I recently started a new project that aims at providing a non-destructive, layer-based photo editing tool. The goal is to develop a full featured application which provides color management, RAW images development, high-quality processing (it will support 8 and 16 bits integer as well as 32 and 64 bits floating point processing) and all the common basic and advanced image editing tools.

The code is released under GPL and hosted on GitHub (the name of the project is "PhotoFlow", but it seems that in this first post I'm not allowed to insert the link to the corresponding web page...).

The image processing engine is based on the excellent VIPS library (I will add the link to it as soon as it will be possible...), which allows to perform real-time processing of images in a variety of formats and of arbitrary size.

The project is very young and at the moment provides only basic features (file loading/saving and some basic editing tools). However I expect it to evolve reasonably fast, and therefore I would be really great to get some feedback from the community whether there could be some interest for it.

Attached is a sample screenshot showing a curves adjustment applied to an image after conversion to Lab colorspace.


Thanks a lot in advance for any feedback.

Thanks, aferrero2707 , that will be very interesting. I made it long time ago (in a very simple way, of course) but I don't remember very well the steps.

Issabella, thanks for looking. The tough part for the moment is the gui development... but there will be new edting features coming out soon!

Hi, I have just updated the PhotoFlow code on GitHub, with lots of enhancements and bug fixes. The most important new features that have been added are:

- export the edited image to jpeg or tiff
- image zooming
- creation and editing of complex layer masks (called layer maps in PhotoFlow)
- some new tools and blend modes


This is probably the first usable version of the program, as it is now possible to save the work in either the internal PhotoFlow format (to save the layer structure and all the imge settings) or to various raster formats. The code seems to be already reasonably stable, so that it can be used for some basic photo editing work.

There is a first detailed step-by-step tutorial on the PhotoFlow web page, which shows how to use most of the existing features. More tutorials are planned, whenever the time will allow to write them...
I've put a screenshot from the tutorial in attachment just to give you a glimpse of what can be done. This file can be downloaded from the PhotFlow website if you want to play with the program and you do not want to start from scratch. Just click on the "testimages" at the beginning of the tutorial sections, and extract the zip file (run an antivirus if you are unsure, but as it only contains tiff and text files and it was created under linux, I'm pretty confident that it is clean).


For the next update I plan to introduce several new features:
- simple hand drawing for selective editing
- sopport for loading, decoding and development of RAW formats
- several sommon tools like unsharp mask, cropping and resizing.


Thanks for looking and commenting.