Re: [Gimp-developer] GIMP branched: new stable branch gimp-2-10

[Elle Stone <ellestone ninedegreesbelow com>]

On 05/21/2018 11:13 AM, Jehan Pagès wrote:
> Hi!,

Hi Jehan and all,

> On Mon, May 21, 2018 at 3:32 PM, Elle Stone <ellestone ninedegreesbelow com>

<snip>

> > I guess changing toolkits is a necessary evil (eg QT4 to QT5, GTK+2 to
> > GTK+3 with GTK+4 already in the wings . . . ). But it uses up a lot of
> > developer time and energy, and the benefits of changing toolkits to the
> > actual purposes for which we use editing software seem to me to be a bit
> > iffy.
>
> Just to be clear, the toolkit update here is not *just* a necessary evil.
> It will also be totally awesome, even feature-wise! Without doing much, the
> differences are already dramatically awesome IMO, like the simple fact that
> input devices (read: graphics tablet) don't have to be activated manually,
> nor plugged before running GIMP (hotplug support), etc.
> Then we'll be able to add touch support (zoom, pan, rotation of canvas with
> fingers).
> And much more. This is very exciting.
> In any case, the benefits are definitely not "iffy".

Good to know!

> Simply to get there, we have to pass through an "unstable" phase, that's
> all there is to it. The old master (which became 2.10) has had this phase
> too, I can definitely tell so. When I started contributed, back in 2012, it
> was absolutely unusable for daily use as well (though you say you were
> already using the master build daily back in 2013, but maybe you are less
> demanding as us :P). Not only unstable, but also slow as hell. Absolutely
> impossible to use for painting.

Back in 2012/2013 I was editing photographs. So the speed of painting 
only affected painting on a layer mask, which indeed was slooooow.

For photographic editing GIMP-2.9 was already useable even in 
middle-late 2012, at least it was after I somehow managed ("somehow" 
meaning with a *great* deal of help from various GIMP devs) to port the 
old LCMS plug-in from LCMS1 to LCMS2, which is when and why I started 
contributing to GIMP development:

http://gimp.1065349.n5.nabble.com/no-subject-td28716.html
http://gimp.1065349.n5.nabble.com/the-Gimp-lcms-c-plug-in-td34453i20.html

My February 2013 review of The Book of GIMP 
(https://ninedegreesbelow.com/photography/book-of-gimp.html) has a 
sample image processed using GIMP-2.9: 
https://ninedegreesbelow.com/photography/gimp/bog/rapidly-departing-storm-clouds.jpg 
- the image was processing using GIMP-2.9's ability to add +4 stops of 
exposure compensation to a copy of a layer to lighten the ground, and 
then "paint" the now out-of-gamut sky areas back in to the desired 
degree of exposure - at the time and maybe even now, as far as I know no 
other image editor makes this sort of editing possible.

Best,
Elle