Maurits thinks aloud

I have been playing with the thought of support for Photoshop actions in GIMP#. There are however several hurdles:

• Adobe stopt documenting their fileformats after Photoshop 6.0. The good news is that since then the format of the action files hasn't changed (much). The bad thing is that lots of new functions have been introduced. This will require some serious reengineering.
• It's not always a one on one mapping of functionality. Filters like "Gaussian blur" are available in both Photoshop and GIMP. There are however lots of other filters that don't have an equivalent. When we are lucky we might be able to map some filters to one or more other filters. For example the GIMPressionist plug-in might be able to emulate several Photoshop plug-ins.
• Even if the plug-ins are similar, there might for example be a difference in the range of the parameters.
• Probaby more to come…

So in theory this should be possible for a subset of all Photoshop actions. This would add a lot of cool stuff to GIMP and it would certainly help to make the transition from Photoshop to GIMP even easier.

We are making nice progress on GIMP# 0.9. Max has already completed a port of the Krita Raindrops filter. Our C# implementation seems to be at least as fast as the original C++ implementation. I really doubt that this is caused by C# being faster than C or C++.

Most performance measurements I've done so far seem to indicate that C# is about half as fast (or twice as slow ) than C. This probably has more to do with the underlying GIMP and Krita code which would indicate that GIMP is faster than Krita.

Max also started on a port of the Forge plug-in which was originally derived long time ago from the ppmforge utility found in netpbm.

Now, what have I been doing for the last few weeks? To start with, GIMP# plug-ins can now be called non interactively. This means that you can write for example script-fu that calls the Ministeck plug-in. Secondly I worked on the API to get closer to 100 % GIMP coverage. Along with that I've implemented more unit tests and fixed quite a few bugs doing so.

And lately I've start working on the Shatter plug-in. This is a port of the Shatter plug-in that comes with Xenofex package for Photoshop. An example:

From the description on the Xenofex homepage: Shatter explodes images and selections into little pieces and shards that fly off the page.

That's all for now, thanks for listening

Sometimes life is good. I came across a site with nice information about simulating of lightning. The results look quite impressive and my first thought was that this would be very nice for a GIMP# plug-in. Too bad they had no source code available. So I decided to contact the author and he nicely responded that he was going to talk to some people at the university where this program was created. A day later he mailed me back that they are going to release the source!

The lesson I learned: if you ask people politely they are very often willing to help you.