Safe as Milk

Krita is now officially blowing my mind

Boudewijn Rempt has made an art of dropping short notes about HUGE features in his blog. Yesterday, he wrote this:

Casper Boemann has added a 16-bit L*a*b colorspace to Krita and thoroughly reviewed the color management path making it very dependable. And now that Adobe allows anyone to download and package a set of high quality icc profiles with their application, the results are good, too. Casper has also added autoscroll to KPresenter and Krita, and the code is generic, so it can spread to other KOffice apps.

Holy shit!!!

I guess they’ve got the object model for the data sorted out, and now it’s just a question of implementing the back-ends, and putting an interface on them. This is massive. Krita can now do 8 bit integer, 16 bit integer, La*b*, RGB, CMYK… these guys are adding major new functionality every week these days. I recently asked Boudewijn if there were plans to add support for floating point, and he reckoned it would be possible to do in a couple of weeks (!)

I guess all they’re missing to take over the world is a plug-in framework, and a bunch of 3rd party plug-ins.

The LGM logo

Every conference needs a logo, and we have ours:

I really can’t thank Andreas Nilsson enough for his work on the artwork. I just didn’t have to think about it. I seem to recall discussing ideas with him on a Friday afternoon, and waking up on Saturday morning with a load of goodies in my inbox.

In his words, he “draws the pretty pictures”. And I’m very glad he came to GUADEC last year to tell us that 😉

Libre Graphics Meeting news

Some news just in about the Libre Graphics Meeting – we will have a new free software project at the conference, Xara Xtreme. The details still need to be worked out, but it’s always good to see companies converting to the GPL.

In other news:

• Gerald Friedland, the creator of SIOX will present his work Friday morning.
• Inkscape hacker & artist Andy Fitzsimon has confirmed he’ll be there, and giving an Inkscape tutorial involving “workflow and nice tips & tricks”, which promises to be cool.
• Jon Phillips (again of Inkscape) will be talking about Creative Commons – which is particularly appropriate at a conference which is likely to attract top-notch content creators.

Libre Graphics Meeting website

The Libre Graphics Meeting website is online at http://www.libregraphicsmeeting.org – it’s a SPIP backed site, and I’m still trying to figure out the basics (like how the front page layout is done), and I’m looking for people willing to help out with the content. All offers welcome.

The banner to the left was designed by Andreas Nilssen, who also came up with the site’s other banner. Please feel free to use it to link to the conference site.

Many thanks to David Odin and pollux from CPE for getting the site hosted, and to Laotseu (Alexandre from ALDIL) for doing the site design and SPIP installation. And of course Andreas for the graphics.

Libre Graphics Meeting

Due to the increasingly varied nature of the projects which will be represented in Lyon March next year, the conference will undergo a name-change. The GIMP developers conference will still take place, but it will be as part of the Libre Graphics Meeting – LGM for short, if you’re into acronyms, pronounced glam. Don’t ask. Just pronounce it glam. Or say LGM. Whichever you feel like. Or just use the long name, so people know what you’re talking about.

The Libre Graphics Meeting will be a meeting of minds and bodies involved in libre graphics. That is, people who program, work with, or want to find out more about free software graphics applications. It’ll be a blast.

The web-page for now is in the GIMP wiki. Please feel free to aliment it with ideas, feedback, comments and abuse.

GimpCon update

It’s been a busy 24 hours.

• Ton Roosendaal of the Blender Foundation has tentatively accepted to present Project Orange in Lyon.
• Developers from littlecms and Inkscape have expressed an interest in coming and presenting their projects.
• There will be a contingent from Scribus, the free desktop publishing app.
• We will have at least 2 presentations around the GIMP.

I need to write all this up in a schedule, as soon as these are confirmed properly. But for the first 48 hours after the confirmation of the dates, it’s not bad at all. This’ll be a real Free Graphics dream team.

The GIMP Conference 2006

I have a huge backlog of news – I guess I’ll not get rid of it any other way that one item at a time.

So, let’s get started – a new conference will hit people’s calendars next year. For the time being, we’re calling it GimpCon, but that may change, because it’s increasingly inaccurate.

The 17/18/19 March, in Lyon, France, there will be a gathering. There will be lots of GIMP people, obviously, but also people from the Scribus project, hopefully also from Blender, Inkscape, littlecms, Krita and other free software graphics projects. I am putting together the basics of a schedule now (consider this a call for proposals, if you’re interested, although I will be doing the rounds of graphics projects mailing lists).

There will be 2 days of presentations, tutorials, technical talks – these are aimed for people interested in image processing in general, and probably about 2/3rd aimed towards application use (professionals and home users, roughly 50/50) and around 1/3 aimed towards people who want to learn about the principles involved (potential developers, students). A third day is unplanned – since the main point of the weekend is to get together, meet people, maybe do some brainstorming and hacking, this day is completely freeform. The public are welcome on all 3 days.

There is a real buzz about this conference – people on different projects are telling me “finally, I’ve been dying to meet people on these projects for years”, or “I have so much to learn, and I’d love to meet all these people”. I have no idea what to expect, but I think it’s going to be great, and the attendance levels are probably going to blow us away.

David and Oscar, I hope ye know what we’ve let ourselves in for…