Four students will be working on GIMP and GEGL this summer thanks to Google Summer of Code 2013 program.

• Ajay Ramanathan will be working on a combined selection tool;
• Carlos Zubieta will be porting GEGL operations to OpenCL;
• Simon Lui will improve support for PSD in GIMP (text layers as text etc.);
• Marek Dvorožňák will add a new tool to deform an image objects in a way that they behave like real world objects (see YouTube demo).

We are looking forward to the upcoming three months of exciting work with our new contributors.

While getting prepared to a new run of the Google Summer of Code program, we merged code from a few past GSoC projects, namely Warp Transform and Seamless Paste tools.

The Warp Transform tool is an interactive on-canvas version of our old iWarp plug-in, and it’s in a good shape to be part of a future v2.10 release. It still needs a few internal and user interface changes, though.

The Seamless Paste tool does just that: seamless pasting of an object from one picture into another, optionally updating color characteristics. This tool needs a lot more work. Barak Itkin recently posted an update in his blog to outline the changes to be made.

Stay tuned for more development news.