GIMP's Next-generation Imaging Core Demonstrated

brendan0powers writes "GIMP developer Øvind Kolås gave a public demonstration of the Generic Graphical Library (GEGL) on Friday at the Piksel 06 festival in Bergen, Norway. GEGL has long been slated to replace the core image processing framework of the GIMP, bringing with it entirely new data models and operations — but development had languished to the point where many critics had written the project off entirely." Linux.com and Slashdot are both part of OSTG.

Comments

Gimpshop!

[BeeBeard]

Ahem:

Gimpshop. It's a great attempt at making The Gimp more comprehensible to people with a Windows/Photoshop background. And like The Gimp, it too is free.

Re:It's about time

[Cinder6]

From over here, I'd like to see the X11 dependence on the Macs go away. Pitch the GTK base and use QT, which is already efficiently cross-platform on Macs, Linux, and Windows.

I'll agree there shouldn't be an X11 dependency on Macs, but I think the odds of the GIMP, of all things, being ported to Qt are rather slim. After all, it's the original source of GTK.

Re:It's about time

[the_olo]

I'd love to hear specifically what is missing, as I'm sure the devs would too. Is it just the color management for print design, or something else?

Let's try:

• Support for various additional color spaces in addition to grayscale and RGB, e.g. CMYK, LAB, HSB. I'm not speaking about the color chooser, which AFAIR lets you pick colors using CMYK already. I'm talking about the image being stored in memory (and on disk in .xcf) and processed using particular color space representation, e.g. for CMYK the image is stored with 4 channels (look at them like color planes) representing the intensity of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and blacK pigments in a subtractive model (RGB on the other hand, is additive). Some color corrections are done most easily when working in LAB color space Read some books by Dan Margulis to get an idea.
  
• Support for color separations (including various settings like dot gain, black point compensation, additional spot colors beside CMYK) and color management is an essential feature for any professional wanting to print the results of one's work and have them match the screen representation.
  
• Support for 16-bits or more (32-bit, floating point etc.) per channel for color spaces, integrated through all the workflow (possibly from the camera RAW files, through all the color curve corrections, levels, filters, hue mappings, up to the output file) so the dynamic range is high and minimal information is lost during colors / tones manipulation
  
• adjustment layers
  
• needs lots of usability fixes, like:
  
  • panning with a single keypress + mouse drag (one cannot simply press space and pan around the image with the mouse)
    
  • ability to scroll the image window beyond the image border regardless of zoom level (GIMP doesn't let you scroll beyond the image's edge which is quite irritating)
    
  • more GUI manipulation flexibility - ability to reorganize the whole UI into single MDI window similar to Photoshop or Corel PhotoPaint; but not at the expense of usability - it should be extremely hard to reorganize the GUI unintentionally (no tear-off toolbars like in MS Office - it's a usability disaster)
    
  • support for "workspace themes" - named sets of window positions, docker layouts, and so on. There should be 2 predefined themes available: "GIMP standard" and "Photoshop-like" - this would help the photoshoppers make the switch and do their first steps in GIMP.