Hello,
We hope you had great winter holidays! Here's our slightly belated 2014 report.
Both GIMP and GEGL projects have been quite active. We didn't add any
new new tools in 2014, but you are going to _love_ how we improved
existing ones.
João Sebastião de Oliveira Bueno added fill arrange modes to the
Align Tool to evenly distribute items across an image or some other
reference object.
The Blend tool got a major redesign by Michael Henning, with
additional work by Michael Natterer and Simon Budig. Now you can tweak
the gradient's end points positions _after_ you created the fill. Much
like the rectangular selection and crop tools, the end points have an
active zone around them to allow easy grabbing and repositioning. The
active zone hihglights disappear when you move the mouse pointer away
which makes previewing your changes a lot easier. To finalize the
gradient fill, you need to press Enter.
The foreground selection tool now uses much improved algorithms for
separating objects, especial the complex ones like hair. One of the
algorithms (global) was earlier created by Jan Rüegg, the other
(Levin) -- by Danny Robson. Michael Natterer updated the tool's
options, made individual strokes undoable, and moved some of the
controls to the canvas. However, performance of the tool needs to be
improved. We'd appreciate some help here.
Speaking of selection tools, the ones like Select by Color and Fuzzy
Select now have a Draw Mask option contributed by Michael Natterer.
What it does is highlighting an area that will be selected when you
release mouse button. It's rather helpful if you need to e.g. evaluate
the area that will be added to an existing selection so that you could
make better choices at once, without going through the undo routine.
The color is currently hardcoded to magenta, but this design decision
is absolutely negotiable.
The Seamless Clone tool earlier created by Barak Itkin got some much
needed love from Jehan who made it a lot more responsive. Now you can
paste and seamlessly blend into the background pictures that are
larger that 100x100px.
Alexia returned to work on the brush engine again. As the result, all
brush-based tools now have a a few more options: locking brush size to
zoom (whether brush size should follow changes in zoom), configurable
hardness and force. There's also a new fallback brush cursor, a
crosshairs-shaped one, used only as last resort.
The text tool was updated by Mukund Sivamaran to use HarfBuzz library
directly instead of relying on deprecated Pango functions. This will
make sure we always provide excellent support for complex writing
systems such as Arabic, Devanagari etc.
To make things even more fun, we added 64bit per color channel
precision to GIMP. One part of GIMP that already uses it is the FITS
loader/saver for astrophysicists. But that bears the question: can
GIMP reliably perform when dealing with such resources-hungry images?
Well, we made quite a few changes to assist you there. First of all,
GIMP now has a switch in the Preferences dialog to enable/disable
OpenCL-based hardware acceleration globally (that is, including
plugins that can make use of this). When applying a preview to GIMP
will also start redrawing the visible part of the image first (the
viewport) and work on the rest next.
Finally, Øyvind Kolås worked on initial threading support in GEGL.
This is still a somewhat experimental feature. The team would happily
accept input from people who can give this thorough thoughtful
testing.
There have been some changes in file formats support too.
First of all, we finally merged the updated PSD loader/saver that
Simon Lui worked on in 2013. In a nutshell, Simon ported the plugin to
GEGL, added support for 16bit files and parsing of advanced features
such as text layers and adjustment layers. But since GIMP doesn't have
public API for handling text layers, the app still can't load text
layers as text. Somone would need to fix this. We also need
non-destructive editing implemented in GIMP to make use of the
ajustment layers parser.
Additionally, Mukund Sivamaran improved and fixed a lot of code to
support various file formats, and Roman Lebedev from the darktable
project added loading and saving of 32bit TIFF files.
Primary contributors to color management implementation in GIMP this
year were Elle Stone and Michael Natterer. They added automatic
generation of an sRGB color profile matching the one by ArgyllCMS, a
widget to display basic ICC profile metadata, and created a new image
profile API that is now used throughout GIMP.
A lot of work has gone into improving user interface and usability.
One notable fix is that now you can drag anything like a layer or a
channel between opened images in the single-window mode.
Michael Natterer introduced an important workflow change. Before, when
you switched tools in the middle of e.g. rotating or adjusting colors,
the change got lost. Now GIMP commits the change and _then_ switches
to another
