GIMP

Here is what we did in 2019 and what we are planning to do in 2020. “Happy New Year 2020”, by Aryeom, Creative Commons by-sa 4.0 New releases and features¶ 2019 was the second year in a row where we shipped updates with new features in the ... [More] stable branch. Our assumption was that this could change the public’s perception of the ongoing development efforts and shift the balance towards having more contributors. Here is why. Between 2012 and 2018 (v2.8 and v2.10 releases respectively), we worked hard and added a ton of improvements and new features, we demoed them on social networks, mentioned them in annual reports etc., and yet we kept hearing how GIMP was dead because those changes were not in any stable releases. The same thing was happening before in the four years between v2.6 and v2.8. Moreover, this was preventing people from contributing as they would have to wait a long time to see their contribution actually used. That wasn’t sparking an interest really. Hence, after the v2.10 release, we kept adding new features at the same pace and started producing regular updates with those features, and all of a sudden we started hearing how we “picked up the pace”! So this could be a lesson for other projects: arguing against the irrational is futile. Just don’t keep people waiting. If you did something good, share it! Either way, there have been three updates in 2019. In terms of focus, here is what we targeted. The list below is far from being complete, these are just the most obvious changes. Usability improvements¶ GIMP is finally able to optionally display and edit pixels outside the canvas boundaries. There’s a new preference to allow the editing of hidden layers. On-canvas handles of transformation tools can now be readjusted after zooming in or out. The Free Select tool now creates a preliminary selection so that you could both copy and paste the selection and tweak positions of nodes when you do a polygonal selection. You can now switch to a particular layer by pointing at its pixels and pressing Alt + middle click. The Curves tool/filter now allows for more predictable editing and comes with two types of nodes instead of one to make more useful, more sophisticated curves. Better tools¶ Parametric brushes now have 32-bit per channel precision. The Bucket Fill tool got a new mode for smart colorization of line art, this is handy for comic artists. The new Sample Merged option in the Heal tool allows non-destructive retouching of photos on a separate layer. The Foreground Select tool got a new Grayscale preview mode. The New Offset tool makes it possible to shift pixels and optionally wrap them around the edges so that you could create repeatable patterns. Better performance¶ Faster painting: GIMP now doesn’t replace the paint buffer on every dab if the paint color/pixmap hasn’t changed. Faster saving/exporting and layer groups rendering. Grayscale workflows are now an order of magnitude faster thanks to changes in the babl library. Improved file formats support¶ Due to popular demand, we merged the existing DDS plug-in originally developed by Shawn Kirst. But as none of us is a game developer, we appreciate further contributions from the community. Layers are now optionally preserved when exporting to TIFF, and if you load a TIFF file with an unspecified channel, GIMP will now ask you how to handle it. GIMP now supports ICC profiles in HEIF images at both loading and exporting time when built with libheif v1.4.0 and newer. New filters¶ A major addition here is the Normal Map filter that generates normal maps commonly used in production of 3G graphics and games. It’s already usable for some workflows, and there’s a plan for further improvements. We also provided direct access to more filters, developed in GEGL a couple of years ago: Bayer Matrix (for ordered dithering) and Linear Sinusoid (useful for halftoning) Newsprint, a GEGL version of the old GIMP filter for halftoning, plus quite a few extras Mean Curvature Blur for edge-preserving blurring A few more filters, namely Neon, Stretch Contrast, and Oilify are finally on par with the original implementations and thus replaced them. Build systems, CI, and packaging¶ During 2019, we ported babl, GEGL, and the master branch of GIMP to the Meson build system. While it’s of little relevance to end-users who rely on ready-to-use builds of GIMP, to developers it means much faster compilation time. We also set up Gitlab-based continuous integration (CI) for all three projects, which gives us a few bonuses over the previously used Jenkins-based solution. One of them is that Windows builds are now available for every successful commit to GIMP’s master branch. Over the year, Alex Samorukov contributed a bunch of improvements to the macOS version, including support for Catalina. Development in the unstable branch¶ As you probably already know from the previous report, we manage to backport most of the new features form the unstable branch to the stable one. However, some changes are the result of refactoring and some changes rely on the tech not available in the GTK2 stack. One of the latter things is the entirely new object-based plug-ins API, with an extra bonus of preserving plugins’ settings across sessions. We expect more to happen there. This part of the work was done mostly by Michael Natterer and Jehan Pages. The use of GObject introspection has more implications: we switched to Python 3 and made it possible to write new plug-ins in Lua and JavaScript. Most recently, Jehan started working on a new feature that checks for availability of a newer version of the program and suggests downloading an update. It also integrates into the bug reporting dialog to tell the user if the version currently in use is out of date and the update may not have that bug anymore. What’s new in GEGL and babl¶ There have been numerous changes in both GEGL and babl: further work on space invasion to streamline the handling of color spaces, in collaboration with Elle Stone and others; a ton of changes in the standalone GEGL tool, making it suitable for node-based compositing and video playback; far more sophisticated CMYK support, up to blending CMYK and RGB pixel data, reading and writing CMYK TIFF and JPEG files; a better use of available CPU cores on more operations thanks to newly added dynamic computation of per-operation thread cost; better memory management: when you close large images in GIMP, it will now free used memory a lot faster. sharper output when downscaling images with the cubic sampler. Øyvind Kolås also started ctx, a new vector rasterizer project with API inspired by Cairo and HTML5 canvas’ 2D rendering context, and sufficiently small resource footprint to provide modern vector graphics on many microcontrollers. The ctx library already has support for floating point pixel formats, and that support is geared to end up generic for gray, RGB, CMYK and other multi-component formats. Lack of support for color spaces and pixel encodings beyond 8-bit sRGB in cairo has been a gap for GEGL/GIMP that ctx can end up filling. Team changes¶ Most of the source code changes in all three projects are still coming from the usual suspects: Michael Natterer, Jehan Pages, Ell, Øyvind Kolås, and Thomas Manni. Nevertheless, there have been a few new contributors who seem interested in sticking around. A significant part of the contributions towards the new build system and CI support came from Félix Piédallu and Salamandar. We now also have a small dedicated team of people, frogonia and nmat, who triage bug reports on a regular basis and do user support on the IRC channel. Liam Quin who has been team member for a long time, now does the vast majority of user support on Facebook. We are still lucky to have Julien Hardelin as the author of the user manual. And, of course, we keep getting no small amount of translation updates from new and seasoned translators. In fact, since the v2.10.14 release, we now mention non-code contributors to the project in release notes. What’s next in 2020¶ There is an agreement among team members that 2.99.x releases are long overdue. We are likely to tie loose ends and start shipping them soon. How you can help¶ As usual, we appreciate both coding and non-coding contributions to GIMP, GEGL, and babl. There are many things we want to improve and even redo completely. And while we do say that certain changes are targeted for v3.2 and beyond, anything goes really, especially with the master branch. UI/UX redesign? Shapes drawing? Clips for layers? Better text tool? Layer filters? Vector layers? You name it. Talk to us, if you want to work on any of that. And if you don’t do programming, there’s plenty of work to do all around: updating and translating the user manual, writing new tutorials, updating incomplete translations, even making great art with GIMP and telling people about it. [Less]

GIMP 2.10.14 arrives with bugfixes and various enhancements. Here are release highlights: Basic out-of-canvas pixels viewing and editing Optional editing of layers with disabled visibility Foreground Select tool: new Grayscale Preview Mode Newly ... [More] added Normal Map filter 27 old filters ported to use GEGL buffers HEIF, TIFF, and PDF support improvements Better loading of corrupted XCF files Grayscale workflows order of magnitude faster macOS Catalina compatibility 45 bugfixes, 22 translation updates “Wilber paints out-of-canvas”, by Aryeom, Creative Commons by-sa 4.0 Out-of-canvas viewing and editing¶ Not being able to view and edit data outside the canvas boundary used to be a deal breaker in quite a few use cases. So this is going to be a bit of a breakthrough moment for quite a few users. Out-of-canvas pixels visible in the Show All mode, with both layer and canvas boundary cues enabled This is what has changed: There is now a new Show All mode accessible via the View menu that reveals all pixels outside the canvas boundary. This mode uses alpha checkerboard for canvas padding, but you can configure GIMP to temporarily or permanently use the usual padding color instead. You can also enable canvas boundary cue display (dotted red line). Color- and patch-picking, bucket-filling, and transforming now works outside the canvas. Which means you can crop past the canvas boundary or pick a source patch from outside the canvas area to heal an area inside the canvas. This is basically the first shot at the previously missing feature set, so expect more to land to GIMP at some point in the future. Making selection tools work outside the canvas sounds like a sensible next stop. Then maybe we can seriously talk about boundless canvas. Most of the work on this was done by Ell. New Image mode in transform tools¶ This new feature is closely related to out-of-canvas viewing and editing and was also contributed by Ell. Now when you e.g. rotate a single-layer image, you can use this transform type to automatically expand the canvas to include all of rotated pixels when using the default Adjust clipping mode. The switch is right next to layer/path/selection toggle at the top of any transform tool’s settings. It’s complemented by a new Image > Transform > Arbitrary Rotation… menu entry, which activates the rotate tool in the Image mode. Filters can now extend beyond layer boundary¶ The result of some filters can be larger than the original layer. A very common example is Drop Shadow, which adds a shadow at an offset to the layer. Such filters are no longer clipped to the layer boundary by default. Instead, the layer is automatically resized as necessary when the filter is applied. Filters are no longer clipped to the layer boundary by default This behavior can be toggled through the new Clipping option in the filter dialog. Invisible layers can now be edited¶ There is now a global toggle to enable the editing of layers with disabled visibility (the eye icon in the layers docker). There was some demand for it from users, and it was easy to do, so a new contributor, woob, added this feature. Free Select tool update¶ The Free Select tool received further usability improvements. It now supports using Alt+drag to quickly move, cut, and copy the selection, without having to commit the selection first, similarly to the rest of the selection tools. Foreground Select tool update¶ Thomas Manni contributed a new Grayscale preview mode to the Foreground Select tool, which allows seeing the resulting mask in black and white. The usual preview mode is now called Color and choosing the color and opacity for the mask instead of imposing only 4 colors (red, green, blue, grey). Feather Selection update¶ The Feather Selection dialog has a new Selected areas continue outside the image toggle, working similarly to the corresponding option in the Shrink Selection and Border Selection dialogs. This option affects the border behavior of the operation: when toggled, selected areas along the image border are assumed to continue past the image bounds, and are therefore not affected by the feather. New filters¶ Thanks to Ell, GIMP is now shipping with a simple Normal Map filter (Filters > Generic) that generates normal maps from height maps. This is early initial work, a lot more is expected to be done. Normal Map filter used on a rock texture from CC0 Textures project GIMP now provides direct access to more GEGL filters: Bayer Matrix (for ordered dithering) and Linear Sinusoid (useful for halftoning), also both created by Ell, are in the Filters > Render > Pattern menu. Newsprint (Filters > Distorts), by Øyvind Kolås, is a GEGL version of the old GIMP filter for halftoning, plus quite a few extras. Mean Curvature Blur, by Thomas Manni, can be helpful to do edge-preserving blurring. Also, more GEGL-based filters with on-canvas preview have replaced old GIMP counterparts: Neon (Filters > Edge-Detect), Stretch Contrast (Colors > Auto), and Oilify (Filters > Artistic). Moreover, Michael Natterer did a simple 8-bit per channel port of 27 older filters to use GEGL buffers (they are still GIMP filters, not GEGL operations). Another filter, Van Gogh, got higher bit depth support (up to 32bpc float). HEIF, TIFF, and PDF support improvements¶ GIMP now supports ICC profiles in HEIF images at both loading and exporting time when built with libheif v1.4.0 and newer. The exporting dialog also features a new “Save color profile” checkbox. The TIFF importer now asks how to process unspecified TIFF channels: use as non-premultiplied alpha (used to be the default), as premultiplied alpha, or just import as a generic channel. This fixes a known bug with 4-channel (RGBA) TIFF files as demonstrated here. Finally, the PDF exporter was fixed by Lionel to export text layers inside layer groups as text correctly. Better loading of corrupted XCF files¶ XCF loading is now a bit more resilient to corruption: it doesn’t stop any more at the first layer or channel error; instead it tries to load more layers/channels to salvage as much data as possible from a corrupted XCF file. Improvements for the macOS version¶ Alex Samorukov introduced various improvements to the macOS build of GIMP. First and foremost, GIMP is now compatible with macOS Catalina and doesn’t have the file permission issue that the 2.10.12 build had. Secondly, the DMG will now open a window with an Applications shortcut that explains how to install it. He also added some fixes for command line users. Finally, Alex built the new version with updated 3rd party components. Among other things, this means support for color profiles in HEIF/HEIC files. Nightly builds for Windows¶ Gitlab CI for GIMP now has a job building GIMP for Windows. It is currently set up to make builds of the master branch only (will eventually become GIMP 3.0). To download a build: Go to the Jobs section. Find a job with the ‘gimp-x86_64-w64-mingw32-meson’ name. Click ‘Download artifacts’ button to the right of the name. Unpack the archive. The binary gimp-2.99.exe is found under gimp-prefix\bin\, though you might have to run gimp-wrapper.cmd instead. The build was set up by Jehan. ⚠️ Please note that we don’t recommend using the master branch for production! This is mostly for testing purposes. ⚠️ More changes and acknowledgments¶ As usual, a complete list of changes is available in the NEWS file. Starting with this release, NEWS also features the list of all code and translation conbtributors. We also thank frogonia, nmat, Michael Schumacher, and everyone else who helps us triaging bug reports and providing technical support to end-users. Around GIMP¶ GEGL and babl¶ Both babl and GEGL have been ported to the Meson build system and now use Gitlab CI for continuous integration. This has little significance for end-users but makes developers’ life easier in many ways. There has been a ton of other changes and improvements in GEGL since the previous release. Here are some of the most interesting ones. GEGL now makes a better use of available CPU cores on more operations thanks to newly added dynamic computation of per-operation thread cost. The built-in GEGL UI has superceded the older built-in ‘gcut’ video editor, so the latter is now removed. Playing back video has been improved: GEGL now uses nearest neighbor interpolation while decoding for realtime playback of HD video content, it now also uses frame cache for rendered video frames. Moreover, you can now also use external file managers to drag and crop content into collections. See the updated NEWS file for more details. As for babl, it now supports Yu’v’ (CIE 1976 UCS) color model, handles grayscale ICC color profiles, and uses AVX2 acceleration for some linear-to-float conversions. Alpha handling in babl has been slightly revamped. The library is now using the terms ‘associated alpha’ and ‘separate alpha’, all of nonpremultiplied-, premultiplied- and nonassociated- alpha are now considered deprecated API. Conversions between associated and separate alpha have been dramatically improved. Øyvind Kolås has a plan to add a per-image associated/separate alpha switch to GIMP’s menu once another batch of code changes by Michael Natterer lands to the master branch. Here is a lightning talk at CCC where Øyvind investigates the data loss incurred by going separate alpha -> associated -> separate or associated -> separate -> associated and discovers that the special cased transparent/emissive cases end up lossless: Øyvind also iterated on new conversions in babl that cover grayscale in all precisions supported by GIMP for some things, this means that working in grayscale is an order of magnitude faster than it was before the last babl release. See here for more information on the latest release. Another new project worth mentioning is ctx, also by Øyvind Kolås. It’s an API inspired by Cairo and HTML5 canvas’ 2D rendering context. It works on 32-bit microcontrollers like ESP32 and ARM-CortexM4, and is devised to scale to networked/remote and threaded software rendering. The ctx library already has support for floating point pixel formats, and that support is geared to end up generic for gray, RGB, CMYK and other multi-component formats. The latter is one of the things we’ve been missing in Cairo. So this is a very interesting project that we might consider using for GIMP further along the road. It will be used in GEGL’s own UI soon enough. What’s next¶ While we do maintain the 2.10.x branch and include new features from the master branch, our full attention really goes to development of what will become GIMP 3.0. We are considering the release of 2.99.2 in the next few months to pave the way for regular alpha/beta releases leading up to a major update of GIMP. For the time being, don’t forget you can donate to the project and personally fund several GIMP developers, as a way to give back and to accelerate GIMP development. [Less]

GIMP 2.10.12 is mostly a bug fix release as some annoying bugs were discovered, which is to be expected after a 2.10.10 with so many changes! “Don’t squash bugs… free them!”, by Aryeom, CC BY-SA 4.0 (a poetic approach to debugging) Still, some ... [More] very cool improvements are also available: Improved Curves tool Layers support for TIFF exporting Support for user-installed fonts on Windows Faster painting Improved symmetry painting support Incremental mode in the Dodge/Burn tool Free Select tool now creates a preliminary selection New Offset tool Improvements and features¶ Improving curves editing and Curves tool¶ Generic curves interaction¶ The interaction with curves in general has been greatly enhanced, which is an improvement both to the Curves tool and all other places where curves need tweaking (currently paint dynamics and input device settings): Relative motion when dragging points¶ When dragging an existing curve point, it won’t “jump” anymore to the cursor position upon pressing the button. Instead it will move relatively to its current position as the cursor moves. This allows selecting a point with a quick click without moving it, and adjusting a point position more easily. Additionally, when the cursor hovers above a point, or when dragging a point, the coordinate indicator now show the point’s position, rather than the cursor’s. Snap to curve when holding Ctrl¶ When holding down Ctrl while adding or dragging a point, the Y-coordinate will snap to the original curve. This is particularly useful for adding points along the curve. Likewise, the coordinate indicator shows the snapped coordinates. Curves tool specific interaction¶ Additionally, some improvements are specific to the Curves tool: Numeric input of Curves tool points¶ Two new spin-buttons labelled “Input” and “Output” are now available in the Curves tool interface. They allow setting the selected point’s coordinates numerically and accurately if needed. Add smooth or corner curve-point types¶ Control points can now be either smooth or corner points. Smooth points produce a smooth curve, while corner points result in sharp angles (previously, all points were smooth and this is still the default). Corner points are displayed using a diamond shape, instead of a circle and the type can be changed in the Curves tool. TIFF now has layer support!¶ Thanks to Tobias Ellinghaus, well known as a darktable developer, TIFF can now export images without merging layers. Support of user-installed fonts on Windows¶ Though not fully tested, we now have a temporary support of a new Windows 10 feature. Windows 10 users indeed now have the ability to install fonts without admin permissions since a recent update. Therefore we added this non-admin font folder to our search path when running GIMP. It should be only a temporary workaround since eventually this should be supported by fontconfig, the upstream library used to manage fonts. Note also that it is not fully tested because of our lack of Windows developers. Therefore we are mostly hoping it will work as expected, and this is a good time to make a call again: Are you a Windows developer? Do you love GIMP? Please contribute! Seriously, none of our current developers use Windows and bugs are piling up in our bug tracker for this platform (same can be said on macOS by the way), whereas GIMP is so enjoyably stable on GNU/Linux. We are happy to do the occasional good deeds, but there are limits to what we can do for a platform we don’t use. On the other hands, we happily welcome patches and new contributors! Faster painting¶ GIMP now doesn’t replace the paint buffer on every dab if the paint color/pixmap hasn’t changed. This results in faster painting on specific cases. As a by-product of the change, the color-from-gradient dynamics is now fixed when the image has a color profile. Incremental mode in the Dodge/Burn tool¶ The Dodge/Burn tool got a new “Incremental” option which, similarly to the Paintbrush, Pencil, and Eraser tools, applies the effect incrementally as the pointer moves. Free Select tool creates preliminary selection¶ One of GIMP 2.10.0 changes which annoyed many people was that the Free Select tool was not creating a selection immediately when the region was closed. One was forced to perform an additional confirmation step (Enter or double-click). This was done on purpose because we wanted to leave ability to tweak the polygonal selection that is built into the Free Select tool. Yet it could obviously be better, proof being the Rectangle Select tool which still allowed to edit the rectangle even though a selection was pre-created. The Free Select tool now works the same way: even though a preliminary selection exists (allowing to directly copy or delete a contents without additional step), you will still be able to edit this free selection as long as you don’t start another selection nor change tools. New Offset tool¶ New Offset tool shifts pixels and optionally wraps them around the edges so that you could create repeatable patterns. New Offset tool used to make a repeatable heart pattern There’s a simple on-canvas interaction available: just drag on the canvas to shift the layer. You can activate the new filter either via Layer > Transform > Offset menu, or via Shift+Ctrl+O shortcut. Moving an intersecting pair of guides¶ The Move tool can now move together an intersecting pair of guides. by dragging the guides at their point of intersection. This is useful when the guides are used to mark a point, rather than a pair of lines (e.g., as is the case for the mandala symmetry guides, which mark the symmetry’s point of origin). Bug fixing¶ Many bugs were fixed, some more severe than others (in particular a few crashes), as well as some code cleaning, factorization, and so on. The usual deal! More than the new features, we actually thought these issues were enough to warrant this new release. Among most pesky bugs fixed: crashes for various reasons, with more crashes to fix yet; various color management related bugs; unwanted change of foreground and background colors in tools’ presets; brush transformation improved and fixed in various places in symmetry painting mode; a few localization bugs, and most importantly broken translation display for several supported languages (so far, we believe it to be a bug in the Pango dependency); some brush format bugs; … And more. GIMP 2.10.12 is the result of about 200 commits in 2 months! We will focus below on two specific bug fixing which deserve mentioning. Improved symmetry painting support¶ The symmetry painting backend got some improvements, which resulted in a few fixes, in particular some artifacts could occur with big brushes or in the Clone/Heal tool when the brush was cropped to the bounds of a drawable. These are now fixed. In the Ink tool as well, the brush shape was not properly transformed. This has been fixed as well. Just open the Symmetry Painting dockable dialog, choose a type of symmetry and paint away! Color space mixup on exporting images¶ Several people noticed that exporting some images ended up in washed-up colors sometimes. This was because in some cases, we were exporting by error sRGB colors with a linear profile (especially visible in GIMP 2.10.10 since we were exporting profiles by default even when using a default GIMP profile). We fixed this and took the opportunity to improve GIMP’s export logics. Now we are always exporting an explicitly set profile as-is, and pixel colors are stored according to this profile expectation. If you manually assigned a profile, GIMP should indeed always follow your request. On the other hand, if no explicit profile was set, we implemented various strategies depending on the format: If the export format is able to store high-bit depth colors (e.g. PNG up to 16-bit and TIFF up to 64-bit), we follow the work format. If the export format is 8-bit only (such as JPEG), we transform the data to sRGB in order to avoid posterization and shadow artifacts (except if your work format is 8-bit linear, then we leave it as 8-bit linear for minimal loss). Note that there are still edge cases which we may not find optimal yet regarding how profiles are handled. These should all be greatly improved when we will merge the “Space Invasion” code (an ongoing mid-term project, as we were already talking about it when releasing GIMP 2.10.8). This code merge should hopefully happen soon enough! Around GIMP¶ GEGL and babl¶ During this development span, GEGL 0.4.16 got released (91 commits), as well as babl 0.1.64 (31 commits) and 0.1.66 (7 commits). The biggest user-visible change is probably the cubic sampler coefficient change, which used to produce smooth interpolation, suitable for some cases, but not as sharp as people would expect in most other cases. Now in all places where there is choice of interpolation (all transformation tools, Warp Transform tool, etc.), the result with cubic has changed and produces sharper results. Another notable improvement in GEGL is an updated memory management, by conditionally freeing memory from the heap (thanks to manual calls of malloc_trim()), hence forcing the underlying libc to release memory more often. This behavior is especially suitable for long-running applications whose memory need can greatly vary, such as GIMP. In practice, it means that GIMP process’ memory size will now shrink much faster when you will close big images on supporting systems. What’s next¶ Though it gets less visibility, work on upcoming GIMP 3 continues and is going well. We will give more news soon enough. For the time being, don’t forget you can donate to the project and personally fund several GIMP developers, as a way to give back and to accelerate GIMP development. [Less]

The GIMP team is proud to announce that the GNU Image Manipulation Program has been chosen as the first Open Source Software project for a sponsored student project on usability. OpenUsability Sponsored Student Projects¶ OpenUsability ... [More] (www.openusability.org) is an initiative that brings Open Source Software (OSS) development and usability together. This symbiosis is beneficial for both sides: Developers can make difficult user interface (UI) decisions together with usability specialists, while usability specialists can explore and further develop their skills in real-world projects without the pressure of a commercial market. Likewise, OpenUsability’s mentored student projects are an excellent way for usability, user-interface design, and interaction design students to gain experience in the interdisciplinary and collaborative development of user interface solutions in international software projects. During a three-month cooperation, you will closely work together with experienced professionals and get insights in to their way of work. An involvement of 20 hours per week is expected. Depending on your location, you will be invited to a kickoff-meeting with the development team, the interaction architect, usability specialist and user support. Otherwise the collaboration will take place via the established channels of OSS development - email, IRC, VoIP, and etc. OpenUsability student projects are sponsored with $700 USD. The sponsorship will be paid after the successful accomplishment of the student project goals. Project Opening: GIMP¶ This project offers the opportunity to work as an Associate Interaction Architect, and to shape the user interface of the next generation of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (https://www.gimp.org). You will be working with Peter Sikking, principal interaction architect at M+MI Works (www.mmiworks.net). Activities include methodically performing a full expert evaluation and analysis of the software, being fully involved in every decision, and performing the bulk of the project work. You will have a great opportunity to learn the ropes in interaction architecture in a project that matters. There is the opportunity to give your role a stronger usability component by being involved with the workplace observation project that is integrated with this project. Also there is the opportunity at the end of this first phase to stay on board and to play a strong part in the design phase that follows. Requirements¶ Interaction architects need to see from the user point of view, know what makes user interfaces tick, have a mathematical eye for the beauty of the simplest solution, a sense for clean layouts and know what can be developed in practice. GIMP is an international project, so you need to be able to communicate and write in English. There are no specific degree requirements. We welcome students from all usability-related backgrounds including communication, media, psychology, interface design or computer science. We know there are no standard university diplomas for interaction architects. So we know you had to define your education yourself, and may not perfectly match all our requirements. Don’t be deterred. GIMP or Photoshop experience is not required, in fact if you have extensive GIMP or Photoshop preferences then this project might be not for you. How To Apply¶ To participate in this project, send your application to [email protected]. The application period ends at the 10th of September. Please send us a short CV or (in PDF), a couple of paragraphs about why you want to be an interaction architect, some of your past experiences which have shaped your current skills, and what you expect from this profession in the future. [Less]

GIMP 2.5.3 is a fresh snapshot from the 2.5 development series. It gives developers and interested users a preview of the upcoming GIMP 2.6 release. If you want to give the GIMP 2.5.4 development snapshot a try, please have a look at the Release Notes for GIMP 2.5.

GIMP approaches the next stable release and only a handful bugs are left to be fixed before GIMP 2.6 is ready. If you want to give the GIMP 2.5.4 development snapshot a try, please have a look at the Release Notes for GIMP 2.5.

he GIMP developers are proud to release GIMP 2.6.0 today. Please have a look at the Release Notes to find out what’s new in GIMP 2.6. The source can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org. Binary packages for the various supported platforms should become ... [More] available soon; please check the Downloads section. Update: There was a minor glitch in the original 2.6.0 tarball. A new tarball has been uploaded that fixes this issue. [Less]

An update of the GIMP user manual is available. The gimp-help-2.4.2 tarball can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org. Users should wait until this release has been packaged in more easily installable form for their platform. This release is still focused ... [More] on GIMP 2.4. Work has started on updating the user manual for GIMP 2.6. If you want to help, have a look at docs.gimp.org. [Less]

GIMP 2.6.1 is a bugfix release in the stable GIMP 2.6 series. The NEWS file lists the changes in details. You may also want to have a look at the Release Notes to find out what’s new in GIMP 2.6. The source can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org. ... [More] Binary packages for the various supported platforms should become available soon; please check the Downloads section. [Less]

The GIMP development team has made another bugfix release in the stable GIMP 2.6 series. The NEWS file lists the changes in details. As usual, the source can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org. Binary packages for the various supported platforms should become available soon; please check the Downloads section.