# State of Libre Graphics

## Animation

### Blender
- Epic Mega Grant - $1.2M in cash to the Blender Foundation to "further the success of Blender"
- Blender 2.80.x releases
- New UI
- Quick Favorites menu
- New Workspace
- Eevee - new real-time renderer
- 2D Animation with Grease Pencil
- Blender Conference Los Angeles - June 1-2, 2020
- Accepted to GSOC 2020 - Apply to get paid to develop for Blender!

### Synfig Studio
- 1.3.12 released on Febuary 7, 2020
- "beta" version of 1.4.0
- Playback cache to make animations smoother
- Custom playback range and looped playback
- Video import
- Export animations for web
- Acepted to GSOC 2020

### OpenToonz
- Version 1.4 released on Febuary 1, 2020
- Guided drawing/auto-in-betweening
- XDTS file support
- Cache folder replacement & clear cache command
- Context-aware toolbar
- Canon DSLR camera capture support (Windows only for now)

### enve
- new 2D animation project
- Timeline-based animation, automatic tweening, all objects’ and filters’ properties are animatable
- Supported objects: Bezier curve, ellipse, rectangle, text, brush strokes
- Uses MyPaint’s brushlib as the painting engine, relies on Qt’s native graphic tablets support
- Ships with a basic selection of blending and compositing modes for objects (Porter-Duff, as well as Screen, Overlay, Color Dodge, Color Burn etc.)
- Supports multiple scenes per project
- Imports image sequences, video and audio files
- Outputs anything that FFmpeg supports
- Has separation into core and GUI and supports pluggable path and raster effects, including GLSL fragment shaders
- Has configurable preview resolution for better performance control, you can use presets or input anything between 0% and 999%
- Works on Linux, can be made to run on Windows and macOS (Qt)

---

## Drawing & Painting

### Inkscape

* First 1.0 beta released (Sept).
* Native macOS app
* Theming support
* Canvas mirror/rotation and alignment
* HiDPI support
* Variable fonts (if built with pango >= 1.41.1)
* Non-destructive boolean operations

### Krita

* Bugs: 1236 new, 1272 closed
* 2271 commits from 60 contributors
* Nine releases (4.2.0 - 4.2.8)
* HDR editing! (4.2.0)
* Four GSoC students
* 2,346,618 unique direct downloads (from krita.org)
* krita-artists.org (1,000 active users)
* $25k Epic Mega grant!

### MyPaint

MyPaint 2.0.0 was released in February 2020 with features such as:

- Linear compositing and spectral blending now used by default to create artwork emulating the use of traditional media
- New brush settings and inputs such as attack angle, zoom level, and barrel rotation
- Four new symmetry painting modes
- Floodfill enhancements including offset useful when the fill does not flow into the outline sufficiently

### Akira
- UI/UX design application using Vala and GTK (elementaryOS)

### Drawpile
- Collaborative drawing program that allows multiple users to draw on the same canvas simultaneously
- Version 2.1.17 released on Febuary 16, 2020 (Updates to admin interface)
- Supports OpenRaster format

---

## Video

### Kdenlive
The April 2020 release of Kdenlive will mark one year since the timeline rewrite. Over the year Kdenlive received a whole lot of improvements and stabilization.

- 3 point editing.
- Audio mixer.
- Huge performance improvements due to optimizations in timeline and addition of *Preview Scaling* in monitors.
- Kdenlive support added upstream to OpenTimeline(OTIO).
- Pitch shift on speed change.
- Tagging and rating of clips in the Project Bin.
- Work on new titler rewrite started as part of GSOC.
- Audio recording into timeline.
- Easier timeline keyframe handling.

Expected features this year:
- Nested timelines.
- Finish implementing OTIO in Kdenlive.
- Audio mapping/remapping and routing.
- Finish new titler.

Also in April the team will be having their yearly Kdenlive sprint right before LGM.

### Olive

Since May 2019, Olive has been undergoing a major rewrite intended to lay solid future-proof foundation:

- node-based processing
- completely new EXR-based caching system
- better memory management
- color management via OpenColorIO etc.

### Shotcut
- Version 20.02.16
- Low resolution previews (proxy clips)
- Audio Pitch Filter - Change audio speed without changing pitch
- 150 new transitions
- Other notable features in the last year:
- More flexible timeline
- Keyframes toolbar and hotkeys for trimming clips
- More of everything: filters, transitions, audio effects

### Flowblade

### Pitivi
- GSOC 2019 results:
- Redesigned effects library
- Thumbnails in effects library
- "Favorite" effects list
- Improved effects workflow - search-based instead of list-based

https://yatinmaan.github.io/2019/08/26/GSoC-19-Final-Report/

### OpenShot
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/02/openshot-2-5-release-install-on-ubuntu

### Open Broadcaster Studio (OBS)
- Version 25 (currently RC releases)
- Vulkan-based games capture
- Capture browser & browser-based windows, browser plugin for Linux
- SRT protocol support (Secure Reliable Transport)
- Version 24.x releases
- Pause recording
- Automatically adjust bitrate when congestion occurs
- Launched sponsorship program via Open Collective and patreon - Feb 2019
- Facebook becomes a Premiere Sponsor (2020-02-19)
- NVIDIA becoems a Diamond Sponsor & OBS at TwitchCon (2019-09-26)
- Twitch Sponsorship (2019-09)
-

### Natron
- Ole Andre has picked up development again
- Bug fixes on-going
- Joined PIXLS.US forum for support

---

## Photography

### RawTherapee

* Newly redesigned website @ rawtherapee.com
* macOS package: the executable loader is now gone in favor of LaunchServices, completing *Catalina* support. (v5.8/dev)
* Dev @agriggio has [hardforked](https://bitbucket.org/agriggio/ART) Another RawTherapee (ART) with a new pipeline and UI refinements.

### raw.pixls.us
This was a successful year for RPU, a sustained growth continues:
| | 2018 | 2019 |
| --------------- | -------------------- | --------------------- |
| Samples | 925 → 1163 (+25.73%) | 1163 → 1346 (+15.74%) |
| Cameras | 592 → 695 (+17.4%) | 695 → 777 (+11.8%) |
| Makes | 41 → 45 (+9.76%) | 45 → 56 (+24.44%) |
| Non-CC0 samples | 249 → 212 (-14.86%) | 212 → 195 (-8.02%) |
| Missing cameras | 184 → 166 (-9.78%) | 166 → 165 (-0.6%) |
*Remember, you **can** contribute, see [this post](https://discuss.pixls.us/t/raw-samples-wanted/5420?u=lebedevri) for details.*
It seems, since it's resurrection in late 2016/early 2017, RPU has by now almost caught up with all the backlog (missing samples), and the growth is slowing down, with most of the new contributions being from fresh newly-released cameras

### [RawSpeed](https://rawspeed.org/) (@LebedevRI)
*NOTE: a RawSpeed-centric 2016-2020(?) retrospective may be published later.*
* The library has been stabilized by now, all detectable undefined behaviours have been eradicated, the library is fully oss-fuzz clean!
* Support for 35 new cameras was added.
* No new decoders/decompressors were added that year
* Finally, it was time to give some much needed attention to performance, which resulted in widespread performance tuning, resulting in mean improvement in decoding speed of `-20%` (*sic!*) over all the tracked data points ([raw.pixls.us masterset](https://raw.pixls.us/data-unique/))
* As usual, *many* bugreports got filed against the compiler, and *many* rough edges got polished (more patches in-flight); perhaps the most obviously-impactful was [D67318 [SimplifyCFG] FoldTwoEntryPHINode(): consider *total* speculation cost, not per-BB cost](https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/commit/10151f661854e3ee4922662f1d0f62b327cbfa8c), which helped [get rid of nasty branching in JPEG value extension](https://godbolt.org/z/u_g-cu).
* A CMake infrastructure was added to allow integration of RawSpeed into LLVM LNT / Test-Suite.

### darktable
- Version 3.0 released
- New GUI, everything now themable via CSS
- Culling mode in the lighttable view - pan and zoom images
- Timeline view - select images by date range
- Lighttable rewrite - much better performance, usable on 4/5K monitors
- New Filmic RGB module replaces base curve, shadows & highlights, and other global tonemapping modules
- Tone Equalizer module - remap tones quickly and easily, like Adam's Zone System
- RGB Curve and RGB Levels modules
- Much improved Profiled Denoise module. No longer necessary to use 2 insances of the module
- 3D LUT module - apply PNG Hald-CLUT and .CUBE LUTs to your images
- Reworked Tagging module - hierarchical view, private tags, synonyms search
- Raster mask, copy parametric masks to other modules in the pixel pipeline

### PhotoFlow

Raw image editor with a workflow based on non-destructive layers and opacity masks. The current focus is on stabilizing the application and polishing the user interface in view of a new official release:
* the user interface layout has been re-organized to maximize the space available for the preview image, even on small screens
* the dynamic range compression (AKA shadows/highlights adjustment) and local-contrast enhancement tools have been re-written to use a guided filter as the underlying low-pass filter, resulting in much improved halo control
* an improved image caching mechanism has been implemented, that allows to limit the total amount of memory used for caching the intermediate results of the processing pipeline
* lots of bugs have been fixed and the overall stability of the application has been greatly improved

### Rapid Photo Downloader

Rapid Photo Downloader imports photos and videos from cameras, phones, memory cards and other devices at high speed. It can be configured to rename photos and videos with meaningful filenames. It can also back up photos and videos as they are downloaded. It downloads from and backs up to multiple devices simultaneously.

Highlights from the past year's releases:
* Added HEIF / HEIC image support. 10 bit images will be supported when libheif and pyheif support them.
* Dramatically improved high DPI monitor support.
* Fixed bug where cameras and phones could no longer be accessed after change in GIO/GVFS.

### Filmulator

### [rawproc](https://github.com/butcherg/rawproc) (@butcherg)

* A personal attempt to make a GUI equivalent to dcraw.
* Uses a 'toolchain' processing pipe, where the raw image is opened, and tools are added in sequence to do the processing. The user is responsible for specifying each and every operation, in whatever sequence they desire.
* The toolchain is presented as a tree structure; each tool maintains a copy of the resulting image from its processing, and any tool can be selected to display its result. Isn't that what memory is for?? :D
* The batch program, img, stores the toolchain it used to make the output image in the metadata; with a special Open menu item, rawproc can extract that toolchain, open the original raw, and re-apply the processing to duplicate the output image. **No sidecars!!!**
* Internal working image is 32-bit float.
* LittleCMS, Lensfun, Libraw, librtprocess, and (coming soon) exiv2 provide heavy lifting in their respective milieu.
* Image formats include JPEG, TIFF, and PNG, in addition to Libraw's extensive raw support.

### GIMP
prokoudine already did the heavy lifting with others in this post:
https://www.gimp.org/news/2020/01/04/gimp-and-gegl-in-2019/

Crib from there.

### Siril
https://www.siril.org/
Siril recently started hosting their forums with PIXLS (discuss.pixls.us/siril).

v0.9.12 released NOV 2019:
https://www.siril.org/2019/11/04/siril-0-9-12-is-available/

Started a YouTube channel with relevant videos:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_8UVzay-xlds4pjyRhHUOw

Moved to [Github](https://gitlab.com/free-astro/siril) recently.

* Preparing 1.0 version with huge UI refactoring
* Working now on the floating point precision version needed in astrophotography

### Luminance HDR

* Four new tone-mapping operators (ferwerda, kimkautz, lischinski, vanhateren).
* Speed optimizations for tone-mapping and HDR creation (thanks to Ingo Weyrich from RawTherapee helping out)
* Added post-processing gamma and saturation
* Previews in HDR Wizard

### HDRmerge
- Version 0.6 released which migrated to QT5

### Geeqie
- Version 1.5 released July 28, 2019
- Partial implementation of Hi-DPI-aware rendering of images
- Improved multi display full screen
- Use GPS lat/long to provide local time corrected for UTC offset and DST correction.
- Marks/image connections can optionally be saved in a text file
- Show star rating
- Search using regular expressions

### Photoflare
* 5 new releases.
* 25 bugs fixed.
* 5 feature improvements.
* 2 new langauge translations. (Czech, Chinese Simplified)
* 12 new features.
* Created User documentation as Github pages.
* Flatpak packaging.
* Lots of new keyboard shortcuts.
* Make use of OpenMP to use multiple threads for graphicsmagick filters.

## Fonts

### FontForge

Three releases in 2019

Deprecates Python2 support for Python3-only-ness; adds some design features like allowing users to decompose glyphs into components.

Recent work to port the in-house GUI library to run on standard GDK/GTK, which in turn makes Wayland support possible and life better in general.

* UFOv3 file support
* WOFF2 export
* Unicode 12.1 support

### Variable fonts

* Google Fonts project has been adapting open source fonts into variable fonts
* They work on all the FOSS browser engines now (including WebKitGTK)
* They work in GTK and GNOME

### Other tools
* TruFont, cross-platform font editor, picking up more developers
* Several new utilities in the Mac font-editor ecosystem have been released as FOSS (Speedpunk, Font Goggles)
### fontmake and Font Bakery
* Open source tools for building fonts from any source format (including proprietary ones)
* Open source quality assurance & CI for font builds

## Desktop Publishing

### Scribus

Most recent release: 1.5.5, from August 2019:
https://bugs.scribus.net/changelog_page.php?version_id=106

* Dark UI theme support
* Updates to Scripter
* Complex script (writing systems) support for hyphenation and numbering
* Detailed messages for fonts missing from a document

### Laidout

Improvements over the last year:

* Automatic AppImage development builds
* Html gallery export
* Better object bleeding across pages
* Object clipping with easy clip path editing

### LibreOffice Writer

* Many improvements to table editing (moving rows & columns, pasting into multiple cells)
* You can automatically avoid overlapping objects
* Bottom-to-top text support
* Improvements to editing auto-numbered lists
* Full edge-to-edge page backgrounds
* Improved forms support
* Improved support for Word and DOCX embedded features (charts, endnotes, etc)

### David Revoy (Pepper & Carrot) F/OSS publishing pipeline
https://www.davidrevoy.com/article757/the-english-book-printed-project-production-report-3

## Sponsorships and Grants
Epic Megagames grants? List?
OBS got a bunch of new sponsors this year as well.