GIMP

Though the updated GIMP release policy allows cool new features in micro releases, we also take pride on the stability of our software (so that you can edit images feeling that your work is safe). In this spirit, GIMP 2.10.8 is mostly the result of ... [More] dozens of bug fixes and optimizations. Wilber and Co. strip, by Aryeom and Jehan, 2013 Notable improvements¶ In particular, chunk size of image projections are now determined dynamically depending on processing speed, allowing better responsiveness of GIMP on less powerful machines whereas processing would be faster on more powerful ones. Moreover various tools have been added to generate performance logs, which will allow us to optimize GIMP even more in the future. As with most recent optimizations of GIMP, these are the results of Ell’s awesomeness. Thanks Ell! In the meantime, various bugs have been fixed in wavelet-decompose, the new vertical text feature (including text along path), selection tools, and more. On Windows, we also improved RawTherapee detection (for RawTherapee 5.5 and over), working in sync with the developers of this very nice RAW processing software. And many, many more fixes, here and there… The Save dialog also got a bit of retouching as it now shows more prominently the features preventing backward compatibility (in case you wish to send images to someone using an older version of GIMP). Of course, we want to stress that we absolutely recommend to always use the latest version of GIMP. But life is what it is, so we know that sometimes you have no choice. Now it will be easier to make your XCF backward compatible (which means, of course, that some new features must not be used). Save dialog shows compatibility issues when applicable Thanks to Ell, the Gradient tool now supports multi-color hard-edge gradient fills. This feature is available as a new Step gradient-segment blending mode. This creates a hard-edge transition between the two adjacent color stops at the midpoint. Newly added Step blending in gradient fills On the usability end of things, all transform tools now apply changes when you save or export/overwrite an image without pressing Enter first to confirm changes. Ell also fixed the color of selected text which wasn’t very visible when e.g. renaming a layer. CIE xyY support¶ Thanks to Elle Stone, GIMP now features initial support for color readouts in the CIE xyY color space. You can see these values in the Info window of the Color Picker tool and in the Sample Points dock. Most of the related code went into the babl library. Much like CIE LAB, this color space is a derivative of CIE XYZ. The Y channel separates luminance information from chromaticity information in the x and y channels. You might be (unknowingly) familiar with this color space if you ever looked at a horshoe diagram of an ICC profile. CIE xyY is useful to explore varios color-related topics like the Abney effect. See this Pixls.us thread for an example of what people do with this kind of information. Improved GIMP experience on macOS¶ Our new macOS contributor, Alex Samorukov, has been very hard at work improving the macOS/OSX package, debugging and patching both GIMP, GEGL, and the gtk-osx project. Some of the macOS specific bugs he fixed are artifacts while zooming, the windows focus bug in plug-ins, and a non-functional support for some non-Wacom tablets. Jehan, Ell, and Øyvind actively participated in fixing these and other macOS issues. We also thank CircleCI for providing their infrastructure to us free of charge. This helps us automatically building GIMP for macOS. That said, please keep in mind that we have very few developers for macOS and Windows. If you want GIMP to be well supported on your operating system of choice, we do welcome new contributors! Also, see the NEWS file for more information on the new GIMP release, and the commit history for even more details. Around GIMP¶ GEGL and babl¶ The babl library got an important fix that directly affects GIMP users: the color of transparent pixels is now preserved during conversion to premultiplied alpha. This means all transform and deformation operations now maintain color for fully transparent pixels, making unerase and curves manipulation of alpha channel more reliable. On the GEGL side, a new buffer iterator API was added (GIMP code has been ported to this improved interface as well). Additionally, new GEGL_TILE_COPY command was added to backends to make buffer duplication/copies more efficient. Recently, Øyvind Kolås has been working again on multispectral/hyperspectral processing in GEGL, which happens to be the groundwork for CMYK processing. This is therefore the first steps for better CMYK support in GIMP! We hope that anyone who wants to see this happening will support Øyvind on Patreon! GIMP in Université de Cergy-Pontoise¶ Aryeom, well known around here for being the director of ZeMarmot movie, a skilled illustrator, and a contributor to GIMP has given a graphics course with GIMP as a guest teacher for nearly a week at the Université de Cergy-Pontoise in France, mid-October. She taught to two classes: a computer graphics class and a 3D heritage one, focusing on digital illustration for the former and retouching for the latter. Aryeom and her students in University of Cergy-Pontoise This is a good hint that GIMP is getting more recognition as it now gets taught in universities. Students were very happy overall, and we could conclude by quoting one of them at the end of a 3-day course: I didn’t know that GIMP was the Blender for 2D; now this is one more software in my toolbox! We remind that you can also support Aryeom’s work on Patreon, on Tipeee or by others means! Flatpak statistics¶ Although Flathub does not (yet) provide any public statistics for packages, an internal source told us that there have been over 214,000 downloads of GIMP since its existence (October 2017). This is more than 500 downloads a day, and by far the most downloaded application there! Flathub is a new kind of application repository for GNU/Linux, so of course these numbers are not representative of all downloads. In particular, we don’t have statistics for Windows and macOS. Even for Linux, every distribution out there makes its own package of GIMP. So this is a small share, and a nice one at that, of the full usage of GIMP around the globe! GIF is dead? Long live WebP!¶ The GIF format is the only animated image format which is visible in any web browser, making it the de-facto format for basic animation on the web, despite terrible quality (256 colors!), binary transparency (no partial transparency), and not so good compression. Well, this may change! A few days ago, WebP reached support in most major browsers (Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera), when a 2-year old feature request for Mozilla Firefox got closed as “FIXED”. This will be available for Firefox 65. Therefore, we sure hope web platforms will take this new format into consideration, and that everyone will stop creating GIF images now that there are actual alternatives in most browsers! And last but not least, we remind everyone that GIMP has already had WebP support since GIMP 2.10.0! A WebP animation (done in GIMP), by Aryeom, featuring ZeMarmot and a penguin. Disclaimer: the GIMP team is neutral towards formats. We are aware of other animated image formats, such as APNG or MNG, and wish them all the best as well! We would also be very happy to support them in GIMP, if contributors show up with working patches. What’s next¶ We’ve been running late with this release, so we haven’t included some of the improvements available in the main development branch of GIMP. And there are even more changes coming! Here is what you can expect in GIMP 2.10.10 when it’s out. ACES RRT display filter that can be used in scene-referred imaging workflows. Technically, it’s a luminance-only approximation of the ACES filmic HDR-to-SDR proofing mapping originally written in The Baking Lab project. Space invasion: essentially you can now take an image that’s originally in e.g. ProPhotoRGB, process it in the CIE LAB color space, and the resulted image will be in ProPhotoRGB again, with all color data correctly mapped to the original space / ICC profile. This is a complicated topic, we’ll talk more about it when it’s time to release 2.10.10. Another new feature we expect to merge to a public branch soon is smart colorization based on the original implementation in the ever-popular GMIC filter. Given quickly approaching winter holidays and all the busy time that comes with it, we can’t 100% guarantee another stable release this year, but we’ll do our best to keep’em coming regularly! Conclusion¶ We wish you a lot of fun with GIMP, as it becomes more stable every day! [Less]

Earlier this month, GNOME Foundation announced that they received a $400,000 donation from Handshake.org, of which $100,000 they transferred to GIMP’s account. We thank both Handshake.org and GNOME Foundation for the generous donation and will use ... [More] the money to do much overdue hardware upgrade for the core team members and organize the next hackfest to bring the team together, as well as sponsor the next instance of Libre Graphics Meeting. Handshake is a decentralized, permissionless naming protocol compatible with DNS where every peer is validating and in charge of managing the root zone with the goal of creating an alternative to existing Certificate Authorities. Its purpose is not to replace the DNS protocol, but to replace the root zone file and the root servers with a public commons. GNOME Foundation is a non-profit organization that furthers the goals of the GNOME Project, helping it to create a free software computing platform for the general public that is designed to be elegant, efficient, and easy to use. [Less]

Earlier this month, GNOME Foundation announced that they receieved a $400,000 donation from Handshake.org, of which $100,000 they transferred to GIMP’s account. We thank both Handshake.org and GNOME Foundation for the generous donation and will use ... [More] the money to do much overdue hardware upgrade for the core team members and organize the next hackfest to bring the team together, as well as sponsor the next instance of Libre Graphics Meeting. Handshake is a decentralized, permissionless naming protocol compatible with DNS where every peer is validating and in charge of managing the root zone with the goal of creating an alternative to existing Certificate Authorities. Its purpose is not to replace the DNS protocol, but to replace the root zone file and the root servers with a public commons. GNOME Foundation is a non-profit organization that furthers the goals of the GNOME Project, helping it to create a free software computing platform for the general public that is designed to be elegant, efficient, and easy to use. [Less]

Almost four months have passed since GIMP 2.10.0 release, and this is already the fourth version in the series, bringing you bug fixes, optimizations, and new features. The most notable changes are listed below (see also the NEWS file). Main changes¶ ... [More] Vertical text layers¶ GIMP finally gets support for vertical text (top-to-bottom writing)! This is a particularly anticipated feature for several East-Asian writing systems, but also for anyone wishing to design fancy vertical text. Vertical text in GIMP 2.10.6. For this reason, GIMP provides several variants of vertical text, with mixed orientation (as is typical in East-Asian vertical writing) or upright orientation (more common for Western vertical writing), with right-to-left, as well as left-to-right columns. Thanks to Yoshio Ono for the vertical text implementation! New filters¶ Two new filters make an entrance in this release: Little Planet¶ This new filter is built on top of the pre-existing gegl:stereographic-projection operation and is finetuned to create “little planets” from 360×180° equirectangular panorama images. Little Planet filter in GIMP 2.10.6. Image on canvas: Luftbild Panorama der Isar bei Ettling in Niederbayern, by Simon Waldherr, (CC by-sa 4.0). Long Shadow¶ This new GEGL-based filter simplifies creating long shadows in several visual styles. There is a handful of configurable options, all helping you to cut extra steps from getting the desired effect. The feature was contributed by Ell. Improved straightening in the Measure tool¶ A lot of people appreciated the new Horizon Straightening feature added in GIMP 2.10.4. Yet many of you wanted vertical straightening as well. This is now possible. Vertical straightening in GIMP 2.10.6. Image on canvas: View of the western enclosing wall of the Great Mosque of Kairouan, by Moumou82, (CC by-sa 2.0). In the Auto mode (default), Straighten will snap to the smaller angle to decide for vertical or horizontal straightening. You can override this behavior by specifying explicitly which it should be. Optimized drawable preview rendering¶ Most creators working on complex projects in GIMP have had bad days when there are many layers in a large image, and GIMP can’t keep up with scrolling the layers list or showing/hiding layers. Part of the reason was that GIMP couldn’t update user interface until it was done rendering layer previews. Ell again did some miracles here by having most drawable previews render asynchronously. For now, the only exception to that are layer groups. Rendering them asynchronously is still not possible, so until we deal with this too, we made it possible for you to disable rendering layer group previews completely. Head over to Preferences > Interface and tick off the respective checkbox. Disable preview of layer groups in GIMP 2.10.6. One more thing to mention here. For technically-minded users, the Dashboard dockable dialog (introduced in GIMP 2.10.0) now displays the number of async operations running in the Misc group. A new localization: Marathi¶ GIMP was already available in 80 languages. Well, it’s 81 languages now! A team from the North Maharashtra University, Jalgaon, worked on a Marathi translation and contributed a nearly full translation of GIMP. Of course, we should not forget all the other translators who do a wonderful work on GIMP. In this release, 13 other translations were updated: Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Latvian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Swedish. Thanks everyone! Marathi translation in GIMP 2.10.6. File dialog filtering simplified¶ A common cause of confusion in the file dialogs (opening, saving, exporting…) was the presence of two file format lists, one for displaying files with a specific extension, the other for the actual file format choice. So we streamlined this. There is just one list available now, and it works as both the filter for displayed images and the file format selector for the image you are about to save or export. File dialog in GIMP 2.10.6. Additionally, a new checkbox allows you to display the full list of files, regardless of the currently chosen file format. This could be useful when you want to enforce an unusual file extension or reuse an existing file’s name by choosing it in the list and then appending your extension. The end of DLL hell? A note to plug-in developers…¶ A major problem over the years, on Windows, was what developers call the DLL hell. This was mostly caused either by third-party software installing libraries in system folders or by third-party plug-ins installing themselves with shared libraries interfering with other plug-ins. The former had already been mostly fixed by tweaking the DLL search priority order. This release provides an additional fix by taking into account 32-bit plug-ins running on 64-bit Windows systems (WoW64 mode). The latter was fixed already since GIMP 2.10.0 if you installed your plug-ins in its own directory (which is not compulsory yet, but will be in GIMP 3). E.g. if you have a plug-in named myplugin.exe, please install it under plug-ins/myplugin/myplugin.exe. This way, not only you won’t pollute other plug-ins if you ever included libraries, but your plug-in won’t be prevented from running by unwanted libraries as well. All our core plug-ins are now installed this way. Any third-party plug-ins should be as well. Ongoing Development¶ Prepare for the space invasion!¶ Meanwhile, taking place simultaneously on the babl, GEGL, and GIMP 2.99 fronts, pippin and Mitch embarked on a project internally nicknamed the “space invasion“, the end goal of which is to simplify and improve color management in GIMP, as well as other GEGL-based projects. Mutant goats from outer space, soon landing in GIMP. About a year ago, babl, the library used by GIMP and GEGL to perform color conversions, gained the ability to tie arbitrary RGB color spaces to existing pixels formats. This, in turn, allowed GIMP to start using babl for performing conversions between certain classes of color profiles, instead of relying solely on the LCMS library, greatly improving performance. However, these conversions would only take place at the edges between the internal image representation used by GIMP, and the outside world; internally, the actual color profile of the image had limited effect, leading to inconsistent or incorrect results for certain image-processing operations. The current effort seeks to change that, by having all image data carry around the information regarding its color profile internally. When properly handled by GEGL and GIMP, this allows babl to perform the right conversions at the right time, letting all image-processing operations be applied in the correct color space. While the ongoing work toward this goal is already available in the mainline babl and GEGL versions, we are currently restricting it to the GIMP 2.99 development version (to become GIMP 3.0), but it will most likely make its way into a future GIMP 2.10.x release. GIMP extensions¶ Lastly Jehan, from ZeMarmot project, has been working on extensions in GIMP. An extension could be anything from plug-ins to splash images, patterns, brushes, gradients… Basically anything which could be created and added by anyone. The end goal would be to allow creators of such extensions to upload them on public repositories, and for anyone to search and install them in a few clicks, with version management, updates, etc. Extension manager in future GIMP This work is also only in the development branch for the time being, but should make it to a GIMP 2.10.x release at some point in the future as well. Helping development¶ Keep in mind that pippin and Jehan are able to work on GEGL and GIMP thanks to crowdfunding and the support of the community. Every little bit helps to support their work and helps to make GIMP/GEGL even more awesome! If you have a moment, check out their support pages: pippin Patreon Jehan Patreon (ZeMarmot) Most importantly: have fun with GIMP everyone! [Less]

The latest update of GIMP’s new stable series delivers bugfixes, simple horizon straightening, async fonts loading, fonts tagging, and more new features. Simple Horizon Straightening¶ A common use case for the Measure tool is getting GIMP to ... [More] calculate the angle of rotation, when horizon is uneven on a photo. GIMP now removes the extra step of performing rotation manually: after measuring the angle, just click the newly added Straighten button in the tool’s settings dialog. Straightening images in GIMP 2.10.4. Asynchronous Fonts Loading¶ Loading all available fonts on start-up can take quite a while, because as soon as you add new fonts or remove existing ones, fontconfig (a 3rd party utility GIMP uses) has to rebuild the fonts cache. Windows and macOS users suffered the most from it. Thanks to Jehan Pagès and Ell, GIMP now performs the loading of fonts in a parallel process, which dramatically improves startup time. The caveat is that in case you need to immediately use the Text tool, you might have to wait till all fonts complete loading. GIMP will notify you of that. Fonts Tagging¶ Michael Natterer introduced some internal changes to make fonts taggable. The user interface is the same as for brushes, patterns, and gradients. GIMP doesn’t yet automatically generate any tags from fonts metadata, but this is something we keep on our radar. Ideas and, better yet, patches are welcome! Dashboard Updates¶ Ell added several new features to the Dashboard dockable dialog that helps debugging GIMP and GEGL or, for end-users, finetune the use of cache and swap. New Memory group of widgets shows currently used memory size, the available physical memory size, and the total physical memory size. It can also show the tile-cache size, for comparison against the other memory stats. Updated Dashboard in GIMP 2.10.4. Note that the upper-bound of the meter is the physical memory size, so the memory usage may be over 100% when GIMP uses the swap. The Swap group now features “read” and “written” fields which report the total amount of data read-from/written-to the tile swap, respectively. Additionally, the swap busy indicator has been improved, so that it’s active whenever data has been read-from/written-to the swap during the last sampling interval, rather than at the point of sampling. PSD Loader Improvements¶ While we cannot yet support PSD features such as adjustment layers, there is one thing we can do for users who just need a file to render correctly in GIMP. Thanks to Ell, GIMP now can load a “merged”, pre-composited version of the image, that becomes available when a PSD file was saved with “Maximize Compatibility” option enabled in Photoshop. This option is currently exposed as an additional file type (“Photoshop image (merged)”), which has to be explicitly selected from the filetype list when opening the image. GIMP then will render the file correctly, but drop certain additional data from the file, such as channels, paths, and guides, while retaining metadata. Builds for macOS Make a Comeback¶ Beta builds of GIMP 2.10 for macOS are available now. We haven’t eliminated all issues yet, and we appreciate your feedback. GEGL and babl¶ Ell further improved the Recursive Transform operation, allowing multiple transformations to be applied simultaneously. He also fixed the trimming of tile xache into the swap. New Selective Hue-Saturation operation by Miroslav Talasek is now available in the workshop. The idea is that you can choose a hue, then select width of the hues range around that base hue, then tweak saturation of all affected pixels. Øyvind Kolås applied various fixes to the Pixelize operation and added the “needs-alpha” meta-data to Color to Alpha and svg-luminancetoalpha operations. He also added a Threshold setting to the Unsharp Mask filter (now called Sharpen (Unsharp Mask)) to restore and improve the legacy Unsharp Mask implementation from GIMP prior to v2.10. In babl, Ell introduced various improvements to the babl-palette code, including making the default palette initialization thread-safe. Øyvind Kolås added an R~G~B~ set of spaces (which for all BablSpaces mean use sRGB TRC), definitions of ACEScg and ACES2065-1 spaces, and made various clean-ups. Elle Stone contributed a fix for fixed-to-double conversions. Ongoing Development¶ While we spend as much time on bugfixing in 2.10.x as we can, our main goal is to complete the GTK+3 port as soon as possible. There is a side effect of this work: we keep discovering old subpar solutions that frustrate us until we fix them. So there is both GTK+3 porting and refactoring, which means we can’t predict when it’ll be done. Recently, we also revitalized an outdated subproject called ‘gimp-data-extras’ with the sole purpose of keeping the Alpha-to-Logo scripts that we removed from 2.10 due to poor graphics quality. Since some users miss those scripts, there is now a simple way to get them back: download gimp-data-extras v2.0.4, unpack the archive, and copy all ‘.scm’ files from the ‘scripts’ folder to your local GIMP’s ‘scripts’ folder. [Less]

Along with the GEGL and babl libraries, GIMP has moved to a new collaborative programming infrastructure based on Gitlab and hosted by GNOME. The new URLs are: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gegl ... [More] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/babl On the end-user side, this mostly means an improved bug reporting experience. The submission is easier to fill in, and we provide two templates — one for bug reports and one for feature requests. New issue form on Gitlab. For developers, it means simplified contribution, as you can simply fork the GIMP repository, commit changes, and send a merge request. Please note that while we accept merge requests, we only do that in cases when patches can be fast-forwarded. That means you need to rebase your fork on the master branch (we’ll see if we can do merge requests for the ‘gimp-2-10’ branch). In the meantime, work continues in both ‘master’ branch (GTK+3) porting and the ‘gimp-2-10’ branch. Most notably, Ell and Jehan Pagès have been improving the user-perceivable time it takes GIMP to load fonts by adding the asynchronous loading of resources on startup. What it means is that font loading does not block startup anymore, but if you have a lot of fonts and you want to immediately use the Text tool, you might have to wait. The API is general rather than fonts-specific and can be further used to add the background loading of brushes, palettes, patterns etc. [Less]

It’s barely been a month since we released GIMP 2.10.0, and the first bugfix version 2.10.2 is already there! Its main purpose is fixing the various bugs and issues which were to be expected after the 2.10.0 release. Therefore, 44 bugs have been ... [More] fixed in less than a month! We have also been relaxing the policy for new features and this is the first time we will be applying this policy with features in a stable micro release! How cool is that? For a complete list of changes please see NEWS. New features¶ Added support for HEIF image format¶ This release brings HEIF image support, both for loading and export! Thanks to Dirk Farin for the HEIF plug-in. New filters¶ Two new filters have been added, based off GEGL operations: Spherize filter to wrap an image around a spherical cap, based on the gegl:spherize operation. Spherize filter in GIMP 2.10.2. Original image CC-BY-SA by Aryeom Han. Recursive Transform filter to create a Droste effect, based on the gegl:recursive-transform operation. Recursive transform filter in GIMP 2.10.2, with a custom on-canvas interface. Original image CC-BY by Philipp Haegi. Noteworthy improvements¶ Better single-window screenshots on Windows¶ While the screenshot plug-in was already better in GIMP 2.10.0, we had a few issues with single-window screenshots on Windows when the target window was hidden behind other windows, partly off-screen, or when display scaling was activated. All these issues have been fixed by our new contributor Gil Eliyahu. Histogram computation improved¶ GIMP now calculates histograms in separate threads which eliminates some UI freezes. This has been implemented with some new internal APIs which may be reused later for other cases. Working with third-parties¶ Packagers: set your bug tracker address¶ As you know, we now have a debug dialog which may pop-up when crashes occur with debug information. This dialog opens our bug tracker in a browser. We realized that we get a lot of bugs from third-party builds, and a significant part of the bugs are package-specific. In order to relieve that burden a bit (because we are a very small team), we would appreciate if packagers could make a first triaging of bugs, reporting to us what looks like actual GIMP bugs, and taking care of their own packaging issues themselves. This is why our configure script now has the --with-bug-report-url option, allowing you to set your own bug tracker web URL. This way, when people click the “Open Bug Tracker” button it will open the package bug tracker instead. XCF-reader developers: format is documented¶ Since 2006, our work format, XCF, is documented thanks to the initial contribution of Henning Makholm. We have recently updated this document to integrate all the changes to the format since the GIMP 2.10.0 release. Any third-party applications wishing to read XCF files can refer to this updated documentation. The git log view may actually be more interesting since you can more easily spot the changes and new features which have been documented recently. Keep in mind that XCF is not meant to be an interchange format (unlike for instance OpenRaster) and this document is not a “specification”. The XCF reference document is the code itself. Nevertheless we are happy to help third-party applications, and if you spot any error or issues within this document feel free to open a bug report so we can fix it. GIMP 3 is already on its way…¶ While GIMP 2.10.0 was still hot and barely released, our developers started working on GIMP 3. One of the main tasks is cleaning the code from the many deprecated pieces of code or data as well as from code made useless by the switch to GTK+ 3.x. The deletion is really going full-speed with more than 200 commits made in less than a month on the gtk3-port git branch and with 5 times more lines deleted than inserted in the last few weeks. Delete delete delete… exterminate! Michael Natterer and Jehan portrayed by Aryeom. It’s actually misses Simon Budig, a long time contributor who made a big comeback on the GTK+3 port with dozens of commits! [Less]

It’s barely been a month since we released GIMP 2.10.0, and the first bugfix version 2.10.2 is already there! Its main purpose is fixing the various bugs and issues which were to be expected after the 2.10.0 release. Therefore, 44 bugs have been ... [More] fixed in less than a month! We have also been relaxing the policy for new features and this is the first time we will be applying this policy with features in a stable micro release! How cool is that? For a complete list of changes please see NEWS. New features¶ Added support for HEIF image format¶ This release brings HEIF image support, both for loading and export! Thanks to Dirk Farin for the HEIF plug-in. New filters¶ Two new filters have been added, based off GEGL operations: Spherize filter to wrap an image around a spherical cap, based on the gegl:spherize operation. Spherize filter in GIMP 2.10.2. Original image CC-BY-SA by Aryeom Han. Recursive Transform filter to create a Droste effect, based on the gegl:recursive-transform operation. Recursive transform filter in GIMP 2.10.2, with a custom on-canvas interface. Original image CC-BY by Philipp Haegi. Noteworthy improvements¶ Better single-window screenshots on Windows¶ While the screenshot plug-in was already better in GIMP 2.10.0, we had a few issues with single-window screenshots on Windows when the target window was hidden behind other windows, partly off-screen, or when display scaling was activated. All these issues have been fixed by our new contributor Gil Eliyahu. Histogram computation improved¶ GIMP now calculates histograms in separate threads which eliminates some UI freezes. This has been implemented with some new internal APIs which may be reused later for other cases. Working with third-parties¶ Packagers: set your bug tracker address¶ As you know, we now have a debug dialog which may pop-up when crashes occur with debug information. This dialog opens our bug tracker in a browser. We realized that we get a lot of bugs from third-party builds, and a significant part of the bugs are package-specific. In order to relieve that burden a bit (because we are a very small team), we would appreciate if packagers could make a first triaging of bugs, reporting to us what looks like actual GIMP bugs, and taking care of their own packaging issues themselves. This is why our configure script now has the --with-bug-report-url option, allowing you to set your own bug tracker web URL. This way, when people click the “Open Bug Tracker” button it will open the package bug tracker instead. XCF-reader developers: format is documented¶ Since 2006, our work format, XCF, is documented thanks to the initial contribution of Henning Makholm. We have recently updated this document to integrate all the changes to the format since the GIMP 2.10.0 release. Any third-party applications wishing to read XCF files can refer to this updated documentation. The git log view may actually be more interesting since you can more easily spot the changes and new features which have been documented recently. Keep in mind that XCF is not meant to be an interchange format (unlike for instance OpenRaster) and this document is not a “specification”. The XCF reference document is the code itself. Nevertheless we are happy to help third-party applications, and if you spot any error or issues within this document feel free to open a bug report so we can fix it. GIMP 3 is already on its way…¶ While GIMP 2.10.0 was still hot and barely released, our developers started working on GIMP 3. One of the main tasks is cleaning the code from the many deprecated pieces of code or data as well as from code made useless by the switch to GTK+ 3.x. The deletion is really going full-speed with more than 200 commits made in less than a month on the gtk3-port git branch and with 9805 lines already inserted for the 921,630 lines deleted! Delete delete delete… exterminate! Michael Natterer and Jehan portrayed by Aryeom. It’s actually misses Simon Budig, a long time contributor who made a big comeback on the GTK+3 port with dozens of commits! [Less]

The long-awaited GIMP 2.10.0 is finally here! This is a huge release, which contains the result of 6 long years of work (GIMP 2.8 was released almost exactly 6 years ago!) by a small but dedicated core of contributors. The Changes in short¶ We are ... [More] not going to list the full changelog here, since you can get a better idea with our official GIMP 2.10 release notes. To get an even more detailed list of changes please see the NEWS file. Still, to get you a quick taste of GIMP 2.10, here are some of the most notable changes: Image processing nearly fully ported to GEGL, allowing high bit depth processing, multi-threaded and hardware accelerated pixel processing, and more. Color management is a core feature now, most widgets and preview areas are color-managed. Many improved tools, and several new and exciting tools, such as the Warp transform, the Unified transform and the Handle transform tools. On-canvas preview for all filters ported to GEGL. Improved digital painting with canvas rotation and flipping, symmetry painting, MyPaint brush support… Support for several new image formats added (OpenEXR, RGBE, WebP, HGT), as well as improved support for many existing formats (in particular more robust PSD importing). Metadata viewing and editing for Exif, XMP, IPTC, and DICOM. Basic HiDPI support: automatic or user-selected icon size. New themes for GIMP (Light, Gray, Dark, and System) and new symbolic icons meant to somewhat dim the environment and shift the focus towards content (former theme and color icons are still available in Preferences). And more, better, more, and even more awesome! » READ COMPLETE RELEASE NOTES « Enjoy GIMP!¶ [Less]

The long-awaited GIMP 2.10.0 is finally here! This is a huge release, which contains the result of 6 long years of work (GIMP 2.8 was released almost exactly 6 years ago!) by a small but dedicated core of contributors. The Changes in short¶ We are ... [More] not going to list the full changelog here, since you can get a better idea with our official GIMP 2.10 release notes. To get an even more detailed list of changes please see the NEWS file. Still, to get you a quick taste of GIMP 2.10, here are some of the most notable changes: Image processing nearly fully ported to GEGL, allowing high bit depth processing, multi-threaded and hardware accelerated pixel processing, and more. Color management is a core feature now, most widgets and preview areas are color-managed. Many improved tools, and several new and exciting tools, such as the Warp transform, the Unified transform and the Handle transform tools. On-canvas preview for all filters ported to GEGL. Improved digital painting with canvas rotation and flipping, symmetry painting, MyPaint brush support… Support for several new image formats added (OpenEXR, RGBE, WebP, HGT), as well as improved support for many existing formats (in particular more robust PSD importing). Metadata viewing and editing for Exif, XMP, IPTC, and DICOM. Basic HiDPI support: automatic or user-selected icon size. New themes for GIMP (Light, Gray, Dark, and System) and new symbolic icons meant to somewhat dim the environment and shift the focus towards content (former theme and color icons are still available in Preferences). And more, better, more, and even more awesome! » READ COMPLETE RELEASE NOTES « Enjoy GIMP!¶ [Less]