In 1998 work began on a motion picture retouching tool based on GIMP 1.0.4. This variant was kept in a separate branch of CVS (Concurrent Versions System) named HOLLYWOOD. This experimental GIMP was referred to as Hollywood Gimp or Film Gimp.

Film Gimp development was sponsored by Hollywood motion picture software maker Silicon Grail (now part of Apple) and Los Angeles film and television post-production studio Rhythm & Hues. Each company gave a GIMP programmer a salary and a desk for a year to enhance GIMP. The team was Calvin Williamson at Rhythm & Hues, and Ray Lehtiniemi at Silicon Grail. Later, GIMP maintainer Manish "Yosh" Singh worked at Silicon Grail. Calvin Williamson now works on gegl, what is expected to eventually become GIMP 2.0. Yosh Singh continues to be a GIMP maintainer. Ray Lehtiniemi works for a small energy management company doing embedded ARM linux and OpenBSD firewall/VPN programming.

Good Egg Productions wrote:
Is it easy to use yet?

I've found GIMP 2.8 to be as easy to use as the previous version (2.6). I remember a steep learning curve when I first used GIMP, but it was no steeper than the learning curve for any other raster graphics editing program. I found Photoshop to have an extremely steep learning curve, too.

We also made 16/32bit float processing available in the unstable branch, with 16bit PNG loading/exporting and EXR and HDR exporting. This is exactly that "more exciting news" mentioned in the 2.8 announce.

Joann Empson wrote:
Notable added features include the ability to toggle between multi-window and single-window modes

This is so nice ... I hated the million windows floating in a myriad places ...

GHWatson wrote:
It says you can download the source code.  What do I do with it?  I'm not a programmer..

Some people are programmers.
Contrary to popular belief, there are such people in the wild.

digital Artform wrote:
When all this Rhythm & Hues stuff and 16-bits is fully in I'll take a good look at it.

It might be late this year (I'm guessing the final touches will be made during Google's summer of code).

GHWatson wrote:
It says you can download the source code.  What do I do with it?

Source code is the human-readable form of a computer program. A computer's CPU can't make sense of this human-readable form of the program.

CPUs can really only process zeros and ones (aka "true and false" or "on and off" or "high voltage and low voltage"). But humans can't efficiently read and write code written in zeros and ones. So humans write computer programs in a human-readable computer language, like C or C++.

To run the program, it needs to be converted (aka "built" or "compiled") into the zeros and ones language that the CPU can process. This conversion is usually accomplished using a program called a compiler. Or, for scripting languages, the conversion is done with a program called an interpreter.

If you don't feel like building the program yourself from the source code, you can wait for someone else to do it for you. There's a guy who builds and distributes GIMP for Windows on Sourceforge (http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/). And there's at least two guys who build and distribute GIMP for Mac OS X (http://gimp.lisanet.de/ and http://www.macports.org/). Just give them some time. I imagine they're busy compiling the programs right now.

STL-After-Dark wrote:
Just in case anyone needs the link - http://www.gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-2.8.html

Thanks, STL-After-Dark! I just had a look at the page, and discovered what is, to me, the best new feature: GIMP's license has been updated to version 3+ of the GNU General Public License.

This further cements its guarantee that this version of GIMP, and any future branches of GIMP based on this version and up, will always respect the users' four essential software feedoms!

Joann Empson wrote:

Source code is the human-readable form of a computer program. A computer's CPU can't make sense of this human-readable form of the program.

CPUs can really only process zeros and ones (aka "true and false" or "on and off" or "high voltage and low voltage"). But humans can't efficiently read and write code written in zeros and ones. So humans write computer programs in a human-readable computer language, like C or C++.

To run the program, it needs to be converted (aka "built" or "compiled") into the zeros and ones language that the CPU can process. This conversion is usually accomplished using a program called a compiler. Or, for scripting languages, the conversion is done with a program called an interpreter.

If you don't feel like building the program yourself from the source code, you can wait for someone else to do it for you. There's a guy who builds and distributes GIMP for Windows on Sourceforge (http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/). And there's at least two guys who build and distribute GIMP for Mac OS X (http://gimp.lisanet.de/ and http://www.macports.org/). Just give them some time. I imagine they're busy compiling the programs right now.

normad-moth wrote:
It might be late this year (I'm guessing the final touches will be made during Google's summer of code).

You're right. All five of the students who made it into Summer of Code this year to work on GIMP have been assigned projects to help with GEGL work, but I don't think three months is enough time for these five kids to finish everything.

Here's the breakdown of the kids' assignments (from the GIMP google+ page):

Maxime Nicco and hanslo will port GIMP filters to GEGL operations.

Ville Sokk will port other GIMP features to GEGL (he already ported blending modes).

Isaac Wagner will create a GEGL-based node compositor that will serve as playground for GEGL development.

Mikael Magnusson will resume and finish the work on Unified Transform tool that he started last year on his own accord

GHWatson wrote:
Thanks for answering my question

You are very welcome! 

GHWatson wrote:
It says you can download the source code.  What do I do with it?  I'm not a programmer..

Windows installers aren't ready yet...patience grasshopper

Not even in linux repository yet...

SKITA Studios wrote:
Not even in linux repository yet...

Two days ago, a guy in Germany built version 2.8 for Ubuntu 11.10- and 12.04-based** GNU/Linux systems. He's sharing it on his Launchpad account: https://launchpad.net/~otto-kesselgulasch/+archive/gimp

To install GIMP from this guy's Ubuntu repositories, just copy and paste these three commands into a terminal.

1. Add the guy's GIMP repository to your repository list:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:otto-kesselgulasch/gimp

2. Refresh your software repositories:

sudo apt-get update

3. Install GIMP 2.8:

sudo apt-get install gimp

Happy days!

** For a list of GNU/Linux distros based on Ubuntu, check the GNU/Linux family tree on Wikipedia. Ubuntu is the child of Debian:

GIMP 2.8 released!

Good.

And seem that from the next release, finally, should be possible wait faster release, since they don't put anymore incomplete feautures on the main branch (that was the reason for this huge delay, since until now a developer that work on something and then stop for a while, prevented others from proceeding).

digital Artform wrote:
When all this Rhythm & Hues stuff and 16-bits is fully in I'll take a good look at it.

Actually I take it back.

Does the Gimp support pressure-sensitive wacom pens and tablets?

I won't use it for much of anything until / unless it does.

NothingIsRealButTheGirl wrote:
Does the Gimp support pressure-sensitive wacom pens and tablets?

I've used it w/ a Wacom Intuos (w/ pressure sensitivity) for the past 3 years :-P

alessandro2009 wrote:
Surprise: Working 16-bit mode landing in GIMP!
On the developer release seem that this part was made a lot faster and seem already almost complete.

Thanks for the pointer, alessandro2009! I built GIMP 2.8 just two days ago, after a little bit of struggling with build dependencies. But it still wasn't too difficult, so I'm feeling encouraged right now. I might even be brave enough to try building the new development version this weekend to try out the 16-bit mode. If I do, I'll report back on the results.

In case it's of any help to anybody here, I'm running a GNU/Linux system that is based on Ubuntu 11.10, and the way I built GIMP 2.8 was by updating gnome packages with the gnome3-team ppa (to update my glib, gtk+, etc.), cloning the source tree using git, and then following the instructions provided.

Here are the commands:

Install git if you don't have it already:

sudo apt-get install git-core

Update the gnome-related packages:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Clone git repositories for GIMP and its dependencies:

git clone git://git.gnome.org/babl

git clone git://git.gnome.org/gegl

git clone git://git.gnome.org/gtk+

git clone git://git.gnome.org/glib

git clone git://git.gnome.org/pango

git clone git://git.gnome.org/gdk-pixbuf

git clone git://git.gnome.org/gimp

And then follow Martin Nordholds' (Nordholds is a code contributor to the GEGL and GIMP projects) guideline for building from git: http://www.chromecode.com/2009/12/best- … it_26.html

NothingIsRealButTheGirl wrote:
Does the Gimp support pressure-sensitive wacom pens and tablets?

I won't use it for much of anything until / unless it does.

It seems the newest version has a known regression that partially breaks support for Wacom devices.

This is from the GIMP 2.8 release notes page:

If your graphic tablet doesn't work in GIMP 2.8 as it should, we recommend downgrading to 2.6 until we release GIMP 3.0 that relies on GTK+3 which has fully functional support for advanced input devices.

GIMP 3.0 will come after GIMP 2.10, which I hope comes soon.

Joann Empson wrote:
I might even be brave enough to try building the new development version this weekend to try out the 16-bit mode. If I do, I'll report back on the results.

I did it! I built the "goat-invasion" branch of GIMP, using the same procedure as before, except this time I didn't have to rebuild all of the dependencies, because they're already installed. All I did was uninstall version 2.8, and then compile and install "goat-invasion".

Here's the splash screen:


And here's the program with the menu for color precision open:

Joann Empson wrote:
I'm going to switch back to the master branch to go back to the stable release of version 2.8.

I made an error. The master branch is actually the current development branch (version 2.9). I built this last night from a fresh git pull. It's very buggy and sluggish.

What I should have done was use the gimp-2-8 branch using this command inside the gimp directory that I pulled from git:

git checkout gimp-2-8

Here are screenshots of version 2.9.1 in case anybody is curious (I'm uninstalling it tonight):

Joann Empson wrote:
The goat-invasion branch of GIMP feels really sluggish on my desktop PC (a Dell Dimension 4500S with a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 and 2 GB PC-3200 RAM).

I'm going to switch back to the master branch to go back to the stable release of version 2.8.

Why don't maintain both release on your system instead?
Putting the developer release for example on the /opt?
Should be sufficient use something similar:
$ ./configure --prefix=/opt/gimp
Since big dependency problems usuall came only when the developer release is near ready.

Which specific problem have you had on the developer release?

alessandro2009 wrote:
Which specific problem have you had on the developer release?

I had trouble with layer masks within layer groups that I had created in 2.8. The masks weren't working.

The entire program was generally very slow. There was a long delay in the appearance of paint of the screen, even when I was painting with a simple, round brush scaled to 20 pixels.

But I think you're right. I ought to keep the development branch on my computer just to help test it and send feedback to the developers. I will put it in /opt as you suggest.

KonstantKarma wrote:
...I bet this renders my GIMP Bible almost obsolete.

The developers have kept the interface of 2.8 somewhat close to version 2.6, so most techniques described in GIMP Bible probably still apply.

According to a recent post on the gimp.org website, a company called "man + machine interface works" has been working on the changes to the GIMP interface since 2006. I think they've been careful not to make their overhaul of the GUI too drastic.

Daniel Ecoff wrote:
Can anyone here with experience with GIMP give a fundamental breakdown of the P&C's of it compared to PS ?

I'm hoping someone else will be able to provide an adequate answer. It's been a few years since I've really used Photoshop.