Excellent. So, this is one tool I know in a few many times. So, it's nice to see
a gimp here. So, right, I think we're a minute late. So, let's start.
Well, we don't have much time so let's jump right into it. Where's going after the 3.2
release? Before I mentioned all that, let's do a quick look behind. The last year has been
very eventful. It's the biggest milestone of course, is after 7 years of development,
finally releasing the most evasive 3.0 release. It has many, many features I will not
cover today. I very much recommend watching the keynote that the gimp may tend to
have given last year. But, until we've summing up quickly, we've published 10 separate
releases first to where about the 3.0 release, the next 4, where about our micro releases
for the now new stable release of 3.0. And, 4, are the new, are releases in the new unstable
branch, the 3.1. The last of which is the second release candidate, which should mean that
the 3.2 release is coming fairly soon. The team has also attended two events, first one
is the library graphics meeting, 2,025, which is more of a developer conference, and then
we also participate in World War week, which is more of a team meeting and a hackathon
more in a personal setting. What's coming in the upcoming 3.2 release, there is way too much
for me to cover here today. So, I'll focus only on free items. The first one are just
the small UX and UI changes that in most cases you will not notice because they are
quite small, but they are the small fixes working towards making the whole UX experience
much better. A lot of these changes have come from the work done in our new GPUX issue
tracker and I very much recommend if you want to participate in the discussions there,
you are always most welcome. The two features I want to mention are two new types of
layers. The first type are link layers. Now it is possible to give projects to the link
and over the existing image file and once that file is updated outside of GIMP, it will
be reloaded automatically. The second type of layer has been in development since 2006
when it started as a Google summer of code project. It has gone through many revisions
and finally one developer has pushed it over the finish line and got it into the main
line and now it is possible to make use of GIMP's path tool to create vector layers, apply
non-instructive transformations to them, and if needed, the best drives them into classic
layer. Resturization is also available for link layers. Now that we all called up, we can
take a look into the future. What is coming after the 3.2 release. The short answer is, it
depends on the community. GIMP is a community driven project. There is no one road map. There
is no one clear vision where we are going. It all comes down to who are the current contributors
and what they are interested in. And then we try to align the interest and maybe try to narrow
down what we are working on. I have taken these from our roadmap, which is publicly available.
And again, there is way too much for me to cover here today. I will focus only on free items
that are particularly interesting to me. The first one is a full C and Y came out. What has
become possible in the 3.0 release is finally working with images using C and YK. What you
can do now is to import an image using C and YK. GIMP will ask you what kind of a color
profile you would like to use. Once GIMP converts an image into RGB automatically, then you
continue working with your image with a project as usual and GIMP uses RGB in the background.
You can make use of software for preview. And once you export your image, GIMP will use
the profile of the color profile you have selected before or change layer and apply it on
export. What we are working towards now is making it possible to skip this conversion altogether
and adding a new color mode which would be the C and YK mode. Having in total free main
color modes available next to RGB, gray scale and hopefully in the future C and YK.
Now then it would be possible not to convert at all and have direct access to the color
channels or adding new channels using for example colors. These two workflows are
to be also referred to as late binding and early binding. I recommend checking out the
working progress merge request where some of the foundation work is already being done.
The second feature that's being worked on is a new XCF format. XCF is the project format
that's used by GIMP and currently it is a binary format. That gives us some limitations
as to how we can work with our project and also limits the performance. Because if you
have a large project of multiple hundreds of megabytes and you export you need to write
we need to write a whole file at one switch. Can take some time if your project is too big.
So the future is some kind of a container format. What type of container? I do not know.
The end result or the expected end result is that we can select the load and export parts
of a project which would then allow for much better performance allowing for features like
all the saving, fast saving and building new features like animation support for keyframes
or pages which are a bit similar features instead of relying on layers as smooth plugins
to now. That would be a good foundation to build these features on. I recommend checking
out a Patreon post of our main of GIMP's maintainer shahan. Second feature that's on myself interested
in is investigating hard the acceleration in GIMP. There are two ways hard the acceleration
can be used in GIMP. That's the compute. Those are your filters, blending modes and color
space and pixel encoding conversions and canvas rendering. There has been a compute support
in GIMP's graphics library, Google for quite a long time but from for some time it has been
disabled by default and even hidden as an experimental option. One of the reasons is overall stability
which is not the greatest and second one is performance. I've spent some time putting together
instrumentation to get a better idea of why OpenCL in Google is not as performance and turns out
we're leaving some potential performance on the table and that's something I've been trying
to investigate how to make better in the future. When I mentioned OpenCL maybe some of you are asking
why OpenCL why not using CUDA or HIP or ROCKN more, any other feet or any other of the many
APIs and maybe the higher level APIs as well. My answer to that right now is that it doesn't
really matter because first of all we need to put together a model for compute to actually make use
of graphics processing in the first place. That much about what's coming in the future releases
now just some behind the scenes. There's a GIMP community these days which the main purpose is managing
the funds that GIMP has to ensure that the community can thrive. There has been a change in the
members of the community there's a new member which is Mitch, a long time contributor, a long time
internal of GIMP. There is also a grant system on the way. Last year the GIMP may
obtain as mentioned there are two grants over the ongoing one was for himself as the main
maintainer and other for the maintainer of the graphics library. At the moment there are no
grants going on which partially is due to the setup of how the grants are being done together with
non-foundation which is the fiscal host of GIMP's funds. There have been some slowdowns because
of the recent management changes on non-foundation site but right now we are very confident in the
steps we are taking and we know that the foundation we're building now will be quite solid.
Now it's just something about becoming a GIMP developer. GIMP is over 30 years old at this point
and I'm not 30 thankfully just yet but I've contributed to getting over the end of the past
but it was only not last year that I actually became a core developer by being invited into the team.
I would just like to mention that anybody is always welcome in the team and it does not
matter how much of an experience somebody has. Myself I joined mainly because I got to participate
in Google Summer of Code which if there are any students around here and are thinking of applying
or doing not know what you saw I very much recommend applying for it but at least from GIMP side
the most appreciated is not the skill of how the developer you are. You can come in and just
start asking questions we are always very much happy to explain stuff and just help you along
to become a better developer. The most appreciated is that you show up and stay around
and just what is it to be a GIMP developer or open source software developer? It's a
I would just say it's a unique hobby and many of you I presume are open source contributors. Actually
I can maybe ask who of you in the room contributes to an open source project if you could
raise your hands at least about half of you here. So you know what it is what it is like spending
a lot of time inside working on a project instead of using doing some conventional hobby.
I very much enjoyed myself though it can be tiring at times. The first few items are almost like a
job listing or job advertisement remote office, work from home, pick your own work, sounds all great.
Most projects have openings at all times and it's all about coming in and joining and usually
the community is just once people coming in and sticking around. So I would just like to
encourage those of you who do not contribute yet or do not know how to start. I would just say
join a discussion channel, go to the issue tracker of the project and start asking questions and
be curious. And it's a tiring, it's almost a job contributing to open source projects so
remember to rest as well. Last year I want to thank all the users of camp. It's not without you
that we would want to continue contributing to camp and especially I want to thank all the
contributors that helped the past year get all the releases out. I took all of these names from
our news reports on gb.org slash news. I'm not sure if I missed somebody, I hope I did not,
but all of the contributors are very much appreciated and I'm very much wanting to thank everybody
who has contributed. And thank you all for coming this is all from my site and if you have any questions
please ask.
Thank you. We have to use the microphone for questions for the people online. So even if you
share it, apparently it doesn't work with the video.
First, thank you for the presentation. Second, my question is about the XCF file format.
I know there are no concrete plans on how to develop it yet. Have you tried anything so far or
looked at any solutions? And if so could you explain what kind of experiments you've already tried with it?
Myself, I didn't look into any of that. I think there is already a discussion on going in the
tracker. I didn't read it. There is way too much for me to read and wait a little time.
I think there has been discussions about whether to use, for example, an SQLite database.
I hope I'm not saying bogus, but I think for example, Krita in their project files makes you
a use of SQLite. I'm not sure. I'm taking it for the report. That could be one way to approach it.
But I don't think there has been any clear experimentation as to what could be the most
performance or the most flexible. Okay, thank you.
Any other questions you can put in your hand up and we'll get the mic, thank you.
What's the look look at it?
Just to follow up to the last question, SQLite would be an excellent storage mechanism or mail
may or may not be an excellent storage. But the actual format isn't that slightly different,
but I mean, format is more a markup and markdown or XML or could be. I've just gotten
in recommendation the other day that whatever formats we choose, it would be saying to make it
also in a way that's handcraftable instead of always relying on the GUI and automatic creation
of the files to create test files for testing, which definitely if it is marked down,
if it is XML or something could be very helpful. I was just using those as examples.
It doesn't have to be any of those, but even just a plain text file with some simple format
could be saying start. Cool. How long have you been running? I've been using it for many years.
Well, I think it's been one of the longest running projects in the last year,
the game has celebrated its 30th birthday, so this year it should be 31 years.
Nice. Very cool. Any other questions? We've got a little bit more time.
Thank you very much. Very cool projects. If you are curious about something more,
or want to just drop by and say hi, if we have a burst of a feather session at one o'clock.
Actually I want more questions. Are there any gimmstickers? Oh, yeah. I have gimmstickers on me,
so if you want some, please. I really have gimmstickers on on the desk. Oh, yes. Thank you.