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 1.6.2 which has been recently released, coming with the below huge list of changes.
New features:
- New command ‘-apply_timeout’ allows to apply a G’MIC command with a time out, so that the commands throws an error if the invoked pipeline takes too much time to finish.
- New native command -boxfilter applies a box filter of order 0,1 or 2 to selected images.
- New native commands -serialize and -unserialize which respectively transform a list of images into a single image (serialized compressed representation) and uncompress it back to a list of images.
- New convenience command -fps which return the number of times this command is called in a second. Useful to get the framerate when doing animations.
- New command -transition which computes a transition between two images, given a user-defined spatial transition map. New filter for GIMP Sequences / Spatial transition allows to use this command from the plug-in.
- New filter Colors / Transfer colors [advanced] which implements a smart color transfer algorithm between two images.
Improvements:
- The interpreter is now more precise when giving the line number in case of an error happening in a -if..-endif bloc. When one bloc is not closed, it also reminds the starting line of the corresponding bloc.
- Command -blur now accepts c for the smoothing axis parameter.
- Introduced ‘pre-releases’ that correspond more or less to the previous ‘beta’ state. Pre-releases are intended to propose intermediate versions of G’MIC that are considered as stable enough, and released frequently. On the contrary, the final ‘stable’ versions will be released less often.
- Update files are now even more compressed on the server. Specialized update files for the cli tools (cli_updateXXXX.gmic) and the gimp plug-in (gimp_updateXXXX.gmic) are generated.
- Command -input: G’MIC now load correctly multi-page tiff or gif files without extensions.
- When command with a selection is misspelled, the suggested alternative command displayed is now more precise.
- Command -displacement now accepts an additional [constraints] parameter that constrain points of the estimated motion field to have specific values.
- Command -warp has two new warping mode, namely forward-absolute and forward-relative, the two previous existing modes corresponding then to backward-absolute and backward-relative.
- The embedded math parser knows a new function ‘isin(value,value0,…,valueN)’ that returns 0 (false) or 1 (true) whether the first argument ‘value’ appears in the list of other values passed as arguments.
- All G’MIC custom commands are now stored in a compressed form in the ‘gmic’ executables, which makes the binaries with 3.5x less size than in previous releases.
- The filters are now automatically updated at startup.
- When running a filter, the progress bar now shows the elapsed time as well as the amount of memory used by the filter.
Bug-fixes:
- Fixed: Character ‘\0’ was not added automatically when reading a compressed command file with command -command.
- Fixed: When loading .cimgz files, the endianness of the data was not taken into account (could result in reading inverted data).
- Fixed: Command -noarg invoked in a -local…-endlocal block was ignored.
- Fixed: Selection was not taken into account when displaying the error message in command ‘-error’.
- Some minor bugs have been fixed thanks to the great ‘-fsanitize=address’ option of g++. Thanks Lukas for the hint!
In this article I will show you how to install G’Mic 1.6.2 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 1.6.2 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
Optional, to remove gmic and gimp-gmic, do:
$ sudo apt-get remove gmic gimp-gmic
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