Libre Graphics World

Week highlights: GEGL is getting its own compositing tool, pre-release of G'MIC 2.5.0 now available, a new development snapshot of Synfig released, new node brush prototype for Blender 2.80 available.

Highlights of the week: Blender Fund now raises 25K euro a month, Ton Roosendal received Ub Iwerks Award, OpenToonz 1.3 has been released, Intel published open source projects for AV1 encoding and image denoising, FreeCAD got a ton of new features for architects, more new features in Olive.

The range of topics I cover at Libre Graphics World tends to unevenly stretch in all directions. One interesting project that caught my attention (and was further reinforced there by a few passionate readers over the last weekend) is a Kickstarter campaign to fund development of Akira, a free/libre application streamlined for making UI mockups.

Week highlights: first MyPaint 2.0 alpha release, new tools In Blender's Grease Pencil, more add-ons ported to Blender 2.80, new features in various video editors, first full sequence screenshot of Spring animated movie in Blender VSE, upcoming IFC diffing in FreeCAD.

Earlier this week, Google Cloud and Sony Pictures Imageworks announced immediate availability of OpenCue, an open source render manager for media and entertainment.

Week highlights: new Inkscape releases, new features in GIMP, Krita, and MyPaint, various Blender add-ons' updates, bugfix updates for MuseScore and Sonic Visualiser, new features in Olive and OpenShot.

While GIMP is undergoing major refactoring and UI update with GTK+3, it's fun watching one of very few successful GIMP semi-forks rise from the ashes again. And this one is interesting because Seashore is a native Cocoa app for macOS and it has just landed to Apple's App Store, while being GNU GPL v2 licensed.

Week highlights: improved performance in GIMP, better smudging and initial filmic support in MyPaint, more HDR work in Krita, various improvements in many NLEs, stereoscopy rendering is back to Blender's viewport.

There are many reasons one could wish for a simple general image editor on Linux. Maybe you just want to crop a photo, and GIMP is a bit too much. Or you want to scribble over an image, and Krita is an overkill. Whatever your reason is, with Pinta gone (or dormant) there haven't been too many options left around. PhotoFlare is one of them.

The winter break highlights: MuseScore 3.0 release, Blender turned 25 years old, Google joined the Blender Development Fund, lots of improvements in FreeCAD, GIMP, and Olive, annual reports from a variety of projects.