New Color Mode Coming to GIMP

Summary

Hello! I’m one of the developers for GIMP. If you use GIMP, you might be familiar with my work adding support for Seattle Filmworks photos, along with other, less important features and fixes. We like to emphasize that GIMP is made by the community. That’s why we try to spotlight areas of interests by our developers, designers, and artists - such as Bruno Lopes’ work on Snap packaging, Fredrik Persson’s art for the GIMP 3.0 splash screen and interviews with Mitch, Michael, Simon, and Øyvind. Today, I’ll add to this illustrious group by sharing a bit about my own area of interest that I’ll be focusing on for the next version of GIMP! The first big project I worked on when I started contributing to GIMP was related to color models. Images can be stored and represented in lots of different ways. The most common mode for many people is RGB, where each color is made up of a combination of red, green, and blue values. You can also represent colors with a single color component, often in Grayscale. Another frequently seen mode is indexed, where you limit the total number of colors to a specific palette (this model is often used in games and pixel art). GIMP has supported all three of these color modes for many years. However, there have been constant user requests for including another well-known color model. Unfortunately, no one had ever stepped up to work on it - until now! I am proud to announce that I will be focused on implementing the long awaited… EGA Color Mode That’s right! At last, GIMP will allow you to easily create images compatible with IBM’s Enhanced Graphics Adapter. You’ll be able to define up to 16 different colors to use with your image from the palette of 64 approved colors. It’ll also be optimized to show high-quality images at a jaw-dropping maximum resolution of 640 × 350! It should be noted that GIMP has had an EGA palette built in for years, so a “late-binding” EGA workflow where you converted before export was already possible. My work will enabl...