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Very cool. I would love to be able to programmatically interact with this through python bindings, though, rather than the GUI.

Yes this might be a future option to open the Plug-Ins to other programming languages.

You might also look into the from rer0tsaz proposed (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10009228) G'MIC. Not sure if there are Python bindings though.

Further is there already tons of good Python Image Processing libraries around, mostly build around PIL.

Yes, or with programs that I could use on the command line, like ImageMagick's convert.