This is excellent! Not only does single-window mode look much cleaner and more organized (to me), but we'll finally be getting support for high color depth images. That's one of the biggest reasons many photographers have stuck with Photoshop. These are probably two of the largest, most significant changes to Gimp to come about in a long time. I'm surprised the version number wasn't bumped to 3.0.
edit: Is the GEGL backend port only partially complete? If so, how long until it's in place?
Other tweaks are nice and cosmetic: tooltip progress indicators for transforms, on-image text editing instead of awkwardly doing it in a separate window, etc.
Layer groups are another important organizational touch.
I'm very much looking forward to this. Great work, Gimp team!
Straight from the article, note that it explicitly says you won't have the high color depth image support:
What's really important, but maybe less user-noticeable, is behind the scene: library work. GIMP 2.8 is an intermediary step in the progress for GEGL integration (GEGL is a graph based image processing framework that will provide the core for GIMP, allowing for much advanced features). This process started with GIMP 2.6, advanced with 2.8, will be finished in 2.10. Expect the real meaty features (like high depth color channels) in the release after 2.10 (is not know if it will be labeles 2.12 or 3.0). For now GEGL is used in some UI elements and some optional filters and tools
"At the time this article is written, about 90% of the GIMP application’s core are ported to GEGL, and the only thing really missing are GeglOperations for all layer modes... GIMP 2.10’s core will be 100% ported to GEGL, and all of the legacy pixel fiddling API for plug-ins is going to be deprecated. Once the core is completely ported, it will be a minor effort to simply “switch on” high bit depths and whatever color models we’d like to see... The port lives in the goat-invasion branch in GIT. That branch will become master once GIMP 2.8 is relased, so the first GIMP 2.9 developer release will already contain the port in progress."
edit: Is the GEGL backend port only partially complete? If so, how long until it's in place?
Other tweaks are nice and cosmetic: tooltip progress indicators for transforms, on-image text editing instead of awkwardly doing it in a separate window, etc.
Layer groups are another important organizational touch.
I'm very much looking forward to this. Great work, Gimp team!