What was planned as a one week visit turned into 3 weeks of GEGL porting madness. At the time this article is written, about 90% of the GIMP application’s core are ported to GEGL, and the only thing really missing are GeglOperations for all layer modes.
GIMP 2.10’s core will be 100% ported to GEGL, and all of the legacy pixel fiddling API for plug-ins is going to be deprecated. Once the core is completely ported, it will be a minor effort to simply “switch on” high bit depths and whatever color models we’d like to see. Oh, and already now, instead of removing indexed mode (as originally planned), we accidentally promoted indexed images to first class citizens that can be painted on, and even color corrected, just like any other image. The code doing so doesn’t even notice because GEGL and Babl transparently handle the pixel conversion magic.
I have a question about this GEGL thing, i read often like if it’s some kind of miracle coming to GIMP that will enable 16/32 bit editing (currently GIMP is stuck to 8 bit editing with its current code)
From this point of view it’s really great.
But from what i have read, the old Gimp fork “Cinepaint” actually enabled 16/32 bit editing years ago without GEGL
I have never used Cinepaint (there’s no windows build of it) so i can’t say how it works, and i know that there’s some kind of feud between the gimp devs and the cinepaint ones, so finding an impartial comparison may be near impossible.
But in the end, what is the better solution : GEGL or whatever Cinepaint is using , in order to enable the 16/32 bit editing ?
And then why is one solution better than the other ?
GEGL is a dedicated library that have been in development for 10 years now and have much more than 16/32 bit editing
if i remember correctly it enables non destructive editing, true cmyk among other color moods , and even opencl acceleration
GEGL was started by the Cinepaint developers to do high bit depths properly (although they haven’t been active for almost a decade now).
While GEGL is in active development, almost no work has been done on Cinapaint in years, so the better solution definitely is GEGL.
Just like BMesh, GEGL doesn’t magically add new features but makes them easier to write and does away with design limitations that stood in the way of certain functionality like high bit depths and non-destructive editing.
@ Fweeb: from that we can extrepolate and imagine what a medium size answer would be:
No, it’s not.
More seriously: if that brings 16/32 bits support, then that’s a very nice step forward !
It seems to me that Gimp is stuck with version 2.6 since… 2009 or so ?
Once one has tasted the incredible evolution rate of Blender, every other FOSS development feels sluggish at best. The same can be said about Inkscape or Scribus.
In that sense, I’ve always felt that the whole “integrated environment vs floating panels” debate was “fehl am platz”. There was way more urgent than that.
One step closer to a true open-source visual effects / animation pipeline - Photoshop still remains supreme ‘currently’, and a lot isn’t possible with out it.
To give a measure of big news this is suffice it to say that it was slashdotted a few days ago.
So, let’s sum it up: single window interface, 16/32bit depth per channel, what else is missing? Oh yeah, PS-like layer groups.
When that’s done I really don’t know what PS addicts will bitch about!
I think one of the really cool things about GEGL is that it will save history with the xcf, so basically if you open a file weeks later and see you goofed you can undo. I don’t really care what the feature is, it’s nice to hear some good news about GIMP development.
It was very welcomed to learn about this tool, because the current version of IWarp is frankly inferior in every way to PS Liquiify (or the Paint.Net version that is as good as the PS one).
I hope this new Warp Transform tool will come to 2.8 now that the GEGL thing was implemented much earlier than the schedule let it supposed to.
Cool news, haven’t really used GIMP much but I am going to be using it a lot in the future so it’s nice to hear that the development is still going strong
It is really, really difficult to claim patents to open source & non commercial software, if it wasn’t MS would have cut Linux down years ago. So that is probably not correct. And if it is, someone actually missed what I stated in my first sentence… ;D
