We are happy to announce the recent release of our web service G'MIC Online a few days ago (see screenshot.)

This service allows users to upload and apply filters and various artistic effects on images, directly from a web browser. It proposes many different filters, a bit like those available in Instagram / Picmagick / Fotoflexer (but we have currently 219 effects available so far :) ). The main difference is that it is based on a free software G'MIC (GREYC's Magic Image Converter), a quite complete image processing framework (released under CeCILL licence) that we are developing in our lab since Aug. 2008.

Particularly, we think that this web service may be useful to quickly improve the quality of an image (it has quite decent image smoothing and sharpening algorithms, formerly known as GREYCstoration), even if there are still limitations on the size of the images we can process. Note that G'MIC features are also available through other interfaces: a plug-in for GIMP, a command line tool (somehow similar to ImageMagick's convert), a webcam manipulation interface and a C++ library.

Actually, we would be very interested to see all these filters available for other image retouching applications or interfaces. So, feel free to test the filters online and let us know if you are interested by one (or several) of them. G'MIC defines a script language to write new filters quite easily, so that every new filter written can be shared amongst all the available interfaces. We hope you'll like it.

GREYCstoration is an open-source tool able to denoise, inpaint or resize 2D color images. This is a command-line program developed by the IMAGE team of the GREYC Lab in France and is available for Unix, Mac and Windows systems (distributed under the CeCILL license). The algorithm is based on anisotropic diffusion PDE's (partial differential equations). These equations are able to smooth an image while preserving its main structures. The Demo Page presents interesting results on color image denoising and reconstruction (real object removal).

A new version of GREYCstoration (2.5) has been released today, with significant improvements :

• Memory usage has been greatly improved. The algorithm is now able to work with big images without eating so much resources. The gain is about x6 compared to the previous versions (restoring a 3264x2448 color image needs about 98Mb of free memory, instead of 654Mb).
• Image pixels coded with 16bits/components or float-valued 32bits are now supported. This allows to denoise images with high color definition.
• A new C++ API has been developed, allowing the easy integration of the GREYCstoration algorithm in third-party open-source softwares. This becomes as simple as one include and few lines of C++ code.

This is a serious free alternative to commercial products like Noise Ninja or Neat Image which perform the same kind of operations. The tool is still a little bit hard to use (command-line based), but I hope the simple C++ API will ease the integration of the algorithm in more user-friendly interfaces. Note that previous versions of GREYCstoration are already available in Digikam and Krita.