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 1.6.0.3, which has been recently released, coming with a lot of changes, despite the fact that it’s considered a minor release.
New features:
- New filter Degradations / Dirty in the G’MIC plug-in for GIMP, which adds dirtiness in your images.
gmic_dirty by david_tschumperle - New filter Rendering / Lightning in the G’MIC plug-in for GIMP, which render lightning bolds.
- gmic_lightning by david_tschumperle
- New filter Layers / Colors to Layers which decomposes an image into several layers, each containing only a single color.
- New commands -rgb2int and -int2rgb which convert selected RGB images into arrays of INT24 values.
- New preferred file format .gmz to save/load a list of images. It is basically the same as .cimgz except that it also stores the image names.
- New command -nlmeans which applies the NL-means denoising algorithm on selected images. Thanks Jérome for this contribution!
Modifications / Improvements:
- The G’MIC project has now its own domain name gmic.eu.
- Command bilateral now accepts arguments sample_s and sample_r which tells about the discretization step used along the spatial and value range dimensions.
- Improved numerical scheme for the -peronamalik_flow command.
- Command -apply_parallel is now more faster when applying a fast command on a huge list of images. Also it has now the shortcut -ap.
- Command -split now allows a new kind of arguments axis,0 which splits the selected image along the specified axis according to blocks of constant values.
- Commands -discard and -split now allows new kinds of argument syntax which allows more flexibility for removing or splitting values/lines/columns.. of an image.
- Command -colormap now allow argument nb_levels to be 0, which means that all existing colors of an image are extracted into the resulting colormap.
- Command -displacement is now able to use multiple cores.
- Command -vanvliet has improved precision. Thanks Fred and Jérome for your contributions on this.
- Command -blend_median has been optimized. Thanks Iain for your contribution!
Bug fixes:
- Command -output was not accepting the default ‘codec’ option (‘0′) when saving a video file frame by frame.
- Command -eigen returns now more stable values when dealing with matrices having big values.
- Commands -center3d, -normalize3d and -split3d now works correctly for large 3d objects (with more than 1M vertices).
- Command -label was not working properly when used on a multi-channel image. This has been fixed.
For a list of full changes, see the official announcement.
In this article I will show you how to install G’Mic 1.6.0.3 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 2.0 and other Ubuntu derivative systems.
Because it will be soon available via the Gimp experimental PPA, installing G’Mic 1.6.0.3 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