November 21 marks 25 years since the first announcement of the free graphics editor GIMP. The project grew out of coursework by two Berkeley students, Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis. Both authors were interested in computer graphics and were dissatisfied with the level of UNIX imaging applications.
Initially, the Motif library was used for the program interface. But in the course of working on version 0.60, Peter got tired of this toolkit so much that he wrote his own and called it GTK (GIMP ToolKit). Later, GNOME and Xfce user environments, several forks of GNOME, and hundreds, if not thousands, of individual applications were written based on GTK.
In the late 90s, a group of developers from the Hollywood studio Rhythm & Hues became interested in the project and prepared a version of GIMP with support for increased bit depth per color channel and basic animation tools. Since the architecture of the resulting project did not satisfy them, they decided to write a new graphics processing engine on acyclic graphs and eventually created the base of the GEGL library. The previously created fork of GIMP lived its short life under the name FilmGIMP, was later renamed Cinepaint and was used in the production of more than two dozen big-budget films. Among them: "The Last Samurai", "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen", "Harry Potter" series, "Planet of the Apes", "Spider-Man".
In 2005, new developer Evind Kolas took over the development of GEGL, and a year later the team began to slowly rewrite GIMP to use GEGL. This process dragged on for almost 12 years, but in the end, by 2018, the program completely switched to a new engine and received support for working with an accuracy of up to 32 bits of floating point per channel. This is one of the main conditions for the possibility of using the program in a professional environment.
Between 2005 and 2012, the team collaborated with Peter Sikking, head of the Berlin-based UX/UI company Man+Machine Works. Peter's team helped the GIMP developers formulate a new position for the project, conducted two rounds of interviews with the target audience, wrote a number of functional specifications, and designed several improvements to the interface. The most popular of these were the single-window interface and the new framing tool, the concept of active zones which later migrated to other applications such as darktable and LuminanceHDR. The most unpopular is the division into saving design data (XCF) and exporting all the rest (JPEG, PNG, TIFF, etc.).
In 2016, the project launched its own long-running animation project, ZeMarmot, which is working on some ideas to improve GIMP for the target audience. The latest such improvement is support for multiple selection of layers in the unstable development branch.
GIMP 3.0 is currently being prepared, based on GTK3. Implementation of non-destructive image processing is planned for version 3.2.
The two original GIMP developers continue to work together (one of them actually married the other's sister) and are now leading the project. CockroachDB.
Peter Mattis joined in the congratulations and thanked the volunteers who continue the project he started.
Spencer Kimball a few days ago gave video interview about CockroachDB. At the beginning of the interview, he briefly talked about the history of the creation of GIMP (05:22), and then at the end, when asked by the host what achievement he is most proud of, he answered (57:03): βCockroachDB is approaching this status, but GIMP is still my favorite project. Every time I install GIMP I see it getting better again. If GIMP were the only project I created, I would consider my life worth living."
Source: linux.org.ru