This year GIMP participated in the annual Google Summer of Code program with three projects. Two out of three projects have been successful: Cage transform tool in GIMP and HDR and matting functions in GEGL.

The new Cage transform tool allows doing shape-preserving deformations of objects. The tool is based on a research paper by Yaron Lipman, David Levin and Daniel Cohen-Or, and was implemented by Michael Muré. The tool is implemented on top of a GEGL operation that can be reused to create more transformation tools. For more information please refer to Michael’s blog or description of the project’s outcome. The code lives in soc-2010-cage-2 branch.

A project by Danny Robson resulted in a number of new, mostly HDR related features in GEGL: a standalone HDR merge tool, RGBE loading and saving, three tone mapping operators and one matting operator. You can read about them in details on the project’s page.

The Cage transform tool is likely to be included in version 2.10, and features implemented by Danny Robson will be available in the next release of GEGL.