A recent Ask Slashdot story, Professional Photographers Using Linux?, got me thinking about what I'd like to see on Linux in terms of image editing. I use Linux 99% of the time (the only time I boot into windows is to do my taxes...maybe I'll see if QuickTax will work with wine this year), and although far from being a professional photographer, I'd still like to see Linux become a viable platform for professional image editing. In no particular order:

• Colour profile support across the board. GIMP needs to support it, the display drivers need to support it, the printer drivers need to support it. Drivers for calibration tools like the Spyder would be the next step.
• More than 8-bits per channel in GIMP. 16 would be nice, floating point as an option would be better (RAM is cheap, right?).
• A killer workflow / image management app. I'm hoping f-spot fits the bill.
• More polished photo-oriented tools in GIMP. Preview on the unsharp mask would be great. Preview of the dcraw input would be great. Being able to tweak the values of a particular operation afterwards would be wicked. Think editing an operation's parameters in the undo list and having those changes take effect and propagate forwards. Being able to create customized toolbars / dialogs with my commonly used operations would also be great. Right now the top 3 operations I do are: levels adjustment, unsharp mask, and resize / crop. It takes quite a few button clicks to get to these operations right now.

caveat: I haven't tried GIMP 2.2 yet (if it's not in debian unstable, chances are I won't check it out), so some of these things may be done already. They may even be there in 2.0 and I just haven't found them yet! If that is the case, could somebody point the way for me?