GIMP v2.10 released (after six years in development!)

[Arthur]

There are some very nice improvements in this version. See the release notes for the more details.

 

Website / Download / Release Notes

 

GIMP 2.10 is the result of six years of work that originally focused on porting the program to a new image processing engine, GEGL. However the new version ships with far more new features, including new and improved tools, better file formats support, various usability improvements, revamped color management support, a plethora of improvements targeted at digital painters and photographers, metadata editing, and much, much more.

 

Updated user interface and initial HiDPI support

One thing immediately noticeable about GIMP 2.10 is the new dark theme and symbolic icons enabled by default. This is meant to somewhat dim the environment and shift the focus towards content.

 

There are now 4 user interface themes available in GIMP: Dark (default), Gray, Light, and System. Icons are now separate from themes, and we maintain both colour and symbolic icons, so you can configure GIMP to have System theme with colour icons if you prefer the old look.

 

Moreover, icons are available in four sizes now, so that GIMP would look better on HiDPI displays. GIMP will do its best to detect which size to use, but you can manually override that selection in Edit > Preferences > Interface > Icon Themes.

 

GEGL port, high bit depth support, multi-threading, and more

The ultimate goal for v2.10 was completing the port to GEGL image processing library, started with v2.6 when we introduced optional use of GEGL for color tools and an experimental GEGL tool, and continued with v2.8 where we added GEGL-based projection of layers.

 

Now GIMP uses GEGL for all tile management and builds an acyclic graph for every project. This is a prerequisite for adding non-destructive editing planned for v3.2.

 

There are many benefits from using GEGL, and some of them you can already enjoy in GIMP 2.10.

 

High bit depth support allows processing images with up to 32-bit per color channel precision and open/export PSD, TIFF, PNG, EXR, and RGBE files in their native fidelity. Additionally, FITS images can be opened with up to 64-bit per channel precision.

 

Multi-threading allows making use of multiple cores for processing. Not all features in GIMP make use of that, it’s something we intend to work on further. A point of interest is that multi-threading happens through GEGL processing, but also in core GIMP itself, for instance to separate painting from display code.

 

GPU-side processing is still optional, but available for systems with stable OpenCL drivers.

 

You can find configuration options for multi-threading and hardware acceleration in Edit > Preferences > System Resources.

 

Linear color space workflow

Another benefit of using GEGL is being able to work on images in a linear RGB color space as opposed to gamma-corrected (perceptual) RGB color space.

 

Here is what it boils down to:

 

• You now have both linear and perceptual versions of most blending modes.
  
• There is now a linear version of the Color Invert command.
  
• You can freely switch between the two at any time via Image > Precision submenu.
  
• You can choose which mode is displayed in the Histogram docker.
  
• You can apply Levels and Curves filters in either perceptual or linear mode
  
• When higher than 8-bit per channel precision is used, all channels data is linear.
  
• You can choose whether the gradient tool should work in perceptual RGB, linear RGB, or CIE LAB color space
  

Colour management revamped

Colour management is now a core feature of GIMP rather than a plug-in. This made it possible, in particular, to introduce colour management to all custom widgets we could think of: image previews, colour and pattern previews etc.

 

GIMP now uses LittleCMS v2, which allows it to use ICC v4 colour profiles. It also partially relies on the babl library for handling colour transforms, since babl is simply up to 10 times faster than LCMS2 for the cases we tested both of them on. Eventually babl could replace LittleCMS in GIMP.

 

[...]

 

File formats support

GIMP is now capable of reading and writing TIFF, PNG, PSD, and FITS files with up to 32-bit per channel precision where applicable.

 

The PSD plug-in additionally supports pass-through, hard mix, pin light, vivid light, and linear light blending modes.

 

GIMP now also ships with native WebP support, including features like animation, ICC profiles, and metadata. Both importing and exporting are supported.

 

The JPEG 2000 plug-in was rewritten to use the OpenJPEG library rather than the somewhat obsolete Jasper library.

 

Finally, the PDF plug-in now supports importing password-protected files (you need to know the password) and exporting multipage PDF documents (each layer will be a page).

 

Metadata viewing, editing, and preservation

GIMP now ships with plug-ins for viewing and editing Exif, XMP, IPTC, GPS, and DICOM metadata. They are available via the Image > Metadata submenu.

 

GIMP will also preserve existing metadata in TIFF, PNG, JPEG, and WebP files. Each plug-in has respective options when exporting to enable or disable exporting the metadata.

 

Additionally, users now can set defaults to preserving or not preserving metadata in all affected file format plug-ins at once depending on whether they want complete privacy or, instead, do a lot of microstock photography. The settings are available on the Image Import & Export page in Preferences.

 

 

[DJ-1701]

How on Earth do you @Arthur, and @DaveP, keep so up to date with all these releases?!

 

Thank you very much!!!

[mavhc]

Still no msi installer, sigh

[ShellfishClive]

How on Earth do you @Arthur, and @DaveP, keep so up to date with all these releases?!

 

Thank you very much!!!

 

I bet they have RSS feeds coming out of their ears!

 

I wonder how much of an improvement this GIMP is compared to the older version. My problem was it used to crash when handling big images, hopefully it deals with that better.

[DJ-1701]

What I don't understand is... 6 years and they still haven't put basic shapes in there?

[unixman_again]

What do you mean by basic shapes? You've been able to draw a square and a circle with the stroke path option pretty much from day one. The shape to path plugin handles more basic shapes that I've ever needed.

[DJ-1701]

I know you can do that, and about the plug-in, but it's not as nice an natural as having a dedicated tool for it.

[Arthur]

v2.10.4 was released a few days ago. One of the best new features is asynchronous fonts loading which means the program starts up a lot faster.

 

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 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.

 

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.

 

Read more...

[ITGuyNW]

Has anyone encountered an issue where a student can view/access other student areas when they go to save/open files in GIMP?

[mavhc]

Has anyone encountered an issue where a student can view/access other student areas when they go to save/open files in GIMP?

 

Sometimes GTK based File open/save boxes don't consider folder redirection etc, but if pupils can see each other's files, that's a security issue on the server, your permissions are wrong

[Arthur]

GIMP 2.10.10 Released

 

We haven’t had any updates for a few months but the wait is hopefully worth it! We’ve got many nice new features, optimizations, and stability fixes in this release!

 

Version 2.10.10 highlights include:

 

• Line art detection in the Bucket Fill tool for comic artists
  
• Various usability improvements in transformation tools
  
• Sample Merged option added to the Heal tool and fixed in the Clone tool
  
• Parametric brushes now have 32-bit per channel precision
  
• Easier brush and pattern creation workflow
  
• On-canvas layer selection
  
• Faster saving/exporting and layer groups rendering
  
• Initial DDS support
  
• Many improvements in GEGL, the image processing engine
  

[Arthur]

GIMP 2.10.12 Released

 

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!

 

Still, some 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