Committed to Code

GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.

GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.

GIMP is written and developed under X11 on UNIX platforms. But basically the same code also runs on MS Windows and Mac OS X.

Code Analysis


Recent Highlights

Avatar

Large commit — app: remove siox.[ch]

More than 1000 lines of source code were added or removed in this commit.

In commit f86e1e5c by Michael Natterer on 2012-05-21 (1 day ago)

Avatar

Large commit — app: remove the entire legacy composition code

More than 1000 lines of source code were added or removed in this commit.

In commit 06c59973 by Michael Natterer on 2012-05-18 (4 days ago)

Anon32

Large commit — app: modified gegl blending modes to take mask ...

More than 1000 lines of source code were added or removed in this commit.

In commit e377eb01 by Ville Sokk on 2012-05-18 (4 days ago)

Avatar

Large commit — app: move all GEGL operations to new directory ...

More than 1000 lines of source code were added or removed in this commit.

In commit 7101ee19 by Michael Natterer on 2012-05-10 (12 days ago)

Avatar

Large commit — update translations

More than 1000 lines of source code were added or removed in this commit.

In commit 1319ad65 by pippin (Using name ‘Øyvind Kolås’) on 2012-05-05 (17 days ago)

See all highlights…


News

A new usability project

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 ... [More] 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. [Less]


High bit depth processing available now

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 ... [More] 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. [Less]


GIMP 2.8 released

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 ... [More] 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. [Less]


GIMP and GEGL projects for GSoC2012 announced

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 ... [More] 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. [Less]


GIMP's core getting ported to GEGL

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 ... [More] , 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. [Less]


Read all GIMP articles…

Edit RSS feeds.