PhotoFlow as a GIMP plug-in

Software
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So, few days ago I was discussing about RAW processing with one of the GIMP developers… now, the great thing of discussing with smart people is that you have a good chance to get away with a smart idea.

In this specific case, she asked me: “Would it be difficult to modify PhotoFlow such that it works as a GIMP plug-in?”.
Honestly I’ve been initially a bit skeptical about the idea, but then the more I was thinking about that, the more it looked like something really great to have. Moreover, it doesn’t seem to represent an enormous amount of work, since 99% of the existing code can be used for the plug-in. The only thing I had to figure out is how to properly set-up the plug-in interface (and there the UFraw sources helped me a lot), and how to copy the processed image back to GIMP (still to be done).

While I cannot offer the plug-in as a Christmas present, it will hopefully come in some initial version in January. It might also be an interesting topic to present and discuss at the LGM meeting…

Here is a short “teaser” video to advertise the new functionality:

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all of you!

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Nice!

May I ask who that GIMP dev was you discussed it with?

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Sure, no problem!

The person is Elle Stone, and the idea came out during a scattered discussion about RAW conversion, linear vs. gamma encoding and color processing in general.

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This would simply be awesome, particularly if it worked out-of-the-box with Gimp2.9, unlike UfRaw.

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Yes, the idea is to take example from the recent modifications in the gmic plugin, and export 32-bit floating point data into gimp.

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An experimental version of the PhotoFlow GIMP plug-in is now available (GIMP 2.9 only)

The plug-in can be used to load and process RAW files directly from GIMP, pretty much like UFraw. The plug-in takes advantage of the high-bit depth capabilities of GIMP 2.9, and the processed image is transferred to GIMP in 32-bits floating point format. The current experimental code does not work with GIMP 2.8 or earlier.

The plug-in must be compiled from sources, and requires the installation of the GIMP 2.9 development packages.

If you feel brave enough to test it, here are the steps to follow:

  • clone the photoflow stable branch:
    git clone https://github.com/aferrero2707/PhotoFlow.git
    cd PhotoFlow
    git checkout stable
  • build photoflow:
  cd build
  ./build.sh
  • copy the plug-in executable to GIMP’s plug-in folder:
    cp -a Release/share/photoflow/plug-in/pfgimp $HOME/.config/GIMP/2.9/plug-ins/
  • start GIMP and open a RAW file; photoflow qill be used to process the file, as in the demo video

Any feedback will be greatly appreciated!

Work is still in progress, in particular ICC and EXIF data are still not transferred into GIMP…

Have a nice end of the year and an happy 2016!

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