The first unstable version of GIMP in a new development cycle usually gives a good idea of what's going to be in the new stable version. This time there also is a helpful report by Simon Budig from the annual meeting of the team at Libre Graphics Meeting in early May 2009 :)

OK, version 2.7.0 is out now, and the agenda is:

• Final transition to project files paradigm
• Further transition to GEGL
• Text tool working on canvas
• Tagging of brushes, gradients and patterns
• Brush dynamics enhanced
• View and editing of metadata
• Various user interface changes
• Anything stuck?
• Google Summer of Code 2009
• How GEGL is doing
• What's next?

I'm leaving a number of changes out of scope of this review: you can see the full list of changes in the announcement, and there will be a full review of stable v2.8 anyway. So let's focus on things that are most important.

Final transition to project files paradigm

This quite serious change is affecting every single GIMP user except probably those who will try using the new version, be freakened out and refuse to use GIMP ever again.

When you try to save a multilayered image to a JPEG, PNG or any other target file using the current stable version of GIMP, you will be warned that some of the data (layers separation, editable text layers, masks) will be lost. And if you close this file right after that, the data will indeed be gone for good.

What you will see in the new unstable version is that every opened file except XCF is considered imported to a newly created project, and thus saving will be possible only to a project XCF file, thus always preserving layers with blending modes and masks. In cases you just want to edit a single PNG or TIFF file there are two new menu items at your service:

1. Export... (Ctrl+Shift+E) — the usual Save As dialog where you can save your project to a target file. You will need to provide filename and extension. By default PNG is suggested.
2. Overwrite <filename> — overwrites the file that was first imported to the project with currently vsible data.
3. Export to (Ctrl+E) — reexports to a previously exported newly created image (not imported from existing file).
   

So what it boils down to is that if you usually open something like IMG_0001.JPG, edit it and save back to this file, you only need to setup a hotkey for overwriting, teach yourself to use it instead of Ctrl+S and not use adult language in presence of kids when you press Ctrl+W only to find out that GIMP wants you to save changes to the project file you never intended to create in the first place :)

The corresponding spec considers long-term plans to make file format specific saving options a much less pain to suffer from. Work on this has already started and is reported by developers to be ca. 80% done.

This change really might look counterproductive and will surely cause ten extra pages of hatred driven comments at Slashdot. I didn't really agree with this concept myself the very first minutes after reading the proposal. However after thinking more about this I figured out I was out of fingers to count all the cases when I didn't save an XCF and then spent minutes to hours recreating complex multilayered compositions with masks. From memory, months after. So force-saving to XCF definitely has its advances. Besides for simpler workflows you already have free/libre tools like Fotoxx and mtPaint.

In other words we are seing the dawn of days when you have all chances in the world to hear something like "Why would you want using GIMP? You don't really drive Ferrari to the next greengrocery, do you? Use a simpler app, dude". The recent attempt to remove GIMP from Ubuntu CDs for being too complex only proves that.

Further transition to GEGL

Just in case you missed the previous report from the "GIMP-3" reality show, let me tell you that the work on porting GIMP to GEGL has already started. And if you are new to the show, GEGL is the next GIMP's engine designed to make GIMP 101% ready for pro users.

So far GIMP can optionally use GEGL for color tools (with currently useless 32 floating point bit per channel precision) and has a testing interactive tool to apply arbitrary GEGL operations to selections or layers. The latter has even formed a c2g operation fanclub of people who love making b/w film looking images from color photos.

So the new version has another switch, this time in View menu, that enables projection rendering using GEGL. In GIMP a projection is a flattened representation of all visible layers with masks. Which means that GIMP already does graphs compositing for layers and floating selections (you can use File > Debug > Show Image Graph command to visuzlize that). Also, with GEGL based projection enabled blending modes like hue, saturation and value are calculated using CIE LCh color space (which is basically L*a*b* in polar coordinates).

The list of changes required to make the switch to GEGL complete looks more or less like this:

• make babl and GEGL color management aware;
• make GIMP use GEGL's data types;
• port more GIMP plug-ins to GEGL operations and implement support for legacy plug-ins;
• make rendering magnitudes faster (I'll get back to this soonish).

Text tool working on canvas

Hallelujah! No, I'm serious. This awful and unusable text input dialog has finally died. You can still call it (without a pentagram, which is insecure really), in case you just can't live without it. But why would you want doing that, when you can type in text, select it, cut and paste it right on canvas? Complex text formatting would be even better, and it will come eventually. Patience is a virtue.

GIMP uses pangocairo for all that jazz, so you shouldn't be having serious issues with complex indic or arabic scripts. And additionally you can now switch between all hinting modes availables in FreeType (which sits behind text rendering in GIMP).

Let's thank Daniel Eddeland for accomplishing this project during Google Summer of Code 2008 and Mitch Natterer for cleaning up, improving and merging this code to the main codebase.