We have just released new versions of GEGL and babl, the libraries that take all the heavy lifting for color space conversion and image processing in GIMP. Both releases are considered a pre-requisite for doing a first 2.9 (development series) GIMP release.

The babl library got floating point conversions optimized. Additionally, HSV and HSL color models were added, CIE LAB conversions were fixed.

Most exciting improvements, however, are in the new GEGL release. A total of 71 new image processing operations were added: mostly these are ports of existing GIMP filters. Some of the existing operations were improved, and some got OpenCL versions.

Another focus of this release was performance: OpenCL support is now enabled by default when detected, there’s experimental multithreading support (use GEGL_THREADS= environment variable) and experimental mipmap rendering (use GEGL_MIPMAP_RENDERING=true environment variable). There’s also a new default tile backend that writes to disk in a separate thread.

The Grid project contributed several major improvements: support for using URIs in image loaders and the loading of meta-operations in JSON, created with imgflo’s online graph editor.

GEGL’s website now features a gallery of available operations and an API browser.

This release of GEGL was brought to you through contributions from 92 people. Respective source code downloads are available on gimp.org: babl 0.1.12, GEGL 0.3.0.

There is still a lot of work to be done. If you are interested to contribute ports of GIMP filters to GEGL or entirely new GEGL operations, please visit our wiki and join #gegl on irc.gimp.net.