After 6 long years, GIMP has finally released version 2.10 using the Generic Graphics Library (GEGL) for high bit depth processing. This release comes with a brand new interface, better integrated color management, a new unified transform tool for scaling, rotating, and correcting perspective, and many other improvements and tools.
takyon: More detailed release notes and NEWS file.
High bit depth support allows processing images with up to 32-bit per color channel precision and open/export PSD, TIFF, PNG, EXR, and RGBE files in their native fidelity. Additionally, FITS images can be opened with up to 64-bit per channel precision.
Multi-threading allows making use of multiple cores for processing. Not all features in GIMP make use of that, it's something we intend to work on further. A point of interest is that multi-threading happens through GEGL processing, but also in core GIMP itself, for instance to separate painting from display code.
GPU-side processing is still optional, but available for systems with stable OpenCL drivers.
[...] Some of the new GEGL-based filters are specifically targeted at photographers: Exposure, Shadows-Highlights, High-pass, Wavelet Decompose, Panorama Projection and others will be an important addition to your toolbox.
The WebP lossy image format, which is now supported by GIMP, was updated by Google to v1.0.0 on April 2.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 27 2018, @09:49PM (1 child)
That is of course correct! But the timing, the timing. I guess by the time 18.10 season arrives, we may get lucky. "All new interface" is a scary term nowadays, especially in the open-source / Linux world. Far too many poor examples of developers breaking previously working software with half-baked "new" ideas. My fresh install of 18.04 snap-ped to v2.8.22. Flatpak is yet-another-standard, sigh. Also to consider is what will happen to G'MIC and suchlike, and any custom scripts.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 28 2018, @12:35AM
G'MIC was (thankfully) recoded in QT so not very much. I always had a preference for Gtk and think Vala is a grossly underrated and underused language but the Gnome developers need to meet us halfway on this. No chance! If I were currently developing any GUI app today, no question it would be in QT/C++.