// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
GIMP Development Update
For the past few months, we’ve been developing all kinds of features for
the future GIMP 3.4 release. We noticed recently that our
changelog
was getting quite long - a good problem to have!
While there’s been a lot going on internally, it’s been a while since we made a
public progress report. So we want to share details on some of the new features
and UX improvements that’ll be available in the first development release,
GIMP 3.3.2. This won’t be an exhaustive list (we have to save at least some
news for the release itself!) but hopefully it will give you some insight into
the current direction and progress of GIMP’s development.
The big focus for maintainer Jehan recently has been developing a new project file format
for GIMP.
XCF has been GIMP’s primary project
format since 1997, and it has served many users well. Over time however, we’ve observed
more and more limitations of the binary XCF format.
Among other issues, it does not easily support very large or complex projects, such as
the multi-page and animation features currently planned for GIMP 3.6.
The new project file format will follow a more common “zipped XML” structure. While
the technical details are still being designed and implemented, this change will allow for
faster saving since we’ll only need to update parts of the file instead of the whole
thing each time. It will also set the stage for much desired features such as auto-saving,
which will now be much more feasible.
That said, XCF is not going away! Backwards compatibility is important to us,
and we will continue to support loading XCFs in all future versions of GIMP.
(For instance, we’re quite proud that a
XCF file made by a small company
for their logo in 1998 still renders the same way in the latest version of GIMP)
However, going forward we will only add support for saving/loading new features
in the new project file format once it is finalized.
During GIMP 3.2’s development, we
upgraded to a newer version
of the MyPaint brush engine. While this brought new brushes and canvas interactions to the
MyPaint Brush Tool,
one feature that was left out was Spectral Blending.
Spectral Blending simulates the effects of blending physical pigments in digital art. For example,
blending yellow and blue will produce a green color instead of darker yellow, and blending red and
yellow will create an orange mix.
Fortunately, new contributor Cassidie Grogan picked up the slack and implemented this feature.
There is now a Spectral Blending checkbox in the MyPaint Brush Tool Options. If checked, the new
blending method is used. You can control the strength of the blending with the Pigment slider.