tool is now very stable enough and will be enabled by default in future releases of GIMP.

MyPaint Brush tool in action. Painting courtesy by Alexia

Additionally, Michael Natterer added canvas flipping that nicely complements canvas rotation and is intended to help painters evaluate their work mirrored horizontally or vertically without having to undo the transformation. Thanks to Simon Budig you can map shortcuts to various commands related to both canvas rotation and flipping to speed up your workflow.

Rotating and flipping the canvas. Painting courtesy by Evelyne Schulz

We also improved support for various file formats:

Tobias Ellinghaus from the darktable team made the EXR loading color-managed by generating an ICC profile from the embedded white point and chromaticities on the fly, assuming linear gamma images.
ShadowKyogre, Massimo Valentini, and Michael Natterer fixed several existing bugs in the PSD plugin and improved support for PSD files with greater than 8-bit depth precision.
Mukund Sivaraman and Tobias Ellinghaus added the reading and writing of PFM (portable floatmap) files commonly used in HDR imaging.
Joao S. O. Bueno implemented exporting and loading group layers in OpenRaster files—a new feature in upcoming MyPaint 1.2.0.

Adjusting exposure of a 32-bit float PFM file

The next development focus was on GIMP’s visual identity.

Benoit Touchette, Michael Natterer, and Jehan Pagès added the ability to switch between icon themes. GIMP now ships with an optional symbolic icon theme originally created by Barbara Muraus with contributions from Jakub Steiner, and Klaus Staedtler.

Benoit Touchette also added an experimental dark theme that should work better for people who work on hi-color images. GIMP also ships a negative version of the symbolic icon theme to go with the dark theme.

Editing a photo in GIMP with a dark theme enabled. Photo courtesy by Pat David

Michael Natterer revisited the screenshot plug-in’s source code. It is now easier to add support for new screenshooting backends (Windows, Wayland etc.).

Michael Henning and Massimo Valentini fixed several bugs in the image ruler code that affected performance during painting. This vastly improved painting experience on Linux, but we hear that Windows users still experience issues, so we’d appreciate a wider testing and code contributions. For now, you can temporarily disable the ruler for your painting sessions.

Johannes Matschke contributed an experimental Handle Transform tool that allows scaling, rotation, shearing, and adjusting perspective with handles placed by a user on the canvas. Michael Natterer further improved the tool’s usability.

Michael also merged, improved, and marked as experimental another new tool, N-Point Deformation, contributed by Marek Dvoroznak a few years ago as the main objective of his Google Summer of Code project. The tool makes it possible to apply rubber-like transformation to objects.

GEGL 0.3.0, released in June, featured over 70 new filters/operations, as well as experimental multithreading and mipmaps support. We do not extensively use mipmaps in GIMP yet, but this will change in the coming releases. Further GEGL updates released this year reintroduced the loading and saving of video frames via FFmpeg, various optimizations, and more new operations, such as libraw based operation for loading RAW images (not yet exposed in GIMP).

Most of the work we did this year is available in v2.9.2, the first development release in 2.9.x series made in late November. Improved MyPaint Brush tool and visual changes (icon themes, dark theme) will be available in upcoming v2.9.4 release.

We expect to continue finalizing the GEGL port and the existing feature set in 2016. There are two branches with new features to review, but other than that we do not expect any major changes in the 2.9.x series of releases.

Last but not least, we owe a great debt to Pat David for redesigning and launching our new website for the 20th anniversary of the project that we celebrated in November.

Libre Graphics Meeting 2016 Calls For Participation

Alexandre Prokoudine — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0100

On April 15—18, the Libre Graphics Meeting 2016 conference is taking place in London. We invite you to attend and meet developers of free graphics software, lead a workshop, or participate in one.

The GIMP team and Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) go way back. In 2005, annual meetings of GIMP developers branched out to a new conference that embraced developers of free software, graphic and type designers, photographers, and 3D artists. That conference was LGM.

Ever since then we attend the event every year to hold project meetings, talk to fellow developers from other libre projects, and get inspired by the work that you, our end-users, present.

If you are a GIMP user with outstanding skills in graphic design, painting, illustration, or photography, we encourage you to attend LGM 2016 and do a GIMP workshop. Please use this submission form to send a proposal. Submission deadline is January 10, 2016.

There are, of course, more formats for active participation: longer and shorter talks, hackathons, Bird of a Feather meetings, etc. You can learn more about those from the press release.

We’ll be excited to meet you in person!

GIMP 2.9.2 Released

Alexandre Prokoudine — Fri, 27 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0100

We are excited to announce the first development release of GIMP in the 2.9.x series. It is another major milestone towards making GIMP a state-of-the art image editing application for graphic designers, photographers, illustrators, and scientists.

The new version is already available in the Downloads section.

GEGL Port¶

GEGL is GIMP’s new image processing engine. The GEGL project was originally launched in 2000 by several developers from visual effects company Rhythm&Hues who needed a versatile image editor for movie production.

From the very beginning, GEGL was a challenging project, since no general image editing software at the time was built on top of the node compositions concept, and GEGL had to be designed with just that in mind.

In 2007, GIMP developers Sven Neumann, Michael Natterer, and Øyvind Kolås started porting GIMP to use GEGL. However, this process had to be broken up into several stages, because GIMP’s source code was already huge at the time.

So GIMP 2.6 (released in 2008) featured optional use of GEGL-based color grading tools and an experimental tool to use GEGL “filters”. Then GIMP 2.8 (released in 2012) featured GEGL-based projection—flattened representation of stacked layers.

Now upcoming GIMP 2.10 is going to use GEGL for pretty much everything under the hood, and v2.9.2 is the first technical preview release on the way towards v2.10.

While a few advanced features of GEGL such as non-destructive editing are planned to be exposed in GIMP at a later development stage (v3.2 and onwards), with 2.9.2, you can already benefit from certain aspects of the new engine, such as:

16/32bit per color channel processing
Basic OpenEXR support
On-canvas preview for many filters
Experimental hardware-accelerated rendering and processing via OpenCL
Higher-quality downscaling

Additionally, native support for PNG, TIFF, PSD, and FITS files in GIMP has been upgraded to read and write 16/32bit per color channel data.

GIMP loads simple 32bit float OpenEXR files and automatically switches to the respective precision mode (featuring a Cornell box reference file).

New and Improved Tools¶

All tools in GIMP are now GEGL-based and fully functional in up to 32bit per color channel precision mode.

GIMP 2.9.2 also introduced two new tools that we consider mostly complete:

Unified Transform, designed by Peter Sikking and implemented by Mikael Magnusson, combines rotation, scaling, skewing, and adjusting perspective in a single tool.
Warp Transform, implemented by Michael Muré, replaces the old iWarp plugin and provides its features in a tool that works directly on images, without a preview window.

We have also improved several existing tools:

Blend tool, worked on by Michael Henning, is now more interactive. After drawing with the tool to define the beginning and the end of the gradient fill, you can adjust start/end positions and change colors.
Align tool now features vertical and horizontal fill modes thanks to João S. O. Bueno.
Foreground Select tool can finally make subpixel selections in complex cases such as strays of hair on textured background. Two new masking methods for that were added by Jan Rüegg and Daniel Sabo, and the user interface was updated by Michael Natterer.

Several new experimental tools can be enabled on the Playground page of Preferences dialog:

N-Point Deformation, by Marek Dvorožňák, implements a new way to bend objects while preserving a natural look.
Handle Transform, by Johannes Matschke, is an interesting approach at applying scaling, rotating, and perspective correction using handles placed on the canvas.
Seamless Clone, by Barak Itkin, simplifies merging one image into another by adjusting brightness and colors of the pasted image to match the look of the image it is pasted to.
MyPaint Brush tool is our first shot at using more brush engines in GIMP. The code was written by Michael Natterer.

All the experimental tools are subject to performance optimizations, bugfixes, user interface redesign etc. We do not guarantee that they will be enabled in v2.10 by default.

File Format Support¶

Thanks to Mukund Sivamaran, Rasmus Hahn, and Øyvind Kolås, GIMP now features basic support for OpenEXR files, both loading and exporting. It’s currently missing advanced features such as layered or multiresolution EXR files, or unpremultiplication when exporting etc., but you should be able to load, process, and export a “regular” floating point EXR file just fine.

Additionally, GIMP 2.9.2 features initial support for WebP images, also both loading and exporting. Missing features so far are ICC profiles, metadata, and animation.

Color Management¶

The color management plugin has been replaced with completely new code by Michael Natterer to provide a more complete set of features, as well as better color fidelity preservation. E.g. GIMP can finally handle cases, when one image is pasted into another, and color spaces don’t match.

GIMP now uses LittleCMS v2 which minimizes color fidelity loss during conversions between 8, 16, 32, and 64bit per channel data, and provides support for ICC v4 color profiles.

Displaying ICC color profiles metadata

There are still some parts of GIMP like color choosers that need to become color-managed. We expect to complete this in time for v2.10.

Layers Blending¶

We have introduced some important changes to blending modes.

Overlay mode is not identical to Soft Light mode anymore and finally relies on a widely used formula from both PDF specification, as well as W3C’s “Compositing and Blending Level 1” spec.

When opening legacy XCF files, GIMP will automatically map the old Overlay mode to the Soft Light during compositing to preserve the rendering of your old artwork. For all newly created layers with Overlay mode the new formula will be used instead.

In addition to HSV-based Hue, Saturation, Chroma, and Value modes GIMP now features their CIE LCH based counterparts: Hue, Chroma, Color, and Lightness. Elle Stone provided a nice example of using them to post-process photos.

Contributors are Rupert Weber, Jörn Meier, Massimo Valentini, Elle Stone, Thomas Manni.

Metadata¶

GIMP 2.9.2 features an experimental dialog to view Exif, XMP, and IPTC metadata—something that we’ve been meaning to provide photographers for quite a while. It doesn’t yet support adding or editing existing metadata—this will be addressed at a later stage of development.

Just like the new color management implementation, metadata support is an integral part of GIMP now.

Digital Painting¶

Apart from the newly added experimental MyPaint Brush tool, there are several major and minor changes:

Canvas rotation and flipping have been added to facilitate users who need to paint from a different angle or check composition for errors.
You can optionally lock brush size to zoom.
All tools that use GIMP’s brush engine now have hardness and force sliders.

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The final v2.10 release is expected to feature configurable mirror painting implemented by Jehan Pagès thanks to GIMP users who supported his crowdfunding campaign. The code is mostly complete and will undergo review in the coming weeks.

Configurability¶

To help interested users test experimental features, we added a new Playground page to the Preferences dialog. In v2.9.2, it serves to enable experimental tools that we mentioned earlier in the news.

Behaviour, another new page in the Preferences dialog, helps configuring default snapping in normal and fullscreen modes.

Behaviour page in the Preferences dialog

Finally, the user interface to enable and disable tools in the toolbox has moved to the Toolbox page in the Preferences dialog.

Known Issues¶

At this stage, GIMP 2.9.x is mostly very stable and is known to be used in production by some brave users. However, certain image processing operations are currently slow. This has been partially remedied by rendering changes in the viewport first. We expect to do a lot of optimization work later on.

Further Plans¶

We are not planning any epic changes in the next 2.9.x releases. We want to release it as fast as we can, so we will be focusing on wrapping up what we have already started any maybe merging a few feature branches we have.

When GIMP 2.10 is out, we shall focus on the GTK+3 port to provide a more up-to-date user interface and restore rock-solid Wacom support on Windows and OS X.

Following GIMP 3.0 release, we shall start working on non-destructive editing and other much anticipated features.

20 Years of GIMP, release of GIMP 2.8.16

Wilber — Sun, 22 Nov 2015 09:32:24 -0500

This week the GIMP project celebrates its 20th anniversary.

Back in 1995, University of California students, Peter Mattis and Spencer Kimball, were members of the eXperimental Computing Facility, a Berkeley campus organization of undergraduate students enthusiastic about computers and programming. In June of that year, the two hinted at their intentions to write a free graphical image manipulation program as a means of giving back to the free software community.

On November 21st, 20 years ago today, Peter Mattis announced the availability of the “General Image Manipulation Program” on Usenet (later on, the acronym would be redefined to stand for the “GNU Image Manipulation Program”).

Since its public release the project has been evolving in many ways as a testbed for new ideas, which was considerably assisted by adding plug-in architecture. Over the years, GIMP amassed a huge amount of new features designed for all kinds of users and practical applications: general image editing, retouching and color grading, digital painting, graphic design, science imaging etc.

Between 2006 and 2012, the team collaborated with Peter Sikking of man+machine works to define product vision and improve user experience. Thanks to this collaboration GIMP’s user interface has become more conventional for professional users, and various tools have become more powerful and easy to use. But more importantly, we got a much better idea how to design good interfaces.

In the past several years we’ve been working hard on porting GIMP to a newer image processing engine called GEGL. The switch to GEGL made us rewrite or at least tweak pretty much every part of GIMP’s source code. Fortunately, this work is nearing completion, and you’ll soon be able to benefit from all the changes that it’s bringing.

New Releases and The Future¶

To celebrate the 20th anniversary, we released an update of the current stable version of GIMP. Newly released GIMP 2.8.16 features support for layer groups in OpenRaster files, fixes for layer groups support in PSD, various user inrterface improvements, OSX build system fixes, translation updates, and more changes.

Our immediate future plans are to release first public version in the unstable 2.9.x series that will feature fully functional GEGL port, 16/32bit per channel processing, basic OpenEXR support, vastly improved color management implementation, new tools, on-canvas preview for many filters, and more. This release will encompass over three years of work and become the first milestone towards 2.10.

Following v2.10 release, we shall complete the GTK+3 port that is required to bring back state of the art Wacom support for Windows users. When it’s done and GIMP 3.0 is out, we shall finally be able to get started on some very exciting and much anticipated features like non-destructive editing. Please refer to Roadmap for more details.

New website¶

In conjunction with the 20th anniversary we have updated and revamped the website. The vast majority of the work on the new website was done by Pat David.

The update (finally) includes some much needed improvements such as news items with permalinks and full RSS/Atom feeds. The site is also now responsive to adapt to various screen sizes. Try it on a mobile device or tablet!

Wilber & Co. comics courtesy of Aryeom & Jehan.

GEGL 0.3.0, babl 0.1.12 Released

Alexandre Prokoudine — Thu, 04 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0200

We have just released new versions of GEGL and babl, the libraries that take all the heavy lifting for color space conversion and image processing in GIMP. Both releases are considered a pre-requisite for doing a first 2.9 (development series) GIMP release.

The babl library got floating point conversions optimized. Additionally, HSV and HSL color models were added, CIE LAB conversions were fixed.

Most exciting improvements, however, are in the new GEGL release. A total of 71 new image processing operations were added: mostly these are ports of existing GIMP filters. Some of the existing operations were improved, and some got OpenCL versions.

Another focus of this release was performance: OpenCL support is now enabled by default when detected, there’s experimental multithreading support (use GEGL_THREADS= environment variable) and experimental mipmap rendering (use GEGL_MIPMAP_RENDERING=true environment variable). There’s also a new default tile backend that writes to disk in a separate thread.

The Grid project contributed several major improvements: support for using URIs in image loaders and the loading of meta-operations in JSON, created with imgflo’s online graph editor.

GEGL’s website now features a gallery of available operations and an API browser.

This release of GEGL was brought to you through contributions from 92 people. Respective source code downloads are available on gimp.org: babl 0.1.12, GEGL 0.3.0.

There is still a lot of work to be done. If you are interested to contribute ports of GIMP filters to GEGL or entirely new GEGL operations, please visit our wiki and join #gegl on irc.gimp.net.

GIMP Project’s Official Statement on SourceForge’s Actions

Wilber — Wed, 27 May 2015 00:00:00 +0200

This is the GIMP project’s official statement on SourceForge’s actions in regard to “abandoned” projects on their service.
It is archived in the GIMP Developer mailing list archive.

We are fully aware that since their launch in 1999, SourceForge had been providing a valuable service to the Free Software community and that this service may still be relevant to some Free and Open Source Software projects today.

The GIMP project did benefit from this service: SourceForge was the place to download the Windows installer for GIMP for many years and we appreciate it as an important part of GIMP history.

When it comes to distributing GIMP, our goal is to make it as easy as possible for users to install GIMP.
We do not want our users having to dodge any “offers” or to worry about possibly installing malware in the process.

With our shared history, it was painful to watch the invasion of the big green “Download” button ads appearing on the SourceForge site. Our decision to move the Windows installers away from SourceForge in 2013 was a direct result of how its service degraded in this respect.

The situation became worse recently when SourceForge started to wrap its downloader/installer around the GIMP project binaries. That SourceForge installer put other software apart from GIMP on our users’ systems. This was done without our knowledge and permission, and we would never have permitted it. It was done in spite of the following promise made by SourceForge in November 2013:

we want to reassure you that we will NEVER bundle offers with any project without the developers consent. (emphasis in original)

To us, this firmly places SourceForge among the dodgy crowd of download sites.
SourceForge are abusing the trust that we and our users had put into their service in the past.

We don’t believe that this is a fixable situation.
Even if they promise to adhere to the set of guidelines outlined below, these promises are likely to become worthless with any upcoming management change at SourceForge.

However, if SourceForge’s current management are willing to collaborate with us on these matters, then there might be a reduction in the damage and feeling of betrayal among the Free and Open Source Software communities.

An acceptable approach would be to provide a method for any project to cease hosting at any SourceForge site if desired, including the ability to:

completely remove the project and URLs permanently, and not allow any other projects to take its place
remove any hosted files from the service, and not maintain mirrors serving installers or files differing from those provided by the project or wrap those in any way
provide permanent HTTP redirects (301) to any other location as desired by the project

This is not unreasonable to expect from a service that purports to support the free software community.

SourceForge, What the…?

Wilber — Wed, 27 May 2015 00:00:00 +0200

Some of you might remember that in November 2013, we abandoned SourceForge (SF) as the primary download site for the GIMP installers for Windows platforms and moved the files to our own download server, download.gimp.org

The tons of links on the web pointing to the former site made keeping the installers there as well a necessity, though, and since SF claimed that our outrage over their “installer with benefits” was based on a misunderstanding, this seemed to be a low-risk approach.

However we are receiving reports that people who get there by chance receive small installers that include additional software. And it’s no clicks on those ‘big green download arrow’ ads this time, we’ve tried ourselves. SF has not responded to our inquiry yet, and we found that the maintainer of the GIMP for Windows installers is locked out of that SF project now.

Update: And now SF is launching an attempt at damage control.

Ars Technica has a nice summary, with insightful comments.

Please go to our own downloads page to get the GIMP for Windows installers.

ZeMarmot, Libre Movie to be Made with GIMP, Blender, Ardour

Alexandre Prokoudine — Tue, 05 May 2015 00:00:00 +0200

During Libre Graphics Meeting 2015 last week in Toronto our very own Jehan Pagès announced a new open animated movie project, ZeMarmot. It’s a road movie with a marmot as protagonist.

The team will be using just free/libre applications for the production: GIMP, Blender, Ardour, and a few others. Jehan will also resume his work on animation features in GIMP, extend OpenRaster file format to support animation, and improve Blender’s non-linear video editor as much as he can.

You can support the campaign at IndieGoGo.

Libre Graphics Meeting 2015

Michael Schumacher — Fri, 27 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0100

Two months to go till Libre Graphics Meeting 2015 happens in Toronto, Canada. This conference is a great place to meet the people who make and use free and open source graphics software.

Participation is gratis and open to all. Every year, donations from supporters make it possible for LGM to subsidize the travel costs of participants:

gimpguru.org — R.I.P.

Wilber — Thu, 22 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0100

We noticed that gimpguru.org, once the host of GIMP tutorials (some of which are also present in our Tutorials section) has been abandoned by its original owner and is redirecting visitors to some very suspicious downloads—don’t go there.

We have removed all links pointing there from the tutorials (please do tell if we missed one), and caution everyone to only consider links on our own downloads page and the sites linked from there.

Special announcement for domain owners: if you own a domain with gimp in its name and host a forum or something else, and don’t feel like you want to continue to do so or renew it some day, please approach us - we’d rather take it over ourselves and have it point to www.gimp.org than see it being abused like that.

GIMP and GEGL in 2014

Alexandre Prokoudine — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0100

In 2014, we spent most of the time on improving GIMP’s usability and finalizing the GEGL port of GIMP to lay the foundation for various advanced features in demand by professionals. Some of the 2014 highlights are:

Redesigned Blend tool, now you can tweak end points before applying the gradient fill;
Improved foreground selection tool that handles fine details like hair;
Finer control over painting dynamics;
Up to 64bit per color channel processing;
Improved file formats support, including 32bit TIFF loading/saving.

A far more detailed report has been posted to project’s mailing lists.

The Price of Being Popular

Michael Schumacher — Fri, 26 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0100

When software is popular, then there are elements out there who seek to profit from it by less ethical means. Installer packages with added spyware, adware or even malware are apparently part of the (Windows) user experience these days.

GIMP is being attacked in that manner as well, In order to keep safe, get GIMP from our own downloads pages or the sites we link to, and be very cautious when going elsewhere.

One victim of this is GIMPshop—started as a fork of GIMP to add UI terms that are more familiar to users of Adobe Photoshop, it is nowadays used to load third-party software onto the unwary user’s system. Thankfully, the original author is not to blame, as this operation is run by someone else.

GIMP Magazine Issue #6 Released

Wilber Gimp — Wed, 19 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0100

The newly released issue #6 of GIMP Magazine features a “Using GIMP for portrait and fashion photography” master class by Aaron Tyree who uses GIMP professionally, and a gallery of other artworks and photos made or processed with GIMP.

The team is planning to switch to monthly releases, however they need your support to cover the costs of publishing a free magazine. You can sponsor the project at Patreon or visit the magazine’s gift shop to make a donation.

Updated 2.8.14 Installer for Microsoft Windows

Wilber Gimp — Tue, 02 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0200

We have released an updated 2.8.14 installer (http) for Microsoft Windows. This one fixes the crash on window resize and the missing icons bugs - all by updating the included GTK+ library to 2.24.24.

Still unsolved are the missing spacing character in the zoom drop down and the disappearing background on high zooms (updating the Pango and Cairo libraries that are didn’t change anything there), investigations continue.

Please continue to report bugs, we can’t fix what we don’t know about.

GIMP 2.8.14 Released

Wilber Gimp — Tue, 26 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0200

Yesterday’s 2.8.12 release had broken library versioning, so we had to roll out GIMP 2.8.14 today. The only change is the fixed libtool versioning. Please do not distribute any binaries of yesterday’s broken 2.8.12 release, and get GIMP 2.8.14 using the torrent: https://download.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.8/gimp-2.8.14.tar.bz2.torrent

GIMP Manual 2.8.2 released

Wilber Gimp — Thu, 14 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0200

A new version of the user manual has been released. Changes include:

complete translation to Brazilian Portuguese
many, many, many bugfixes

You can click here to download the 2.8.2 release package. This release provides only the sources to build the help used by the GIMP Help browser. Find the packages on our download server.

For easy installation we suggest that you wait until an installer for this release has been packaged for your platform. Find more releases and information about our goals and how you can help at https://docs.gimp.org.

Gimp-Perl release candidate ready for testing

Wilber Gimp — Thu, 12 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0200

It’s been possible to use various scripting languages to automate GIMP for a long time. But until recently Perl bindings for GIMP were considerably out of date due to lack of interest from contributors. Fortunately, a while ago Ed J started working on updating those, and now a release candidate is available for testing.

Gimp-Perl version 2.30_05 is on CPAN now. It supports GIMP 2.8 and provides the following features:

An autosave script (not installed by default, examples/autosave2) will save in its own directory files that were opened and changed, then reopen them on GIMP startup; if installed, will start along with GIMP.
A plugin registry viewer, installed by default to Filters/Browse Plug-in Registry.
A Perl console, installed by default to Filters/Perl/Console.

The way to install the release candidate on Linux is:

perl -MCPAN -e "install 'ETJ/Gimp-2.30_05.tar.gz'"

If you encounter any bugs, please report them on bugzilla.gnome.org.

Download server renamed to download.gimp.org, no FTP anymore

Michael Schumacher — Tue, 13 May 2014 00:00:00 +0200

Heads-up if you are still accessing the downloads via ftp.gimp.org:

The downloads server has been renamed to download.gimp.org, and it doesn’t support FTP anymore. If you have linked any file, installer package, source archive or directory with an ftp://-Link, please change it to https://. The directory structure is unchanged.

Libre Graphics Meeting 2014

Michael Schumacher — Thu, 23 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0100

The Libre Graphics Meeting is a conference where artists, users, developers, designers, contributors,… who use, plan, develop, play with, tamper with free, libre and open source graphics applications, libraries, concepts,…

It is an unparalleled opportunity for them to meet, talk, discuss, listen, experience and learn about their favorite tools, the uses, the undiscovered potential, the new ideas that come with them

This year, Libre Graphics Meeting will happen at the University of Leipzig, April 2-5.

The attendees arrive from all over the world—last year, people from 26 countries traveled to Madrid to attend. Maybe there will be even more this year?

You can help to make this happen—and many of you already did.

We, the GIMP team, are covering the travel and accommodation expenses for our own team members, and we contribute to the global LGM funds as well. These funds are used to reimburse the travel expenses of contributors and speakers.

Our contribution is possible due to your donations—many, many thanks for this, the return on investment from such meetings for the projects is invaluable.

But, the LGM organizers, they ask for modest contributions, always keen not to drain the funds of the projects that attend the meeting. We’ve got our planned expenses covered for this LGM, so we’ll ask you to force them to take more! :)

LGM runs a travel fund pledgie campaign with an ambitious goal: $12,000. Please go there and contribute to make this awesome meeting possible.

What we did in 2013

Alexandre Prokoudine — Tue, 24 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0100

Before you leave for the holidays, we thought you’d like an overview of what we did this year to improve GIMP for you.

Most of the time was spent on improving the GEGL-based version of GIMP (to be released as v2.10) and porting GIMP plugins to GEGL, so that you could benefit from 32bit float precision per color channel as much as possible.

We also successfully participated in Google Summer of Code 2013 and merged more code from GSoC2012 into the main development branch, namely Seamless Clone and Warp Transform tools.

You can find out a lot more in this detailed report. We wish you to have a great time with your family and friends!

GIMP 2.8.10 released

Alexandre Prokoudine — Thu, 28 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0100

We just released GIMP 2.8.10 ! This is a release in the stable GIMP 2.8 series. This release fixes a bug that prevented older GIMP versions from running on OS X Mavericks. We also did some small adjustments to the Save/Export code in order to make things a bit easier. For the complete list of changes please see the NEWS file.

GIMP Manual 2.8.1 released

Michael Schumacher — Thu, 28 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0100

We’ve released a new version of the user manual with:

Many, many, many bugfixes
New (incomplete) translations: Brazilian Portuguese, Danish, Catalan
The online version of the manual provides a language menu. Readers are now able to easily switch to a different language of the same page.
It is now easier to report bugs: each page has a link at the bottom to report errors straight into Bugzilla.

Find the packages on our FTP server.

An additional bug fix release for GIMP 2.6 has been prepared as well: 2.6.2. It contains content fixes and an improved build system.

Google Summer of Code 2013 Results

Alexandre Prokoudine — Fri, 04 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0200

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!

Sponsoring symmetric painting mode

Alexandre Prokoudine — Mon, 23 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0200

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.

GIMP Magazine #4 published

Alexandre Prokoudine — Thu, 05 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0200

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.

GIMP 2.8.6 Released

Alexandre Prokoudine — Fri, 21 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0200

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.

Four Students to Work on GIMP During GSoC2013 Program

Alexandre Prokoudine — Mon, 27 May 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Four students will be working on GIMP and GEGL this summer thanks to Google Summer of Code 2013 program.

Ajay Ramanathan will be working on a combined selection tool;
Carlos Zubieta will be porting GEGL operations to OpenCL;
Simon Lui will improve support for PSD in GIMP (text layers as text etc.);
Marek Dvorožňák will add a new tool to deform an image objects in a way that they behave like real world objects (see YouTube demo).

We are looking forward to the upcoming three months of exciting work with our new contributors.

While getting prepared to a new run of the Google Summer of Code program, we merged code from a few past GSoC projects, namely Warp Transform and Seamless Paste tools.

The Warp Transform tool is an interactive on-canvas version of our old iWarp plug-in, and it’s in a good shape to be part of a future v2.10 release. It still needs a few internal and user interface changes, though.

The Seamless Paste tool does just that: seamless pasting of an object from one picture into another, optionally updating color characteristics. This tool needs a lot more work. Barak Itkin recently posted an update in his blog to outline the changes to be made.

Stay tuned for more development news.

Four Students to Work on GIMP During GSoC2013 Program

Alexandre Prokoudine — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0200

GIMP will be taking part in this year’s Google Summer of Code program as a mentoring organization. We are inviting interested students to get in touch with us and start discussing potential projects.

Some project ideas have already been posted in the wiki, but you are free to come up with your own ones. At this point porting existing plug-ins to GEGL has the highest priority, as it will aid us in releasing GIMP 2.10 sooner.

If you are eligible for participation and eager to contribute to our project, please introduce yourself on the mailing list for developers or in the #gimp channel at irc.gimp.net. In the latter case please bear in mind that the core team is mostly in the Western Europe timezone.

Four Students to Work on GIMP During GSoC2013 Program

Alexandre Prokoudine — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0100

Yesterday Google announced Summer of Code 2013 program. Participating at GSoC has proved to be rather beneficial to us. Here are just some of the features implemented during past runs of the program: five new tools (Heal, Perspective Clone, Cage Transform, Warp Transform, Seamless Paste), resources tagging, hardware acceleration in GEGL. Needless to say, we’ll try to participate this year again.

We already have a preliminary list of project ideas for this year’s program: improving selection tools, implementing sophisticated slicing tool for web designers, creating a full-featured OpenEXR plug-in. However, the top priority project for us would be porting more plug-ins to GEGL, which is one of the issues that block the release of GIMP 2.10.

Even though we won’t know whether we are participating until April 8, if you are considering to work with us this summer, we suggest that you start talking to us already. When we vote for students, we need to know you well enough to make a fair judgment. Please find out if you are eligible for the program, then join the developers mailing list or talk to us on IRC.

GIMP 2.8.4 for OSX Available

Alexandre Prokoudine — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0100

GIMP 2.8.4 is now available as disk image for Mac OSX.

Please note that with this release, we have moved GIMP’s per-user data from “~/Library” to “~/Library/Application Support”. If you had installed GIMP 2.8.2 before, please open a terminal and enter the following command, so GIMP 2.8.4 will pick up your data from the right location:

mv ~/Library/GIMP ~/Library/Application\ Support

GIMP 2.8.4 Released

Alexandre Prokoudine — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0100

GIMP 2.8.4 is out! 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.

Pre-built binaries for Mac will be available soon.

GIMP in 2012

Alexandre Prokoudine — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0100

As 2013 is fast approaching, we’d like to take a quick look at 2012 and what we did during the year.

In May we released the long anticipated new stable version, v2.8, with many improvements such as layer groups, tagging of resources, new Cage transform tool and more.

We also started the final transition to GEGL as a new image processing core. All legacy from the libgimp has already been removed.

Unstable version of GIMP is now capable of working in 16 and 32 bit per channel modes, both integer and float. Color management has been improved as well, and thanks to support by AMD and Google the GEGL library can do GPU-side rendering and processing with OpenCL.

We successfully participated at Google Summer of Code 2012. Our students ported more GIMP filters to GEGL operations, created a node compositing application for testing GEGL, and implemented a unified transform tool for GIMP.

In past years we let our work with community slip, so this year we also tried to establish a better connection with our user base. Our Google+ page, where we now regularly share project news and useful GIMP tutorials we come across, is currently circled by ca. 22.000 people (as compared to 1.000 in January 2012).

Last, but not least, we are happy to see the community actively promoting GIMP of its own accord. E.g. this year the GIMP Magazine project was started, with two issues already published and the 3rd issue currently in the works.

Thanks to all contributors our project vision is becoming a reality. GIMP already works in HDR, partially uses GPU for rendering and processing, has better transformation tools.

Our primary focus for 2013 will be finishing the transition to GEGL. We don’t expect it to be an easy job: it’s likely to keep us busy most of 2013, if not longer. You can help us to boost the development. Come join us to complete the rewrite and deliver the new generation of GIMP as a polished stable product.

GIMP Gets ICC v4 Color Profiles Support

Alexandre Prokoudine — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0100

For the last few weeks GIMP has been capable of using ICC v4 color profiles thanks to a patch by Laurent Martelli who ported the color management plug-in to use LittleCMS v2.

There is also an ongoing work by Elle Stone to adapt that plug-in to the new GEGL-based architecture and make color space conversions just work between various bit depth precision levels — from 8-bit to 32-bit floating point.

Once it’s done, GIMP will be capable of converting images between different color spaces with little to no loss of color fidelity. In fact, it already works, with some caveats.

Meanwhile Michael Natterer is busy porting plug-ins for loading and saving files to GEGL and GIO. The latter means that GIMP doesn’t create temporary files anymore when loading files from remote locations, and previews in the Open File dialog 100% match actual images.

There is still a lot of work to do before GEGL-based version of GIMP is completely functional. We encourage you to join the team and help making the future closer.

Google Summer of Code 2012 Is Over

Alexandre Prokoudine — Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0200

Four out of five GIMP students successfully finished their work in the Google Summer of Code 2012 program. Unfortunately one of the students wasn’t able to complete all of the work.

The code written by the students has already been merged to main development branches and is expected to be available in the next releases of GIMP and GEGL.

While the first public version of the Unified Transform Tool will only be available in the 2.9.x series, new GEGL operations will be present in the next release of GEGL already.

The students ported the following GIMP filters to GEGL operations: Shift, Wind, Cartoon, Photocopy, Oilify, Softglow, and a variety of noise generators.

The GEGL-based node editor is a standalone project and will eventually be released separately.

It was a great summer. We thank all the students for participating and we would love to see them around in years to follow.

GIMP 2.8.2 Released

Alexandre Prokoudine — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0200

We’ve just released GIMP 2.8.2, the first update to the new stable version of GIMP. The update brings several dozens of fixes to various issues of all scales.

Most notorious bugs fixed are: not being able to remember JPEG saving options, slow canvas redraw, not showing page setup options on Windows. There’s also a workaround for the bug that used to cause showing incorrect file size values on Windows. For the complete list of changes please see the NEWS file.

Additionally we did a lot of work to make a native build of GIMP for Mac a possibility. The official GIMP.app will be available soon. Windows installers of v2.8.2 will be available from the usual location shortly.

Beginning with this version we are also switching to a new versions numbering scheme. Final releases now always have even number of the micro version, and the versions in Git always have an odd number.

We Are Looking for Windows Developers

Alexandre Prokoudine — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0200

It’s been a long time since we last had an active Windows-based developer. Consequently, GIMP has accumulated a plethora of bugs specific for that operating system. As much as we’d like to provide a smooth user experience for Windows users, we simply do not have the required human resources.

Hence, if you are an experienced Windows-based developer who is interested to help GIMP become a first-class citizen in the Windows world, please get in touch with us. Our main communication channels are the gimp-developer mailing list and IRC. Here is the list of all reported bugs for the Windows version of GIMP.

If you go for IRC, we recommend sticking there for several hours, since we are mostly Europe-based, and you maybe aren’t in the same timezones span. Most development talks happen on IRC anyway, so staying online helps the communication.

All GSoC 2012 Students Passed Midterm Evaluation

Alexandre Prokoudine — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0200

We are glad to announce that all of our Google Summer of Code 2012 students passed the midterm evaluation last week.

All projects are coming along nicely. The unified transform is already quite functional, the experimental GEGL editor is maturing, more filters were rewritten into GEGL operations, and more parts of GEGL were adapted for the new image processing core.

There’s also substantial progress with the Seamless Clone tool that was part of Google Summer of Code 2011 program. The tool relies on Poly2tri — a C++ library for generating constrained Delaunay triangulations. You can read more about this project in the developer’s blog.

The Poly2tri library is likely to be used by the next generation of the Cage Transform tool (available since v2.8). This is expected to simplify and hence speed up calculations which are currently slow when used on large images.

New Usability Project

Alexandre Prokoudine — Mon, 14 May 2012 00:00:00 +0200

Since 2006 we’ve been improving GIMP’s user interface with help from Peter Sikking and his team at man + machine interface works. Some of the best improvements in GIMP’s UI over past several years are the direct result of our collaboration.

We are happy to announce that for the next 10 weeks Marinus Schraal is joining Peter Sikking to work on a concept of a new widget set for tools’ options in GIMP. The net outcome will be a functional spec for new UI elements that will be compact and easy to use.

By the way, recently Peter did another GIMP related interaction design course at the FH Vorarlberg, Austria. His students worked on possible new user interfaces for Liquid Rescale plug-in that implements content-aware scaling.

High Bit Depth Processing Available Now

Alexandre Prokoudine — Fri, 04 May 2012 00:00:00 +0200

Today at Libre Graphics Meeting 2012 in Vienna we announced that the development version of GIMP is now capable of processing images in 16bit and 32bit modes, integer or float at your preference.

Transformation, painting and color adjustment tools will just work in higher bit depth precision modes. More than that, GIMP can load and save 16bit PNG images and save EXR and HDR files now. We also improved support for indexed images, so that you could finally paint over them with the Smudge tool or apply filters.

There is still a lot of work left to do, and this is a great chance for potential contributors to step up and begin improving the application. Low-hanging fruits include porting of file loaders and savers, filters and other small bits of GIMP that don’t require a lot of familiarity with the internal structure. Please contact us in the gimp-developer mailing list.

Decision on the final feature set in 2.10 is yet to be made, no time-based schedule is available either. However we fully intend to make development cycles much shorter.

GIMP 2.8 Released

Alexandre Prokoudine — Thu, 03 May 2012 00:00:00 +0200

We are happy to announce immediate availability of GIMP 2.8—a new stable version of GNU Image Manipulation Program that culminates 3.5 years of exciting work.

With this version we are introducing some long-anticipated features such as layer groups, on-canvas text editing, advanced brush dynamics and the much desired optional single-window mode. We also started applying other important changes to the user interface that bring us closer to matching the product vision.

For detailed information about changes since 2.6 please read the release notes. Source code is available for downloading from a plethora of mirrors, a build for Windows will soon be available, and we hope to see a build for Mac OS X released as well.

We’d like to thank everyone who participated in development of GIMP 2.8: programmers, translators, documentation writers (updated user manual is a work in progress), and testers. We also thank our user community for the dedication and support—we needed it more than ever.

Now that this version is finally released, we are grasping the future with both hands. Stay tuned: some really exciting news will follow.

GIMP and GEGL Projects for GSoC2012 Announced

Alexandre Prokoudine — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0200

We are excited to announce that we have five students to work with us on improving GIMP as part of the Google Summer of Code 2012 program. All the students will be contributing to faster transition of GIMP to GEGL, our new advanced image core.

The projects are:

Maxime Nicco and hanslo will port GIMP filters to GEGL operations.
Ville Sokk will port other GIMP features to GEGL.
Isaac Wagner will create a GEGL-based node compositor that will serve as playground for GEGL development.
Mikael Magnusson will create a Unified Transform tool.

In the past years Google Summer of Code has proven to be a great source of contributions. We wish our students success and, above all, a lot of fun while making GIMP a state of the art image editor.

GIMP’s Core Getting Ported to GEGL

Alexandre Prokoudine — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0200

In late 2007 we launched smooth transition to GEGL—a new advanced image processing core incepted by a team of Rhythm & Hues developers.

For v2.6 we made an optional GEGL-based implementation of color adjustment tools, and for upcoming v2.8 we implemented optional projection rendering via GEGL. But nobody really had evaluated the amount of the work to be done in order to finalize this transition. Until just now.

Five weeks ago Michael Natterer and Øyvind Kolås decided to finally work out the migration strategy. While working on that they found themselves doing the actual porting. So now about 90% of the GIMP application’s core has been ported to GEGL. When finished, this will be released as GIMP 2.10 along with some other improvements yet to be decided on.

GEGL is quite an exciting project that will make it possible to implement some long anticipated features in a clean, non-sloppy way: high bit depth image processing and deep painting, non-destructive editing, a wider choice of color spaces to work in, mipmaps processing for faster perceived editing etc. This will be the focus of our future work after release of v2.10, along with further user interface improvements thanks to collaboration with Peter Sikking and his team at Man+Machine Works.

Now that we passed the point of no return with regards to GIMP and GEGL, we encourage you to join us and help porting the rest of GIMP. We’d really like to finish the boring part as soon as possible and start new exciting developments where we’d also need your support.

We also encourage you to support Libre Graphics Meeting 2012 where developers of GIMP and other teams such as Scribus, Inkscape and Blender meet to align development strategies.

GEGL and babl Updated, GIMP 2.8rc1 Released

Alexandre Prokoudine — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0200

We released new versions of GEGL and babl, quickly followed by the first release candidate of GIMP 2.8.

GEGL 0.2.0 has some major improvements and breaks API/ABI compatibility with earlier versions for some very good reasons.

Perhaps the most exciting change in GEGL is an initial support for GPU-side rendering and processing via OpenCL. Hardware acceleration makes it possible to leverage many operations to GPUs which can dramatically improve performance.

The foundation for this feature was laid by Jerson Michael Perpetua as the primary objective of his GSoC2009 project. The second part of the project was done by Victor Oliveira during GSoC2011. Victor was also sponsored by AMD to finish the project this winter, with help from GEGL team, Zhang Peixuan and his team from Multicore Ware. Currently you need to run GEGL_USE_OPENCL=yes to use this.

Two new essential operations were contributed to GEGL. Mikael Magnusson implemented perspective transformation, and Jan Rüegg submitted a global matting operation that would be required for a GEGL-based foreground selection tool.

Since this version GEGL also supports internationalization. The final patches for that were delivered by Michael Muré. Translations into German, French, Polish, Russian, Slovenian and Spanish languages are available, and we expect more to follow. Users of GIMP 2.8 will see this in the experimental GEGL operation tool.

The changes in GIMP 2.8rc1 since 2.7.5 are mostly not user-visible. We merely updated the code to work with newer versions of GEGL and babl, fixed GFig rendering issues and used all the translation updates we got to the point. There is still time to review your translations and submit updates, although probably not too much of it.

Please use the Downloads section to fetch source code of GIMP 2.8rc1 and visit gegl.org for source code of GEGL and babl. Let us know if you run into serious regressions that haven’t been reported yet.

GIMP Accepted for GSoC2012

Alexandre Prokoudine — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0100

GIMP has been accepted to Google Summer of Code 2012 program. This is a great chance for aspiring developers to get a good understanding of remote collaborative work and coincidentally help the project become an even better image editor.

We put together a list of project ideas that you might like to have a look at. But you are also free to suggest your own idea. Here is some more essential info for potential students. If you are eligible for the program, please join the gimp-developer@ mailing list or the IRC channel to discuss your project idea.

Student application period opens on March 26 and closes on April 6. Please contact us prior to submitting your application. We will not accept projects from people we never heard of.

GIMP 2.7.5 Released

Alexandre Prokoudine — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0100

We’ve just released GIMP 2.7.5, the last beta in the 2.7.x series. This version got various fixes and improvements, translation updates and a few minor features such as configurable default color of quick masks.

Since this version GIMP is shipping with a revamped brush pack and a set of ca. 40 tools presets, mostly painting related. The work was done by Ramón Miranda (GIMP Paint Studio) and Guillermo Espertino. This particular change is a first major step in updating the default bundle of resources to match user expectations.

For a complete list of changes since 2.7.4 please refer to the NEWS page, while the release notes summarize changes in the whole 2.7.x series.

There are still some bugs to fix before we can release v2.8. We encourage you to join the team and help us getting 2.8 released.

GIMP at Libre Graphics Meeting 2012

Alexandre Prokoudine — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0100

On May 2–5 we are attending Libre Graphics Meeting 2012, the annual conference for developers and users of free software for graphic design, photography and 3D modeling. The event is taking place in the beautiful city of Vienna, co-located with Linuxwochen.

The conference started in 2006 as an extended version of our annual developers meeting where we met Scribus and Inkscape teams to figure out how we can make our software work better together. Since then LGM has become the premiere event of the year for everyone who cares about free graphics software.

One of the achievements of the conference is OpenRaster, a raster file format that supports layers and blending modes and is intended for long-time archival. It is currently supported by GIMP, MyPaint, Krita and Pinta which makes it possible to use various tools on the same project file.

We have various ideas how else to co-operate with other teams and we tend to use LGM as another venue for our developers to meet each other and our usability team. However we’d like to notice that while your continuous support via donations enables us to travel to LGM, not all of the other teams are in this position. So if you care about co-operation between teams, we humbly ask you to support the conference via Pledgie. The money will be spent on getting other developers to the conference.

We expect the upcoming four days of Libre Graphics Meeting 2012 to be full of sparkling ideas, collaboration and, above all, fun. If you’d like to meet us or any other teams or even give a talk, you still have time to register.

GIMP 2.6.12 Released – The Final 2.6 Release

Alexandre Prokoudine — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0100

GIMP 2.6.12 is a bug-fix release in the stable GIMP 2.6 series. Its purpose is mostly to wrap up all fixes that have piled up since 2.6.11 into a last release in the stable 2.6 series before we switch to 2.8. Please have a look at the NEWS file for a detailed list of changes.

The source can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org. Binary packages for various supported platforms should become available soon; please check the Downloads section.

Just like you, we want to see v2.8 out in the wild as soon as possible, but there’s still a number of regressions that block this important release.

On a lighter note, v2.8 is going to have an updated default set of brushes for painting and a set of tools presets (new feature in 2.8). The work was done by Ramón Miranda (GIMP Paint Studio project) and Guillermo Espertino.

Meanwhile there is a considerable progress with the GPU-side rendering project we announced in November. Victor Oliveira has brought OpenCL support on GEGL to a level where GIMP can load an image to a GPU and process it there with a brightness-contrast operation. This is only the beginning, but it opens quite a few possibilities.

We also maintain a rather active Google+ page where we post various project related news, links to impressive work done with GIMP and so on.

GIMP 2.7.4 Released, GEGL and babl Updated

Alexandre Prokoudine — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0100

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.

AMD Sponsors Further Work on OpenCL Support in GEGL

Alexandre Prokoudine — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0100

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.

Mailing Lists Moved to GNOME Mailing List Server

Michael Schumacher — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0200

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:

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.

Online Docs and Developer Pages Restored

Michael Schumacher — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0200

The online docs and developer pages are available again:

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

FTP and Wiki Back Online

Michael Schumacher — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0200

We managed to get FTP and Wiki back online:

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

Mailing list, FTP and Documentation Outage

Michael Schumacher — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0200

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)

GSoC2011 is Over

Alexandre Prokoudine — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0200

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.

GIMP 2.7.3 Released

Alexandre Prokoudine — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0200

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.

On GPU-side Rendering and Further Development Plans

Alexandre Prokoudine — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0200

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.

All GSoC Students Passed Midterm Evaluation

Alexandre Prokoudine — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0200

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.

Two New Books on GIMP Published

Alexandre Prokoudine — Fri, 06 May 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Two new books on GIMP have been published recently. “GIMP 2.6 Cookbook”, in English, by Juan Manuel Ferreyra is a collection of straightforward instructions that will help you accomplishing typical design and photography related tasks. This book is packed with answers to get you preparing great images with the GIMP immediately.

“GIMP”, in French, by Olivier Lecarme and Karine Delvare is, on the contrary, a complete user guide and a reference to GIMP features. The book explains basics of digital imaging, retouching photos, creating animations, preparing pictures for publishing on the Web etc.

Google Summer of Code 2011 Projects Announced

Alexandre Prokoudine — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0200

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.

GIMP 2.7.2 Released

Alexandre Prokoudine — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0200

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.

Progress of GIMP development is now trackable

Alexandre Prokoudine — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0200

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.

We Are Participating in Google Summer of Code 2011

Alexandre Prokoudine — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0100

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.

GEGL 0.1.6 and babl 0.1.4

Alexandre Prokoudine — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0100

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.

Two Interns to Work on GIMP’s Usability

Alexandre Prokoudine — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0100

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.

Plans for 2.8 and Beyond

Alexandre Prokoudine — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0100

In the face of all sorts of rumours and interpretations about the future of the project there is a call for clarification regarding development of GIMP.

Currently GIMP team is working on finalizing the new stable v2.8 with many improvements such as layer groups, improved brush dynamics, a new unique transformation tool, optional single-window mode and more. There are two big obstacles in our way right now: missing specification on the last change in user interface and broken graphic tablets support in GTK+.

We have already invested a lot of time into UI changes and brush dynamics, we treasure your continuous support for the project and thus we are determined to release v2.8 only when it’s working out of box as expected for everybody.

After releasing v2.8 the focus of development will shift to deep integration of GEGL — our new non-destructive image processing core. Results of this work will enable many features considered critical for use of GIMP in professional environment which is part of GIMP’s product vision. It’s a lot of work, and currently we don’t have enough developers to make this change happen very fast. If you want to help us to get there faster, we encourage you to join gimp-developer mailing list and/or the IRC channel to discuss how you could contribute.

GIMP Manual 2.6.1 Released

Michael Schumacher — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0100

We’ve released a new version of the user manual with:

many, many, many bugfixes
spelling fixes and new translations for: Italian, English, German, French, Japnese, Norwegian, Swedish, Russian, Korean
website typo fixes

This release does not only include pre-built documentation for all the supported languages, we also publish the source of the user manual. Find the packages on our downloads server.

For easy installation we suggest that you wait until an installer for this this release has been packaged for your platform. Find more releases and information about our goals and how you can help at https://docs.gimp.org.

GIMP 2.6.11 Released

Michael Schumacher — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0200

GIMP 2.6.11 is a bug-fix release in the stable GIMP 2.6 series. Among other bug-fixes, it makes printing work with the recently released version 1.10 of the Cairo library. Please have a look at the NEWS file for a detailed list of changes.

The source can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org. Binary packages for various supported platforms should become available soon; please check the Downloads section.

Google Summer of Code 2010 Results

Alexandre Prokoudine — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0200

This year GIMP participated in the annual Google Summer of Code program with three projects. Two out of three projects have been successful: Cage transform tool in GIMP and HDR and matting functions in GEGL.

The new Cage transform tool allows doing shape-preserving deformations of objects. The tool is based on a research paper by Yaron Lipman, David Levin and Daniel Cohen-Or, and was implemented by Michael Muré. The tool is implemented on top of a GEGL operation that can be reused to create more transformation tools. For more information please refer to Michael’s blog or description of the project’s outcome. The code lives in soc-2010-cage-2 branch.

A project by Danny Robson resulted in a number of new, mostly HDR related features in GEGL: a standalone HDR merge tool, RGBE loading and saving, three tone mapping operators and one matting operator. You can read about them in details on the project’s page.

The Cage transform tool is likely to be included in version 2.10, and features implemented by Danny Robson will be available in the next release of GEGL.

GIMP 2.6.10 Released

Michael Schumacher — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0200

Unfortunately a rather bad bug sneaked into GIMP 2.6.9, so here’s another release in the stable GIMP 2.6 series to fix this issue. Please have a look at the NEWS file for a more detailed list of changes.

The source can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org. Binary packages for various supported platforms should become available soon; please check the Downloads section.

GIMP 2.7.1 Released

Michael Schumacher — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0200

It is about time… For a new development snapshot on the way to the next stable version GIMP 2.8. This release brings a whole lot of new features and improvements, see the release notes and the NEWS file for details.

The source can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org and its mirrors. Have fun!

GIMP 2.6.9 Released

Wilber — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0200

It’s been a while since the last release. Quite a few bug-fixes have piled up in the stable branch, so here’s another release in the stable GIMP 2.6 series. Please have a look at the NEWS file for a detailed list of changes.

The source can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org. Binary packages for various supported platforms should become available soon; please check the Downloads section.

GIMP 2.6.8 Released

Wilber — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0100

GIMP 2.6.8 is a bug-fix release in the stable GIMP 2.6 series. Please have a look at the NEWS file for a detailed list of changes.

The source can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org. Binary packages for various supported platforms should become available soon; please check the Downloads section.

Gimp Help Released for GIMP 2.6

Wilber — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0200

The GIMP documentation team has been working hard and is proud to announce the availability of the first release of the user manual for GIMP 2.6.

The release is split into several files that provide pre-built HTML per language. Because of a major change in how the manual is translated, most translations are work-in-progress and may contain untranslated strings. You can find the releases on our FTP server: ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/help/. Users should wait until this release has been packaged for their platform.

Find more information about our goals and how you can help at https://docs.gimp.org/. The user manual project is looking for a new project maintainer. If you want to help, please join our mailing list or have a look at https://docs.gimp.org/help.html.

GIMP 2.7.0 Development Release

Wilber — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0200

The release of GIMP 2.7.0 is a first step towards GIMP 2.8, the next stable release. Please note that this is an unstable development snapshot and read the GIMP 2.7 release notes. A more complete list of changes can be found in the NEWS file. The source code can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org.

GIMP 2.6.7 Released

Wilber — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0200

GIMP 2.6.7 comes with lots of bug-fixes and it contains an important fix for using GIMP with the latest GEGL and babl releases. Please have a look at the NEWS file for a detailed list of changes.

The source can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org. Binary packages for the various supported platforms should become available soon; please check the Downloads section.

GIMP Animation Package 2.6.0 Released

Wilber — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0200

GAP 2.6.0 is a stable release of the video menu intended for use with the GIMP 2.6.x series.

This release contains updates for video encoding/decoding, undo support for the storyboard feature and fixes for better compatibility with the GIMP 2.6.x releases. Please have a look at the NEWS file included in the download for a detailed list of changes.

Google Summer of Code - Student Application Period Has Started

Wilber — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Google has started to accept applications from students for Summer of Code.

If you are interested in our proposals, then check if you meet Google’s requirements; have a look at their advices and check what we want to read in your application.

GIMP Has Been Accepted for Google Summer of Code!

Wilber — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0100

The the list of accepted organizations is published. This page is the main gateway for students to find the projects that they are looking for, and the guidelines of each org for successful applications.

Check our wiki ideas page for suitbale projects, or propose your own ideas on our IRC channel and the gimp-developer mailing list.

GIMP 2.6.6 Released

Wilber — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0100

GIMP 2.6.6 is a bug-fix release in the stable GIMP 2.6 series. This release contains an important fix for compiling GIMP against the recently released GTK+ 2.16. Please have a look at the NEWS file for a list of other changes.

As usual, the source can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org. Binary packages for the various supported platforms should become available soon; please check the Downloads section.

Libre Graphics Meeting 2009

Wilber — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0100

For four years, the Libre Graphics Meeting has been the premiere conference for developers, users and supporters of free software graphics applications. Developers from projects such as GIMP, Inkscape, Blender, Krita, Scribus, Hugin, the Open Clipart Library, and the Open Font Library gather to work on interoperability, shared standards, and new ideas. Work at prior LGMs has pushed the state of the art in important areas such as color management, cross-application sharing of brushes and other assets, and common formats.

The face-to-face meetings and opportunities for collaboration are important to developers, but LGM offers plenty for end users as well. Tutorials, talks, and birds-of-a-feather (BOF) meetings to help free software users get the most out of their applications fill out the LGM schedule, and demonstrations from artists showcase what is possible.

Click here to lend your support to: Support the Libre Graphics Meeting and make a donation at www.pledgie.com ! The fourth annual LGM will be held May 6–9, 2009 in Montreal, Canada at École Polytechnique. Donations will be used solely to help cover travel costs for volunteer developers and presenters. Last year’s campaign raised more than $12,000 dollars from individuals and corporations in the community. As with last year, pledges can be made online. Visit pledgie.com to make your contribution. All donations are tax deductible for US taxpayers.

GIMP 2.6.5 Released

Wilber — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0100

GIMP 2.6.5 is a bugfix release in the stable GIMP 2.6 series. The NEWS file lists the changes in details. As usual, the source can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org. Binary packages for the various supported platforms should become available soon; please check the Downloads section.

Happy New Year

Wilber — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100

The GIMP developers welcome you in the new year with the fourth bug-fix release in the stable GIMP 2.6 series. The NEWS file lists the changes in GIMP 2.6.4. The source can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org. Binary packages for the various supported platforms should become available soon; please check the Downloads section.

Users and distributors are also encouraged to update GEGL to version 0.0.22, which has been released yesterday.

GIMP 2.6.3 Released

Wilber — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0100

GIMP 2.6.3 is another bugfix release in the stable GIMP 2.6 series. The NEWS file lists the changes in details. As usual, the source can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org. Binary packages for the various supported platforms should become available soon; please check the Downloads section.

GIMP 2.6.2 Released

Wilber — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0100

The GIMP development team has made another bugfix release in the stable GIMP 2.6 series. The NEWS file lists the changes in details. As usual, the source can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org. Binary packages for the various supported platforms should become available soon; please check the Downloads section.

GIMP 2.6.1 Released

Wilber — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0200

GIMP 2.6.1 is a bugfix release in the stable GIMP 2.6 series. The NEWS file lists the changes in details. You may also want to have a look at the Release Notes to find out what’s new in GIMP 2.6.

The source can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org. Binary packages for the various supported platforms should become available soon; please check the Downloads section.

GIMP User Manual 2.4.2 Released

Wilber — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0200

An update of the GIMP user manual is available. The gimp-help-2.4.2 tarball can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org. Users should wait until this release has been packaged in more easily installable form for their platform.

This release is still focused on GIMP 2.4. Work has started on updating the user manual for GIMP 2.6. If you want to help, have a look at docs.gimp.org.

GIMP 2.6.0 Released

Wilber — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0200

he GIMP developers are proud to release GIMP 2.6.0 today. Please have a look at the Release Notes to find out what’s new in GIMP 2.6. The source can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org. Binary packages for the various supported platforms should become available soon; please check the Downloads section.

Update: There was a minor glitch in the original 2.6.0 tarball. A new tarball has been uploaded that fixes this issue.

GIMP 2.5.4 Development Version Release

Wilber — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0200

GIMP approaches the next stable release and only a handful bugs are left to be fixed before GIMP 2.6 is ready. If you want to give the GIMP 2.5.4 development snapshot a try, please have a look at the Release Notes for GIMP 2.5.

GIMP 2.5.3 Development Version Release

Wilber — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0200

GIMP 2.5.3 is a fresh snapshot from the 2.5 development series. It gives developers and interested users a preview of the upcoming GIMP 2.6 release. If you want to give the GIMP 2.5.4 development snapshot a try, please have a look at the Release Notes for GIMP 2.5.

Open Usability and GIMP

Wilber — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0200

The GIMP team is proud to announce that the GNU Image Manipulation Program has been chosen as the first Open Source Software project for a sponsored student project on usability.

OpenUsability Sponsored Student Projects¶

OpenUsability (www.openusability.org) is an initiative that brings Open Source Software (OSS) development and usability together. This symbiosis is beneficial for both sides: Developers can make difficult user interface (UI) decisions together with usability specialists, while usability specialists can explore and further develop their skills in real-world projects without the pressure of a commercial market.

Likewise, OpenUsability’s mentored student projects are an excellent way for usability, user-interface design, and interaction design students to gain experience in the interdisciplinary and collaborative development of user interface solutions in international software projects.

During a three-month cooperation, you will closely work together with experienced professionals and get insights in to their way of work. An involvement of 20 hours per week is expected.

Depending on your location, you will be invited to a kickoff-meeting with the development team, the interaction architect, usability specialist and user support. Otherwise the collaboration will take place via the established channels of OSS development - email, IRC, VoIP, and etc.

OpenUsability student projects are sponsored with $700 USD. The sponsorship will be paid after the successful accomplishment of the student project goals.

Project Opening: GIMP¶

This project offers the opportunity to work as an Associate Interaction Architect, and to shape the user interface of the next generation of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (https://www.gimp.org).

You will be working with Peter Sikking, principal interaction architect at M+MI Works (www.mmiworks.net). Activities include methodically performing a full expert evaluation and analysis of the software, being fully involved in every decision, and performing the bulk of the project work. You will have a great opportunity to learn the ropes in interaction architecture in a project that matters.

There is the opportunity to give your role a stronger usability component by being involved with the workplace observation project that is integrated with this project. Also there is the opportunity at the end of this first phase to stay on board and to play a strong part in the design phase that follows.

Requirements¶

Interaction architects need to see from the user point of view, know what makes user interfaces tick, have a mathematical eye for the beauty of the simplest solution, a sense for clean layouts and know what can be developed in practice. GIMP is an international project, so you need to be able to communicate and write in English.

There are no specific degree requirements. We welcome students from all usability-related backgrounds including communication, media, psychology, interface design or computer science. We know there are no standard university diplomas for interaction architects. So we know you had to define your education yourself, and may not perfectly match all our requirements. Don’t be deterred.

GIMP or Photoshop experience is not required, in fact if you have extensive GIMP or Photoshop preferences then this project might be not for you.

How To Apply¶

To participate in this project, send your application to students@openusability.org. The application period ends at the 10th of September.

Please send us a short CV or (in PDF), a couple of paragraphs about why you want to be an interaction architect, some of your past experiences which have shaped your current skills, and what you expect from this profession in the future.