CinePaint returns as version 1.0

CinePaint 0.25 in action
Source: CinePaint.org

CinePaint, the open source deep painting package originally known as FilmGIMP, has been released as version 1.0. The project was developed as a fork of GIMP 1.0.4 which was modified to work with 16- and 32-bit float precision per colour channel. The software has been used on movies such as 2 Fast 2 Furious, The Lord of the Rings, Spider-Man and the Harry Potter series.

There have been no releases of CinePaint since 2008, when the team that took over the FilmGIMP project and renamed it dissolved; there had been no source releases since 2007. The announcement says that the new version is numbered 1.0 "for administrative reasons", has known bugs, is not significantly different from version 0.26, and only runs on Linux, with no Windows or Mac versions available.

The return is somewhat curious: according to Libre Graphics World, none of the changes in Kai-Uwe's private fork have been incorporated, and there is no announcement of any plans to continue development; the last plan announced by Robin Rowe, the CinePaint project leader, was for 2010.

The CinePaint web site is also undergoing renewal. The source tarball for Cinepaint is available to download and the code is licensed under the GPLv2.

(djwm)