Since the release of GIMP 3.2.4, we’ve been hard at work behind the scenes. We’ve been making fixes that will be included in the upcoming 3.2.6 stable release and adding tons of new features for the first 3.4 development version.
In addition, we’ve been mentoring our four Google Summer of Code (GSoC) students as they’ve been working on their projects. Since we just completed their midpoint evaluation, we wanted to share their progress with you all!
In alphabetical order:
Akascape¶
Akascape started off their early work for GSoC by creating a new Vibrance filter in GEGL. This filter combines the existing Hue-Chroma and Saturation filters to more selectively adjust the less saturated sections of an image without increasing others. It was released in GEGL 0.4.68, so you can use it right now in GIMP!
Their main focus has been on improving the user experience with the Keyboard Shortcuts dialog. They plan to both improve usability while also adding new features.
Akascape’s in-progress work already includes several big improvements such as a category list to quickly jump to relevant shortcuts, the ability to import and export shortcut “profiles”, and efforts to make the dialog more friendly for a future GTK4 port.
In addition, Akascape did some early work on adding more adjustment layers to our PSD import plug-in, building off in-progress work by several contributors. His work would allow for importing Vibrance, Black & White, Photo Filter, and Exposure PSD adjustment layers.
Blezecon¶
Blezecon has taken on the task of building the online infrastructure for a GIMP Extensions platform. Originally planned as part of GIMP 3.0, the Extensions platform would allow users to download third-party themes, brushes, plug-ins, and more via a package manager directly in GIMP. The local infrastructure has been in place for several years - this GSoC project is about developing the online submission process.
Blezecon has been working in the Extension repository and making great progress. His initial work involved cleaning up and correcting issues with the initial YAML script.
He then created a comment-based approval system in the repo. This will allow community moderators to easily inspect and approve new extensions through the same interface they use for responding to issue reports and review merge requests. Blezecon next developed a scheduler script that will monitor pending extensions, and once they have received the required approvals, automatically merge them into the Extensions repository for user access.
While infrastructure work is often not as visible to end users, Blezecon’s GSoC project is an essential effort to getting the Extensions repository up and running for future releases of GIMP!
v4vansh¶
v4vansh did some early bugfixes and improvements in GIMP beforehand. He fixed a problem where the thumbnail wouldn’t update after changing image modes, and he corrected missing information in our manual page generation.
Since the start of GSoC, he has been focused on improving text handling in GIMP. His current big project
is grouping fonts by family in the text widgets.
In addition to better organization (especially with the infamous Noto fonts which have hundres of variants),
this patch significantly reduces lag on systems with large numbers of fonts, as v4vansh’s mentor Liam can
attest. This feature is in final testing, and we hope it will be merged into the main codebase soon!
v4vansh has also begun experimenting with adding support for OpenType variable fonts. This would allow for much more sophisticated font and text work in GIMP. The initial work involves exploring both the functionality and the user interface to interact with it, and both will develop further as he continues to work with OpenType fonts.
Waris Maqbool¶
Before GSoC began, Waris contributed some early work to GIMP. He updated our OpenEXR import code to load YUV images in color instead of in grayscale. The main focus of his project though has been with GEGL, our color processing engine.
His first project was implementing a GEGL version of the Sharpen filter. Sharpen is a simpler version of the Unsharpen Mask filter, a popular method of correcting blurry images. It was unfortunately removed from GIMP 3.0 due to it not being maintained and only working on 8 bit images. Waris has created a GEGL filter of Sharpen by doing comparisons with the 2.10 version. The recreated Sharpen filter will be non-destructive and will have an on-canvas preview, both improvements over the original.
You can see the in-progress merge request for comparison. We’re doing some final reviews for optimization, but we expect it to be ready for a future release of GEGL and GIMP.
Waris has also begun working on a new Inner Glow filter for our PSD support improvement project. While GEGL already has an inner glow feature, it was not designed to be compatible with how it looks in Photoshop. As part of his work, he is also creating a generic curve editing widget to use for editing the PSD Inner Glow’s settings.
We unfortunately had more great GSoC applicants than we were awarded available spaces. One student in particular continued contributing, so we’d like to highlight their work as well.
Harsh Verma¶
Harsh has been focusing on several different areas of GIMP. His initial proposal involved improving our unit testing suite. He is currently working to implement automated UI testing for GIMP. This is a challenging task, as interacting with the UI varies across platforms. He’s already developed several tests that work on Wayland, which you can see at his in-progress merge request.
He’s also improved our contributor infrastructure that integrating CI-Fairy into our pipeline. This feature checks to make sure contributor commits follow the proper format before merging, which makes our commit history easier to read and understand.
Harsh has also been working on more user-visible changes. He recently took on a user request to add more version information to our About dialog. This follows standard practice with other software, and makes it easier for users to find information that helps us troubleshoot problems. In addition, there’s a handy Copy feature to easily grab the information for sharing. The code and UI have gone through several revisions based on developer and designer feedback, and it will likely be merged soon!
We’ve very proud of our student’s contributions so far, both in code and in community! We’re looking forward to you all getting the chance to try out their work in future development releases of GIMP, which we hope to have more information to share soon.