Michael Henning says that some work still has to be done to improve the GIMP's FITS plugin. Needless to say, with its 8bit precision GIMP 2.8 owes you a new pair of eyes: Let's try a new experimental GEGL operation called Exposure and bump lightness by +7EV stops. Whereas unstable GIMP 2.9 loads the FITS image in 32bit float mode, hence tweaking gamma is far, far less ugly. Here's what you get with GIMP 2.8 and its 8bit precision: Let's start taking it to extremes and apply +3 gamma with the Levels tool. Looks boring? Well, this is how GIMP automatically scales image data (which is, by the way, bottleneck #2). Here's a picture of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy (image courtesy by Chandra X-Ray observatory). GIMP will now load such images in their native precision mode, except for the last option. After that, during last weekend, Michael Henning implemented support for high bit depth precision in the FITS loader and saver, namely: So the plug-in was first cleaned-up and ported to GEGL by Michael Natteter in January 2013. And thus ever since the GIMP team passed the point of no return towards the bright GEGL future with its processing in 32bit floats and non-destructive editing, it was only a matter of time till the FITS plugin was upgraded. The bottleneck #1 was in the lacking support for high bit depth precision. Recent changes in the unstable version finally address this issue. In the eyes of astrophotographers GIMP has always been an underdog.

G'mic for gimp 2.8 mac