Art meets open source at Libre Graphics Meeting (Linux.com)

[Posted May 15, 2007 by ris]

Linux.com has a report on the Libre Graphics Meeting. "Unlike a typical Linux get-together, at the Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM), half of the attendees are developers and the other half are artists. The conference, which was held earlier this month at the Polytechnique Montreal, featured speakers from as far as Australia and Europe. In three rooms, speakers presented techniques for everything from generating photorealistic vector drawings to producing full movies to magazine production."

to post comments

Art meets open source at Libre Graphics Meeting (Linux.com)

Posted May 16, 2007 13:58 UTC (Wed) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link] (2 responses)

It's a pity he forgot to mention Krita ;-)

But apparently, that's something which happens more often...
http://www.valdyas.org/fading/index.cgi/urlaub/saturday.html (see at the end - saying 'Linux can't do 16 bit and RAW images properly' is pretty stupid, there are several very good apps that can. OK, they're no GTK apps, but why would that rule out using or promoting them to non-linux users?)

Anyway, it's good there is still development on Gimp going on. When are we going to see it getting some long-awaited improvements like 16-bit color support, multiple colorspaces, RAW? The competition does have them for quite some time now...

Art meets open source at Libre Graphics Meeting (Linux.com)

Posted May 16, 2007 20:52 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] (1 responses)

When someone does the work and contributes the changes, of course.

Art meets open source at Libre Graphics Meeting (Linux.com)

Posted May 17, 2007 4:12 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

The work is fairly done... fundamentally-wise at least.

For a long time Gimp has massaged it's code base for various improvements such as theming support. They have also worked to prepare the code base to support the entry of Gegl.

For a long time Gegl development stalled, however it's picked up again.

Right now things are waiting for the 2.4 release then they will probably start incorporating portions of Gegl into Gimp.

This is a 'next-generation' graphics proccessing core (at least as far as Gimp is concerned). It should provide the ability to bring Gimp up to feature parity with Photoshop and other such things in relative ease (compared to trying to take Gimp as it currently is and extending it).

Currently the Gegl core is capable of:
http://www.gegl.org/
> * 8bit, 16bit integer and 32bit floating point, RGB, CIE Lab, and Y'CbCr output.
> * Non destructive editing
> * C, C#, Python and Ruby interfaces.
> * Extendable through plug-ins.
> * XML serialization format (not-finalized)
> * Iterative processing.
> * Efficient subregion evaluation.
> * Processing and display of image buffers larger than RAM
> * Internal sparse pyramidial render cache.
> * Bounding box based hit detection.
> * Rich core set of processing operations that internally computes with >HDR capable 32bit floating point.
> o PNG, JPEG, SVG, EXR, RAW and other image sources.
> o Pattern renderers
> o Arithmetic operations
> o porter duff compositing
> o SVG filter modes
> o Gaussian blur.
> o Unsharp mask.
> o Color correction.
> o Text layout using pango

Of course if anybody wants to help the ideal way would be to contribute to getting Gimp 2.4 out the door or contributing directly to the Gegl code base.

Also Gegl is not to gimp-specific. Other applications could incorporate it's functionality.

Also 32bit floating point is what you want to use for almost-lossless color correction and manipulation. You'd use it in very high-end color applications such as direct film editing, which is what Cinepaint is designed for.

And lossless editing would be nice since you can go and undo "step 10" and see the changes it would make without having to redo "step 11 through step 25". And allow you to do things like transformation layers and such things. These sorts of things should lead to a massive increase in human/computer workflow performance.