History

At Disney there have been various expression languages. SeExpr started as a language for our procedural geometry instancing tool, XGen. Work was done to generalize it into something that could be used in other contexts. Later it was integrated into paint3d, our texture painting facility, which opened the door to procedural synthesis. More recently, we have integrated it as a way of defining procedural controls to physical dynamical simulations and render time particle instancing.

Expressions can be seen as a way of allowing customization of inner loops. This is contrast to scripting which is mostly aimed at gluing large parts of code base together. So in this sense, C++ forms the center of your application, python could be used to put pieces of it together, and SeExpr is used to customize tight inner loops.

Major Features

• Arithmetic expression of scalar/vector types
• Large library of builtin functions
• Extensible variables and functions (including with DSOs)
• Simple to embed in any program

Home Page: http://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/seexpr.html
Project Page: http://github.com/wdas/seexpr/
Language: C++
Platform: Linux, OSX, Windows
License: New BSD
Sponsor: Walt Disney Animation Studios

All programs in the package exchange image data using unix pipes and a simple generic HDR image format – pfs. pfs in not just another format for storing HDR images (and there are already quite a few of them), but is rather an attempt to integrate the existing HDR image formats by providing a simple interface for exchanging data between applications.

pfstools is a base set of tools and more advanced functionality can be found in related packages, such as pfstmo (tone-mapping) or pfscalibration (recovery of camera response curve and merging multi-exposure LDR image). If you are not comfortable with a command line interface or you want to save yourself compilation problems, you may want to check Qtpfsgui, which packages some functionality of pfstmo and pfscalibration in a nice GUI interface.

Home Page: http://pfstools.sourceforge.net/
Project Page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pfstools/
Language: C++
Platform: Linux, OS X, Windows
License: GNU Library or Lesser General Public License (LGPL)

Like other GUI front-ends, hugin provides an easy-to-use unified point-and-click interface to a whole range of other command-line tools including:

• autopano-sift, autopano-sift-C, panomatic or autopano for automatic creation of control points.
• nona for remapping input images and rendering output images.
• enblend and enfuse for seamless blending of output images.

The Hugin project’s mission is not only to provide a powerful GUI, but also to provide opensource replacements for the small number of closed source components of Panorama tools, especially PTStitcher. A PTStitcher replacement, called nona has been developed, supporting its most important features.

Among the many flexible Hugin workflow options, it is possible to correct exposure, Vignetting and White balance between photos; generate HDR or exposure blended output from bracketed photos; or use 16bit and HDR input data natively.

Home Page: http://hugin.sourceforge.net/
Project Page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/hugin/
Language: C++
Platform: Linux, OS X, Windows
License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

• creation of DCP from source files
• support for multi-reel DCPs with several audio and subtitle tracks
• development of an intuitive, multi-lingual user interface

Project Page: http://code.google.com/p/opencinematools/
Language: C++
Platform: Windows, Linux
License: New BSD License

• Support for 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit color channels of deep paint.
• High fidelity image file types such as DPX, OpenEXR and 16-bit TIFF.
• High Dynamic Range.
• Onion-skinning.
• Flipbook. Movie playback of short sequences of images in RAM.
• Color Management System. CinePaint uses LittleCMS.
• Gallery-quality printing. B&W photographs have only one color channel and degrade quickly when manipulated as 8-bit images. CinePaint has higher fidelity and offers a 16-bit printing path to the print-head using GutenPrint.

Home Page: http://www.cinepaint.org/
Project Page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/cinepaint/
Language: C
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X, BSD
License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

Aimed world-wide at media professionals and artists, Blender can be used to create 3D visualizations, stills as well as broadcast and cinema quality videos, while the incorporation of a real-time 3D engine allows for the creation of 3D interactive content for stand-alone playback.

Originally developed by the company ‘Not a Number’ (NaN), Blender now is continued as ‘Free Software’, with the source code available under the GNU GPL license. It now continues development by the Blender Foundation in the Netherlands.

Key Features include:

• Fully integrated creation suite, offering a broad range of essential tools for the creation of 3D content, including modeling, uv-mapping, texturing, rigging, skinning, animation, particle and other simulation, scripting, rendering, compositing, post-production, and game creation
• High quality 3D architecture enabling fast and efficient creation work-flow
• User community support by forums for questions, answers, and critique at http://BlenderArtists.org and news services at http://BlenderNation.com
• Small executable size, easy distribution

Home Page: http://www.blender.org/
Project Page: http://www.blender.org/development/
Language: C, Python
Platform: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD 5.4 (i386), Sun Solaris 2.8 (sparc)
License: GNU GPL

GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions.

Key features include:

• Full suite of painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, Clone, etc.
• Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high quality anti-aliasing
• Extremely powerful gradient editor and blend tool
• Supports custom brushes and patterns
• Tile based memory management so image size is limited only by available disk space
• Layers and channels
• Multiple Undo/Redo (limited only by diskspace)
• Editable text layers
• File formats supported include bmp, gif, jpeg, mng, pcx, pdf, png, ps, psd, svg, tiff, tga, xpm, and many others
• SVG path import/export

Home Page: http://www.gimp.org/
Project Page: http://developer.gimp.org/
Language: C
Platform: Windows, Linux, OSX
License: GPL

Imagemagick provides a rich feature set including:

• Format conversion: convert an image from one format to another (e.g. PNG to JPEG).
• Transform: resize, rotate, crop, flip or trim an image.
• Transparency: render portions of an image invisible.
• Draw: add shapes or text to an image.
• Decorate: add a border or frame to an image.
• Special effects: blur, sharpen, threshold, or tint an image.
• Animation: create a GIF animation sequence from a group of images.
• Text & comments: insert descriptive or artistic text in an image.
• Image identification: describe the format and properties of an image.
• Composite: overlap one image over another.
• Montage: juxtapose image thumbnails on an image canvas.
• Motion picture support: read and write the common image formats used in digital film work.
• Image calculator: apply a mathematical expression to an image or image channels.
• Discrete Fourier transform: implements the forward and inverse DFT.
• High dynamic-range images: accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from the brightest direct sunlight to the deepest darkest shadows.
• Encipher or decipher an image: convert ordinary images into unintelligible gibberish and back again.
• Virtual pixel support: convenient access to pixels outside the image region.
• Large image support: read, process, or write mega-, giga-, or tera-pixel image sizes.
• Threads of execution support: ImageMagick is thread safe and most internal algorithms are OpenMP-enabled to take advantage of speed-ups offered by the dual and quad-core processor technologies.
• Heterogeneous distributed processing: certain algorithms are OpenCL-enabled to take advantage of speed-ups offered by executing in concert across heterogeneous platforms consisting of CPUs, GPUs, and other processors.

Home Page: http://www.imagemagick.org/
Language: C with API's provided for C++ and Perl
Platform: Windows, Linux, OSX
License: Custom open source license that requires attribution. Free for commercial use. GPL compatible.

Main features include:

• Extremely simple but powerful ImageInput and ImageOutput APIs for reading and writing 2D images that are format agnostic — that is, a “client app” doesn’t need to know the details about any particular image file formats. Specific formats are implemented by DLL/DSO plugins.
• Format plugins for TIFF, JPEG/JFIF, OpenEXR, PNG, HDR/RGBE, Targa, JPEG-2000, FITS, BMP, and ICO formats. More coming! The plugins are really good at understanding all the strange corners of the image formats, and are very careful about preserving image metadata (including Exif, GPS, and IPTC data).
• An ImageCache class that transparently manages a cache so that it can access truly vast amounts of image data (thousands of image files totaling hundreds of GB) very efficiently using only a tiny amount (tens of megabytes at most) of runtime memory. Additionally, a TextureSystem class provides filtered MIP-map texture lookups, atop the nice caching behavior of ImageCache.
• Several image tools based on these classes, including iinfo (print detailed info about images including metadata), iconvert (convert among formats, data types, or modify metadata), idiff (compare images with statistics), igrep (search images for matching metadata), iv (an image viewer). Because these tools are based on ImageInput/ImageOutput, they work with any image formats for which ImageIO plugins are available.

Home Page: http://www.openimageio.org
Project Page: http://www.openimageio.org
Language: C++ (Python bindings under development)
Platform: Linux, Mac OS X, Windows
License: New BSD

• Multi-Platform
• Playback both image sequences and movie files
• Support for industry standard file formats including Cineon, DPX, OpenEXR, and QuickTime
• Includes command line utilities for batch image processing

Home Page: http://djv.sourceforge.net/
Project Page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/djv/
Language: C++
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X, Solaris
License: BSD