Compared to Photoshop you maybe noticed that down/or upscaling images results in poorer quality in GIMP than in Adobes graphics flagship. With your help this could change … very soon!

Crowd funding is a concept of raising money from lots of different sources (many people donate to a special project). There was a discussion already if the whole GIMP development should be speed up using this kind of development. It was rejected for the main development. But the concept itself is awesome – the money is raised to support one or more developers which spend the time working on the project. Without they wouldn’t be able to fully work on that and it would take ages to have something completed.

On freedomsponsors.org Nicolas Robidoux (he is working on GEGL for many years and is also involved in ImageMagick and VIPS) started a project that will heavily improve scaling methods in GIMP (via new and improved GEGL samplers). The whole project needs a lot of time! So he divided the project into 8 steps (one followed one by another) that are worth 5500 USD in total (~20+ weeks of development for all steps). That means if you donate, GIMP will definitely benefit from it, whether if only 2 or all 8 steps are funded through your help.

If you ever wanted to have high quality state of the art scaling in GIMP (which is definitely needed!) donate to this project! It directly flows into GEGL (GIMPs new graphics engine) and will be available in the next version of GIMP.

Alexandre has published a long article with more information on the details.

Head over to this freedomsponsors.org issue and support it.

Update [Jan. 1st, 2013]: Nicolas completed step 1, 2 and 3. He implemented 2 new great sampler that are already found in GIMP 2.9 (development version).