Sean Greenhlgh wrote:

I work in the print world. And wanted to know if you guys are planning on adding CMYK color modes to the software. Open source and free software is the future, and it would be really cool to get this going and off the ground. If some designers started using it, we could get, many, many users, using it.

For printing of photos edited in GIMP we recommend adopting a color management workflow with late binding to CMYK by adopting PDF/X[1] worflows [2]. GIMP is already used successfully by many users with such workflows.

For cases where late binding workflows are not possible the GIMP 2.10 series will hopefully gain both support for and good control over CMYK separation when exporting for instance to TIFF; integrating functionality that currently is possible with additional third party GIMP plug-ins.

There might be future improvements to how GIMP deals non-RGB data in the 3.x series or beyond, probably including direct support for opening/importing CMYK files
without a conversion to RGB - adding such capabilities should be more easily possible
now that image processing is abstracted away and encapsulated in GEGL ops.

When it comes to more radical departures from RGB, I've personally worked on, and have plans for continued work on code experiments with color that eventually might lead to CMYK being just one of possible sets of plate configuration for process inks / spot-colors / paints used for any simulated duo, tri, quad(or more)-tone
print plate configuration for various colored substrates - using spectral characterisation
along the lines of [3].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/X 2: https://www.scribus.net/svn/Scribus/trunk/Scribus/doc/en/pdfx3.html 3: http://www.color.org/CxF_test.xalter

With regards, Øyvind Kolås

http://pippin.gimp.org/   https://patreon.com/pippin