[Keavon]

Indeed, it's weird that nobody has brought node-based editing to regular image manipulation before our project, but that's our goal with Graphite. With the equally important goal of making the node aspect optional for users by building such capable tooling that it can abstract away the node graph for all conventional image editing use cases, allowing users to work purely with the WYSIWYG tools that secretly manage the node graph behind the scenes. Until they're proficient enough with the traditional tools to start learning the power of node-based editing.

That said, we've been building our engine so far with a focus mostly on vector editing. There are some raster nodes but they're pretty limited right now (no GPU support yet, more engineering to do until that's production-ready). The raster compositing and image manipulation nodes + tools + infrastructure will be a big part of the focus for next year on the roadmap (https://graphite.rs/features/#roadmap).

[dleeftink]

I wonder, where do SVG filters fall on the vector/raster spectrum? I really like that I can tune them hands-on in Inkscape (e.g. fractal noise + displacement map), and then use it anywhere that supports SVG. A little interactive demo from a while back:

[0]: https://observablehq.com/@dleeftink/svg-workbench#options

[Keavon]

We will have a large variety of filters and a subset of them will be implementations of all the SVG filters. Separate to our regular raster render process that's used for displaying content to the screen, we'll have an SVG render process used for exporting the graph data to an SVG file. That process will be specifically designed to preserve the purity of the graph data representation such that it encodes all possible operations in the SVG format directly, and resorts to progressive degradation as required to approximate things SVG can't natively represent. That might mean rasterizing some unsupported raster filters, but the ones SVG supports would be used natively.

[atombender]

I don't think Graphite is the first. Gimel and GIE already exist, and I think there are other more obscure ones.

[Keavon]

First in the sense that there's nothing in the industry that's a real product. Certainly there are various experimental concepts people have made as a hobby in a limited capacity, but they don't really count as generally useful tool suites. There's nothing even from the commercial software side of the industry either, which I find surprising. But it gives our project an advantage.