Maurits thinks aloud

A very first screenshot of my Photoshop Actions plug-in in action. For this screenshot I’ve downloaded an action file (adactio actions.atn) from the Adobe site and put it in my GIMP scripts directory. This file contains a set with 4 different actions. All the actions that can be fully parsed and executed are colored green. For example “soft focus”, “drawing” and “moody” can be executed. The “lomo” action can’t be completed yet. This is due to an event that isn’t (fully) implemented. Events like “Gaussian Blur” and “Merge Layers” are also colored green, because they can be executed by GIMP.

If everything goes well we will release GIMP# 0.9 coming weekend (july 1st or 2nd).

And finally: I have created a poll here where you can give your opinion on GIMP#.

A picture (even an ugly one) often says more than a thousand words. Well, here is the picture:

Ok, maybe this does need a few words of explanation after all. Continue reading Photoshop actions with GIMP#, first results…

I started writing a GIMP# plug-in that can read and play Photoshop action files. The fileformat is quite easy to reengineer, using the Photoshop 6.0 documentation and a trial version of Photoshop.

Lots of actions map on a GIMP equivalent. I downloaded about 100 action files and created a top 25 of most often used functions. At the top are functions like Brightness/Contrast, Set Selection, Gaussian Blur, etc. etc. The first function without a direct GIMP equivalent is the Chrome filter.

The current status of this new plug-in: it can succesfully parse the top 25. Next step is to implement the execution in GIMP of these actions. This is pretty straightforward. As soon as this is finished we can play a small percentage of all Photoshop actions that are out there, maybe 5 %. Finally I will start implementing actions untill we reach about 10 % when we release GIMP# 0.9. Future versions of GIMP# will of course slowly increase this percentage and hopefully we can get to somewhere between 80 and 90 %. That would make thousands of Photoshop actions available to GIMP.