As 2013 is fast approaching, we’d like to take a quick look at 2012 and what we did during the year.

In May we released the long anticipated new stable version, v2.8, with many improvements such as layer groups, tagging of resources, new Cage transform tool and more.

We also started the final transition to GEGL as a new image processing core. All legacy from the libgimp has already been removed.

Unstable version of GIMP is now capable of working in 16 and 32 bit per channel modes, both integer and float. Color management has been improved as well, and thanks to support by AMD and Google the GEGL library can do GPU-side rendering and processing with OpenCL.

We successfully participated at Google Summer of Code 2012. Our students ported more GIMP filters to GEGL operations, created a node compositing application for testing GEGL, and implemented a unified transform tool for GIMP.

In past years we let our work with community slip, so this year we also tried to establish a better connection with our user base. Our Google+ page, where we now regularly share project news and useful GIMP tutorials we come across, is currently circled by ca. 22.000 people (as compared to 1.000 in January 2012).

Last, but not least, we are happy to see the community actively promoting GIMP of its own accord. E.g. this year the GIMP Magazine project was started, with two issues already published and the 3rd issue currently in the works.

Thanks to all contributors our project vision is becoming a reality. GIMP already works in HDR, partially uses GPU for rendering and processing, has better transformation tools.

Our primary focus for 2013 will be finishing the transition to GEGL. We don’t expect it to be an easy job: it’s likely to keep us busy most of 2013, if not longer. You can help us to boost the development. Come join us to complete the rewrite and deliver the new generation of GIMP as a polished stable product.