Hello Linux Geeksters. As you may know, G’MIC (GREYC’s Magic Image Converter) is a editing tool, that can be used with GIMP or as a standalone application, being available for both Linux and Windows. G’MIC provides a window which enables the users to add more than 500 filters over photos and preview the result, in order to give the photos some other flavor.
G’Mic comes with different interfaces: a command-line tool, an interface for webcam manipulation, build in Qt and a library and plugin for GIMP.
The latest version available is G’Mic 1.6.1 which has been recently released, coming with the below huge list of changes.
New features:
- G’MIC can now use libcurl for a native support of downloading network files. Thanks Lukas, for the suggestion!
- New command -split_colors which decomposes an image into several images, each containing only a non-transparent single color. The plug-in filter Layers / Colors to layers has been updated to use this new command.
- gmic_split_colors by david_tschumperle
- Optimal preview size is automatically guessed at startup.
- New filter Black & White / Engrave which can render a wide variety of black and white effects from an image (opt. with color background), like comics-like rendering.
Improvements:
- Substituted strings @{ind,b}, @{ind,f} and @{ind,x} are not limited to 256 char anymore.
- Several sessions of valgrind and gprof and various static code analyzers allowed to optimize and stabilize the code of the interpreter.
- Suppressed warnings when compiling G’MIC with Visual Studio.
- Removed the ‘modified’ tag of image properties. Was computed but never used.
- Command ‘-solve’ now works to solve linear system with the right-hand side is a matrix instead of a vector.
- Math parser has now a predefined variable ‘ic’ equal to the median of the reference image.
- Better handling of ‘inf’ and ‘nan’ for G’MIC command arguments.
- Name of each layer is now passed to all G’MIC filters, and a filter can also output new layers with custom names.
- Improvements on how layers are modified. Filters now better preserve the user-defined blending mode, opacity, position and names of input layers.
- The plug-in better handles filters applied on selections.
- When updating filters, the current filter parameters are kept unchanged when possible.
- Better and customizable preview layout when previewing multiple output layers.
Bug fixes:
- Better precision and more robustness for texture mapping in 3d objects.
- Fixed small bug that prevents getting wrong values of the ‘ia’ variable when evaluating math expressions in a multi-threaded environment.
- Reading video files with ‘step_frame>1’ with OpenCV could hang, because of a unreleased mutex. This has been fixed.
- Fixed: wrong line number was displayed in case of an error happening just after a -endlocal directive.
- ZArt now compiles for both versions 4 and 5 of Qt.
In this article I will show you how to install G’Mic 1.6.1 on Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet, Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn, Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr, Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin, Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca, Linux Mint 17 Qiana, Linux Mint 13 Maya, Pinguy OS 14.04, Elementary OS 0.3 Freya, Elementary OS 0.2 Luna, Peppermint Five, Deepin 2014, LXLE 14.04, Linux Lite 2 and other Ubuntu derivative systems.
Because it will be soon available via the Gimp experimental PPA, installing G’Mic 1.6.1 on the listed Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Elementary OS and other Ubuntu derivative systems is easy. All you have to do is add the ppa to your system, update the local repository index and install the gmic package. Like this:
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:otto-kesselgulasch/gimp
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install gmic gimp-gmic
The latest version available is GIMP is Gimp 2.8.14, for installation instructions and more information, see this article.
Optional, to remove gmic and gimp-gmic, do:
$ sudo apt-get remove gmic gimp-gmic