Hello,

We recently published our (regrettably belated) annual project report:

https://www.gimp.org/news/2017/01/15/2016-in-review/

We tried to keep it short, so it's only a few minutes read.

There are, however, more news.

First of all, last week, Michael Natterer and Øyvind Kolås started cleaning up libgimp to prepare it for the v2.10 release which will happen some time later this year. Most of the work is currently happening in the code related to layer blending modes. The refactoring involves introducing streamlined workflow for handling linear pixel data. More work will be done at the end of January during a week-long project meeting in Barcelona (details to follow separately).

Which brings us to the next major topic.

As you very well know, we don't organize project-level paid development at this time; instead we encourage personal fundraisers that focus on particular missing features in GIMP. One of such enterprises was recently started by Øyvind Kolås.

Øyvind has been working on GEGL since mid-2000s, he's the principal developer of that project with a 42% share of all changes. He is now looking for community's support to further improve this engine.

The more time he can spend on GEGL, the more we can improve performance of GIMP (v2.10 and onwards) and the faster we can implement more advanced features, such as layer effects, non-destructive editing, and CMYK/spot colors support (in the 3.x series of releases).

You can fund Øyvind's work at Patreon:

https://www.patreon.com/pippin

Additionally, if you want GIMP to have better animation capabilities, you can support ZeMarmot, upcoming GIMP-powered animated movie by Jehan Pagès. Part of the funding will cover the expenses of developing a better animation plug-in. Jehan recently posted about the ongoing work in details:

https://girinstud.io/news/2016/12/zemarmot-end-of-year-report/

Jehan is one of our most active contributors in recent years. Earlier he successfully completed another community-funded feature -- symmetric painting mode which is available since v2.9.4 and will be part of v2.10. Here is his Patreon page:

https://www.patreon.com/zemarmot

We expect to ship v2.10 later this year with 16/32-bit per color channel precision, basic OpenEXR support, new and updated tools, UI updates, and many more changes. For the complete list of new features and improvements so far please refer to https://wiki.gimp.org/wiki/Release:2.10_changelog. For the development roadmap, please read https://wiki.gimp.org/wiki/Roadmap.

Best regards, Alex

I fund Krista and Blender. It appears Gimp is caught up in GEGL hellll.