GimpPlugins

Gimp 2.4

how to install plugins, like [WWW] http://registry.gimp.org/plugin?id=3515?

Gimp 2.2

There is now standard functions for preview in plugins, see the developer documentation for details.

Warning: If you compiled a plugins with gimp-2.2 and it crashs, verify that the gimp-2.0 libraries are not in your library search path. plugins compiled with gimp-2.0 work fine with gimp-2.2

Gimp 2.0

The plugins included with Gimp 2.0 are a hodgepodge. Most of them were ported from Gimp 1.2 with only the minimal changes required to make them work. Some are useful, others are toys; some are well-designed, others not. Because a substantial part of the user's experience with Gimp depends on plugins, there is a need to improve their organization and functionality. This Wiki can serve as a place for ideas and criticism. If you have ideas about how plugins can be improved, or if you believe the opinions expressed here are incorrect or incomplete, please edit this page. If you want to express an opinion or suggest a change, but don't want to be so assertive as to modify the existing text, add it in brackets, possibly with your name, like this: [Luigi: I use this all the time, and would be sad if it went away!].

Note that there are also two other mechanisms for discussing these issues: Gimp Bugzilla and the developer's mailing list. Each has its place. The Wiki is useful for high-level planning, because Bugzilla and the mailing list are "random access": they don't have any intrinsic organization beyond the thread level. Nevertheless, when it comes time to actually change the code, it is important to begin by filing a bug in Bugzilla describing the issues to be addressed and the changes proposed to address them. When you do so, please add a reference in the Wiki to the Bugzilla bug number, and a reference to the Wiki discussion in Bugzilla.

Overall

Generally speaking, most of the included plugins could benefit from user interface enhancements. If you are a programmer who is interested in working on Gimp stuff, plugins are an excellent place to start, because they are separate executables, which means that you can modify them without worrying about wrecking something in the core and making the whole Gimp unusable -- also the amount of code you have to look at is much less than if you work on the core. Nevertheless, you have access, through the procedural database, to most of the Gimp's functionality, so it is a great learning experience. One improvement that almost every plugin needs is tooltips for the controls. Also, each of them should have an About button that shows, at a minimum, a brief description of the function of the plugin. Other ideas are listed in association with specific plugins. [need link here to instructions about plugin programming]

Many of the plugins would benefit from improved previews of their results. There is a tentative plan to include a special Preview widget for plugin programmers in Gimp 2.2, so it might be best to wait a bit before tackling this issue. Some of the plugins make use of the gtk_preview widget, which is now deprecated and ought to go away.

There are numerous poorly chosen labels and parameter names. In particular, many plugins have a frame labeled "Parameter settings". This is simply meaningless clutter. If there is no more informative label that could be used, then no label at all would be better.

Category: Noise

This category contains six menu entries: Hurl, Pick, Slur, Noisify, Scatter HSV, and Spread. Three of these---Hurl, Pick, and Slur---come from the same plugin, which is called Randomize. Hurl replaces some pixels with random ones, while Pick and Slur rearrange pixels in different ways. These forms of noise are actually not very useful to most users, and there is no good reason for them to stay in the main distribution. (They can be moved to the plugin registry web page.)

The other three, in contrast, are quite useful, but two of them are poorly named.

Noisify randomizes, by a controllable amount, the R, G, and B channels of each pixel. The name "noisify" is basically meaningless when it appears in the Noise menu: this might better be renamed "Scatter RGB". The user interface is basically clean and good.

Scatter HSV does essentially the same thing as noisify, except that it operates in HSV space rather than RGB space. The preview is powerful but ugly and hard to use---it would be better to have a simple preview like Noisify does. The parameter "holdness" particularly needs a tooltip because its meaning is far from obvious, and twiddling it does not make its function immediately apparent.

Spread shuffles the pixels in the image, and should be thusly named: "Shuffle pixels". The interface is clean and simple. It would be nice if the parameters were floats instead of ints, so that there could be finer control over the amount of shuffling. It would also be good to have a preview.

Summary

In summary, this category could be reduced to three entries, which would be called "Scatter RGB", "Scatter HSV", and "Shuffle Pixels".

Footnote

There are actually a number of other ways to add noise to an image: for example, using Plasma, or Clouds, or Solid Noise to render a noise pattern, and then compositing it with the image. It would be nice if the Noise category menu had some way of pointing to these, for example, an entry called Other that would bring up a dialog box giving a list of noise-rendering plugins and a suggestion of how to use them.

Stuff that was in this page before

these plug-ins must stay with the main tarball

these can be removed and offered via Wilber

Gimp 1.2

Porting GIMP Plugins

Replace this with something about porting 1.2 plugins so they will work with 2.0 and maybe something for checking whether there is nothing to port... (tools would be nice to have here)

Some identifiers (names) changed from older versions of GIMP to newer ones. The mapping between these names is documented in a file called

gimpcompat.h

([WWW] http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/gimp/libgimp/gimpcompat.h)

See also:

[WWW] http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/migrating.html

last edited 2007-12-27 20:57:35 by ThurnerRupert