GEGL
GEGL (Generic Graphics Library) is a graph based image processing framework.
GEGL's original design was made to scratch GIMP's itches for a new compositing and processing core. This core is being designed to have minimal dependencies. and a simple well defined API.
Features
- Output in RGB, CIE Lab and Y'CbCr color models with 8bit, 16bit integer and 32bit floating point per component. Possible to extend to ICC managed output in babl.
- Non destructive editing
- C, C#, Python and Ruby interfaces.
- Extendable through plug-ins.
- XML serialization format (not-finalized)
- Iterative processing.
- Efficient subregion evaluation.
- Per node caches.
- Processing and display of image buffers larger than RAM
- Internal sparse pyramidial render cache.
- Bounding box based hit detection.
- Rich core set of processing operations that internally computes
with 32bit floating point, linear light RGB.
- PNG, JPEG, SVG, EXR, RAW, ffmpeg and other image sources.
- Pattern renderers
- Arithmetic operations
- porter duff compositing
- SVG filter modes and full set of compositing ops from SVG-1.2 draft
- Gaussian blur, bilateral-filter, symmetric nearest neighbour, unsharp mask.
- Color correction.
- Text layout using pango
Gallery
For examples of what GEGLs rendering engine currently can do look at the gallery.
Dependencies
GEGL is currently building on linux, the build enviroment probably needs some fixes before all of it builds gracefully on many platforms.
- Core
- glib (including gobject, and gmodule) 2.10 or newer, which provides inheritance, dynamic modules, common algorithms and data structures for C programming.
- babl 0.0.14 or newer (for pixel-format agnostisism).
- libpng (png load/export ops, and image magick fallback import)
- GUI (sandbox for testing ops and the API)
- GTK+
- Optional dependencies for operations.
- SDL (display op)
- libjpeg (jpg loader op)
- libopenexr (exr loader op)
- cairo, pango (text source op)
- librsvg
Download
The latest development snapshot, and eventually stable versions of GEGL are available at ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gegl/.
The current code under development can be browsed online and checked out from GNOME Subversion using:
svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/gegl/trunk/ gegl
Building
To build GEGL type the following in the toplevel source directory:
$ ./configure or: ./autogen.sh if building from svn
$ make
$ sudo make install
Bugzilla
The GEGL project uses GNOME Bugzilla, a bug-tracking system that allows us to coordinate bug reports. Bugzilla is also used for enhancement requests and the preferred way to submit patches for GEGL is to open a bug report and attach the patch to it.
Below is a list of links to get you started with Bugzilla:
- List of Open Bugs
- List of Open Bugs (excluding enhancement requests)
- List of Enhancement Proposals
- Bugzilla Weekly Summary
Mailinglist
You can subscribe to gegl-developer and view the archives here. The GEGL developer list is the appopriate place to ask development questions, and get more information about GEGL development in general. You can email this list at gegldev at gegl.org.
Copyright
GEGL is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
Contributors
Code: Calvin Williamson Caroline Dahloff Manish Singh Jay Cox Daniel Rogers Sven Neumann Michael Natterer Øyvind Kolås Philip Lafleur Dominik Ernst Richard Kralovic Kevin Cozens Victor Bogado Martin Nordholts Geert Jordaens Michael Schumacher John Marshall Étienne Bersac Mark Probst Håkon Hitland Tor Lillqvist Documentation: Garry R. Osgood Øyvind Kolås Kevin Cozens Shlomi Fish Artwork: Jakub Steiner
Documentation
GEGLs programmer/user interface is a Directed Acyclic Graph of nodes. The DAG expresses a processing chain of operations. A DAG, or any node in it, expresses a composited and processed image. It is possible to request rectangular regions in a wide range of pixel formats from any node. See the Glossary to decode this paragraph.
The GEGL API is available from both C as well as Ruby and Python. The XML Data model provides a tree based interface that maps to the internal DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph). Environment Variables can be set to tune and instrument the behavior of GEGL. gegl is small commandline tool acting as a wrapper around the XML capabilities that provides output to PNG.
Glossary
- connection
- A link/pipe routing image flow between operations within the graph goes from an output pad to an input pad, in graph glossary this might also be reffered to as an edge.
- DAG
- Directed Acyclic Graph, see graph.
- graph
- A composition of nodes, the graph is a DAG.
- node
- The nodes are connected in the graph. A node has an associated operation or can be constructed graph.
- operation
- The processing primitive of GEGL, is where the actual image processing takes place. Operations are plug-ins and provide the actual functionality of GEGL
- pad
- The part of a node that exchanges image content. The place
where image "pipes" are used to connect the various
operations in the composition.
- input pad
- consumes image data, might also be seen as an image parameter to the operation.
- output pad
- a place where data can be requested, multiple input pads can reference the same output pad.
- property
- Properties are what control the behavior of operations, through the use of GParamSpecs properties are self documenting through introspection.
Operations
The main source of documentation as GEGL grows is the Operations reference. Plug-ins themselves register information about the categories they belong to, what they do, and documentation of the available parameters.
Hello world
This is a small sample GEGL application that animates a zoom on a mandelbrot fractal
#include <gegl.h> gint main (gint argc, gchar **argv) { gegl_init (&argc, &argv); /* initialize the GEGL library */ { /* instantiate a graph */ GeglNode *gegl = gegl_node_new (); /* This is the graph we're going to construct: .-----------. | display | `-----------' | .-------. | layer | `-------' | \ | \ | \ | | | .------. | | text | | `------' .-----------------. | FractalExplorer | `-----------------' */ /*< The image nodes representing operations we want to perform */ GeglNode *display = gegl_node_create_child (gegl, "display"); GeglNode *layer = gegl_node_new_child (gegl, "operation", "layer", "x", 2.0, "y", 4.0, NULL); GeglNode *text = gegl_node_new_child (gegl, "operation", "text", "size", 10.0, "color", gegl_color_new ("rgb(1.0,1.0,1.0)"), NULL); GeglNode *mandelbrot = gegl_node_new_child (gegl, "operation", "FractalExplorer", "width", 256, "height", 256, NULL); gegl_node_link_many (mandelbrot, layer, display, NULL); gegl_node_connect_to (text, "output", layer, "aux"); /* request that the save node is processed, all dependencies will * be processed as well */ { gint frame; gint frames = 30; for (frame=0; frame<frames; frame++) { gchar string[512]; gdouble t = frame * 1.0/frames; gdouble cx = -1.76; gdouble cy = 0.0; #define INTERPOLATE(min,max) ((max)*(t)+(min)*(1.0-t)) gdouble xmin = INTERPOLATE( cx-0.02, cx-2.5); gdouble ymin = INTERPOLATE( cy-0.02, cy-2.5); gdouble xmax = INTERPOLATE( cx+0.02, cx+2.5); gdouble ymax = INTERPOLATE( cy+0.02, cy+2.5); if (xmin<-3.0) xmin=-3.0; if (ymin<-3.0) ymin=-3.0; gegl_node_set (mandelbrot, "xmin", xmin, "ymin", ymin, "xmax", xmax, "ymax", ymax, NULL); g_sprintf (string, "%1.3f,%1.3f %1.3f×%1.3f", xmin, ymin, xmax-xmin, ymax-ymin); gegl_node_set (text, "string", string, NULL); gegl_node_process (display); } } /* free resources used by the graph and the nodes it owns */ g_object_unref (gegl); } /* free resources globally used by GEGL */ gegl_exit (); return 0; }
Compiling
GEGL uses pkg-config for passing the needed compile time options, download hello-world.c and typing what follows in a terminal after succesfully installing GEGL should produce a working binary.
gcc hello-world.c `pkg-config --libs --cflags gegl` -o hello-world
XML data model
The tree allows clones, making it possible to express any acyclic graph where the nodes are all of the types: source, filter and composer.
GEGL can write and reads its data model to and from XML. The XML is chains of image processing commands, where some chains allow a child chain (the 'over' operator to implement layers for instance).
The type of operation associated with a node can be specified either with a class attribute or by using the operation name as the tag name for the node.
For documentation on how this XML works, take a look at the sources in the gallery. And browse the documentation for operations.
Environment
Some environment variables can be set to alter how GEGL runs, this list might not be exhaustive but it should list the most useful ones.
- BABL_STATS
- When set babl will write a html file (/tmp/babl-stats.html) containing a matrix of used conversions, as well as all existing conversions and which optimized paths are followed.
- BABL_ERROR
- The amount of error that babl tolerates, set it to for instance 0.1 to use some conversions that trade some quality for speed.
- GEGL_DEBUG_BUFS
- Display tile/buffer leakage statistics.
- GEGL_DEBUG_RECTS
- Show the results of have/need rect negotiations.
- GEGL_DEBUG_TIME
- Print a performance instrumentation breakdown of GEGL and it's operations.
- GEGL_SWAP
- The directory where temporary swap files are written, if not specified GEGL will not swap to disk. Be aware that swapping to disk is still experimental and GEGL is currently not removing the per process swap files.
gegl
GEGL provides a commandline tool called gegl, for working with the XML data model from file, stdin or the commandline. It can display the result of processing the layer tree or save it to file.
Some examples:
Render a composition to a PNG file:
gegl composition.xml -o composition.png
Invoke gegl like a viewer for gegl compositions:
gegl -ui -d 5 composition.xml
Using gegl with png's passing through stdin/stdout piping.
cat input.png | gegl -o - -x "<gegl> <tree> <node class='invert'/> <node class='scale' x='0.5' y='0.5'/> <node class='png-load' path='-'/></tree></gegl>" > output.pngThe latest development version is available in the gegl module in GNOME Subversion.
gegl usage
The following is the usage information of the gegl binary, this documentation might not be complete.usage: gegl [options] <file | -- [op [op] ..]> Options: --help this help information -h --file read xml from named file -i --xml use xml provided in next argument -x --dot output a graphviz graph description --output output generated image to named file -o (file is saved in PNG format) -p (increment frame counters of various elements when processing is done.) -X output the XML that was read in --verbose print diagnostics while running -v All parameters following -- are considered ops to be chained together into a small composition instead of using an xml file, this allows for easy testing of filters. Be aware that the default value will be used for all properties.
Bindings
The bindings for use of GEGL in other programming languages than C are co-hosted with GEGL in GNOME subversion but are not part of the regular GEGL distribution. The following language bindings are currently available:
- rgegl
- for Ruby.
- pygegl
- for Python.
- gegl-sharp
- for C#/Mono.
Development
GEGL uses bugzilla to track feature requests and contributions. A description of what the various directories in the GEGL checkout is in the Code Overview. Most coders working with gegl would probably be extending it through operations.
Code Overview
Directories in the GEGL distribution
gegl-dist-root │ │ ├──gegl core source of GEGL, library init/deinit, │ │ │ ├──buffer contains the implementation of GeglBuffer │ │ - sparse (tiled) │ │ - recursivly subbuffer extendable │ │ - clipping rectangle (defaults to bounds when making │ │ subbuffers) │ │ - storage in any babl supported pixel format │ │ - read/write rectangular region as linear buffer for │ │ any babl supported pixel format. │ ├──graph graph storage and manipulation code. │ ├──module The code to load plug-ins located in a colon seperated │ │ list of paths from the environment variable GEGL_PATH │ ├──operation The GeglOperation base class, and subclasses that act │ │ as baseclasses for implementeting different types of │ │ operation plug-ins. │ ├──process The code controlling data processing. │ └──property-types specialized classes/paramspecs for GeglOperation │ properties. │ ├──operations Runtime loaded plug-ins for image processing operations. │ │ │ ├──core Basic operations tightly coupled with GEGL. │ │ │ ├──affine transforming operations (rotate/scale/translate) │ ├──blur Blurring operations. │ ├──color Color adjustments. │ ├──generated Operations generated from scripts (currently │ │ ruby scripts.) (arithmetic, compositors, ...) │ ├──io sources and sinks (file loaders/savers etc.) │ ├──meta Operations that themselves are made by gegl graphs. │ ├──render Operations providing patters, graidents, fills, ... │ ├──svg Non-compositors part of the SVG 1.2 specification. │ ├──transparency opacity/mask control │ └──workshop Works in progress, (not built/installed by default) │ └──generated generated operations that are in the workshop. │ │ ├──docs A website for GEGL │ │ │ └──gallery A gallery of sample GEGL compositions, using the │ │ (not yet stabilized) XML format. │ │ │ └──data Image data used by the sample compositions. │ ├──bin gegl binary, for processing XML compositions to png files. │ ├──bindings bindings for using GEGL from other programming languages │ not included in the tarball distribution but exist in │ the subversion repository. │ └──tools some small utilities to help the build.
Directories in the babl distribution
babl-dist-root │ ├──babl the babl core │ └──base reference implementations for RGB and Grayscale Color Models, │ 8bit 16bit, and 32bit and 64bit floating point. ├──extensions CIE-Lab color model as well as a naive-CMYK color model. │ also contains a random cribbage of old conversion optimized │ code from gggl. Finding more exsisting conversions in third │ part libraries (hermes, lcms?, liboil?) could improve the │ speed of babl. ├──tests tests used to keep babl sane during development. └──docs Documentation/webpage for babl.
Extending
To create your own operations you should start by looking for one that does approximatly what you already need. Copy it to a new .c source file, and replace the occurences of the filename (operation name in the source.)
Most of the operations do not use the verbose gobject syntax, but preprocessor tricks turning the boilerplate in a short chant.