GIMP 2.6 released

Yes. GeGL is what everybody has been waiting for. It's what is designed to be color independent so it should be possible to plug whatever type of color format you want into it... 8-bit RGBA, 16-bit grayscale, 16-bit RGBA, floating point RGBA, CYMK, YUV formats, etc etc.

But that's not even the best part. It should help streamline the workflow and make working with Gimp much faster and more efficient.

For example.. Say your building a image and you have done steps 1 through 25. Now you find out a blur you put into a layer in step 15 isn't looking good. So now you would have to undo steps 25, 24, 23, 22, 21, 20, 19, 18, 17, 16, and then 15 to undo your mistake and hopefully you've memorized everything you did for 16 thru 25, because now you have to recreate 2 hours worth or work... manually.

However with Gegl it should be possible to just undo step 15 and leave the rest of what you did untouched... Just 'pop' out the change in 15 and leave the rest of your work untouched.

Then you can do color adjustment layers, filter layers, and other forms of non-destructive editing. That way when you perform a blur or a different sort of effect on a layer you don't loose any information or destroy your source of the image. Right now you would be forced to create many layers of images to save copies of what your working on in case you have to come back and make a change.

If Gimp ever get those types of features, which Gegl should make possible, then you can expect a _massive_ increase in the efficiency of a person's workflow. They should be able to take chances and run with ideas much easier. For a professional the time it takes to get a image done is critical.. their time is worth money and the more images and more ideas they can crank out in a given time is very important.

If improvements in Gimp can reduce the time it takes to produce quality output from a 3-4 days of work to 1-2 days then you can expect to see professionals starting to take it very very seriously.