[gimp-web/testing] First shot at the 2.9.2 news post



commit 8aa7b89496c135bca5e04c13cc5600c1f0e77bb8
Author: Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre prokoudine gmail com>
Date:   Thu Nov 26 05:12:55 2015 +0300

    First shot at the 2.9.2 news post

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+Title: GIMP 2.9.2 Released
+Date: 2015-11-26
+Category: News
+Authors: Alexandre Prokoudine
+
+We are excited to announce the first development release of GIMP in the 2.9.x series. It's another major 
milestone towards making GIMP a state-of-the art image editing application for graphic designers, 
photographers, illustrators, and scientists.
+
+## GEGL Port
+
+[GEGL](http://gegl.org/) is GIMP's new image processing engine. The GEGL project was originally launched in 
2000 by several developers from visual effects company Rhythm&Hues who needed a versatile image editor for 
movie production.
+
+From the very beginning, GEGL was a challenging project, since no general image editing software at the time 
was built on top of the node compositions concept, and GEGL had to be designed with just that in mind.
+
+In 2007, GIMP developers Sven Neumann, Michael Natterer, and Øyvind Kolås started porting GIMP to use GEGL. 
However, this process had to be broken up into several stages, because GIMP's source code was already huge at 
the time.
+
+So GIMP 2.6 (released in 2008) featured optional use of GEGL-based color grading tools and an experimental 
tool to use GEGL "filters". Then GIMP 2.8 (released in 2012) featured GEGL-based projection—flattened 
representation of stacked layers.
+
+Now upcoming GIMP 2.10 is going to use GEGL for pretty much everything under the hood, and v2.9.2 is the 
first technical preview release on the way towards v2.10.
+
+While a few advanced features of GEGL such as non-destructive editing are planned to be exposed in GIMP at a 
later development stage (v3.2 and onwards), with 2.9.2, you can already benefit from certain aspects of the 
new engine, such as:
+
+* 16/32bit per color channel processing
+* Basic OpenEXR support
+* On-canvas preview for many filters
+* Experimental hardware-accelerated rendering and processing via OpenCL
+* Higher-quality downscaling
+
+Additionally, native support for PNG, TIFF, PSD, and FITS files in GIMP has been upgraded to read and write 
16/32bit per color channel data.
+
+## New and Improved Tools
+
+All tools in GIMP are now GEGL-based and fully functional in up to 32bit per color channel precision mode.
+
+GIMP 2.9.2 also introduced two new tools that we consider mostly complete:
+
+* **Unified Transform**, designed by Peter Sikking and implemented by Mikael Magnusson, combines rotation, 
scaling, skewing, and adjusting perspective in a single tool.
+* **Warp Transform**, implemented by Michael Muré, replaces the old iWarp plugin and provides its features 
in a tool that works directly on images, without a preview window.
+
+We have also improved several existing tools:
+
+* **Blend** tool, worked on by Michael Henning, is now more interactive. After drawing with the tool to 
define the beginning and the end of the gradient fill, you can adjust start/end positions and change colors.
+* **Align** tool now features vertical and horizontal fill modes thanks to João S. O. Bueno.
+* **Foreground** Select tool can finally make subpixel selections in complex cases such as strays of hair on 
textured background. Two new masking methods for that were added by Jan Rüegg and Daniel Sabo, and the user 
interface was updated by Michael Natterer.
+
+Several new experimental tools can be enabled on the _Playground_ page of _Preferences_ dialog:
+
+* **N-Point Deformation**, by Marek Dvorožňák, implements a new way to bend objects while preserving a 
natural look.
+* **Handle Transform**, by Johannes Matschke, is an interesting approach at applying scaling, rotating, and 
perspective correction using handles placed on the canvas.
+* **Seamless Clone**, by Barak Itkin, simplifies merging one image into another by adjusting brightness and 
colors of the pasted image to match the look of the image it is pasted to.
+* **MyPaint Brush** tool is our first shot at using more brush engines in GIMP. The code was written by 
Michael Natterer.
+
+All the experimental tools are subject to performance optimizations, bugfixes, user interface redesign etc. 
We do not guarantee that they will be enabled in v2.10 by default.
+
+## File Format Support
+
+* basic OpenEXR loading and exporting
+* initial WebP loading and exporting
+
+## Color Management
+
+The color management plugin has been rewritten from scratch by Michael Natterer to provide a more complete 
set of features, as well as better color fidelity preservation. E.g. GIMP can finally handle cases, when one 
image is pasted into another, and color spaces don't match.
+
+GIMP now uses LittleCMS v2 which minimizes color fidelity loss during conversions between 8, 16, 32, and 
64bit per channel data, and provides support for ICC v4 color profiles.
+
+There are still some parts of GIMP like color choosers that need to become color-managed. We expect to 
complete this in time for v2.10.
+
+## Layers Blending
+
+We have introduced some important changes to blending modes:
+
+* FIXME
+* FIXME
+* FIXME
+
+## Metadata
+
+GIMP 2.9.2 features an experimental dialog to view Exif, XMP, and IPTC metadata—something that we've been 
meaning to provide photographers for quite a while. It doesn't yet support adding or editing existing 
metadata—this will be addressed at a later stage of development.
+
+<!-- Should we mention Hartmut's per-layer metadata branch as something to undergo review in 2.9.x? -->
+
+## Digital Painting
+
+Apart from the newly added _experimental_ MyPaint Brush tool, there are several major and minor changes:
+
+* Canvas rotation and flipping have been added to facilitate users who need to paint from a different angle 
or check composition for errors.
+* You can optionally lock brush size to zoom.
+* All tools that use GIMP's brush engine now have hardness and force sliders.
+
+The final v2.10 release is expected to feature configurable mirror painting implemented by Jehan Pagès 
thanks to GIMP users who supported his crowdfunding campaign. The code is mostly complete and will undergo 
review in the coming weeks.
+
+## Configurability
+
+To help interested users test experimental features, we added a new _Playground_ page to the _Preferences_ 
dialog. In v2.9.2, it serves to enable experimental tools that we mentioned earlier in the news.
+
+_Behaviour_, another new page in the _Preferences_ dialog, helps configuring default snapping in normal and 
fullscreen modes.
+
+Finally, the user interface to enable and disable Tools in the toolbox has moved to the _Toolbox_ page in 
the _Preferences_ dialog.
+
+## Known Issues
+
+At this stage, GIMP 2.9.x is mostly very stable and is known to be used in production by some brave users. 
However, certain image processing operations are currently slow. This has been partially remedied by 
rendering changes in the viewport first. We expect to do a lot of optimization work later on.
+
+## Further Plans
+
+* FIXME
\ No newline at end of file


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