re-lab project is announced

We are glad to announce a new project called re-lab. It is a side project of the newly restored GIMP.ru that focuses on reverse-engineering.

Back in November last year a GIMP user told me that brush dynamics in Photoshop brushes (ABR) isn’t supported in the application. There is a number of reasons for that, but one of them was absense of a public specification. The only one officially published covers just Photoshop v6, and brush dynamics appeared later in CS (v7).

So Valek who did a lot of work on reverse engineering Corel DRAW files back in 2007 analyzed sample files I had around and created a parser in Python. The rest was really just a monkey job. And since file format for gradients apparently was changed in CS and was really much like ABR, we reverse-engineered GRD as well.

The specifications are in the main Git repo here. I never really wrote a file format spec before, so it looks quite clumsey. Constructive criticism is appreciated. BTW, we decided not to go into the whole byte thing, because the parser pretty much gives the idea to those who are willing to implement support for ABR and GRD.

We have a couple of ideas what else to work on, but feel free to suggest something :)