GIMP 2.10 will use 16-bit colour depth throughout

GEGL operations in the current GIMP version

Not long after the announcement of the first release candidate for GIMP 2.8, the developer community has more news to report – if all goes according to plan, GIMP 2.10 will fully use GEGL (Generic Graphics Library) for its calculations. This promises 16-bit colour depth for all relevant processes such as changing brightness, contrast, hue or saturation.

On his blog, developer Michael Natterer writes that he and Øyvind Kolås started to play around with GEGL as part of a week of hacking they had planned to do at his home. GIMP currently uses a component called TileManager to store pixel information and Natterer and Kolås wrote a GEGL backend that also uses TileManager to store its information. Natterer said that, when this backend started working after only a few hours of programming, it was relatively easy to port further functions to GEGL. The planned one-week hacking holiday turned into three weeks of GEGL porting and ultimately made 90 per cent of GIMP's features available through GEGL.

GIMP 2.10 is scheduled to fully use the new graphics library, while Gimp 2.8 will use a library that has remained largely unchanged since GIMP 1.2. Very few features of the current GIMP use GEGL.

(fab)