GIMP 2.10.4 released with async font loading and other improvements

Mr Alexandre Prokoudine, on behalf of GIMP project has announced the release of GIMP 2.10.4, second stable update in GIMP 2.10.x series. This release brings bug fixes and feature enhancements like asynchronous font loading and simple horizon straightening.

Earlier, it was quite tedious to straighten the tilted images in GIMP. The GIMP 2.10.4 brings an easy way to this task. With this, we just need to mark the angle of inclination and click on the Straighten button. This will automatically straighten the image.

Image straightening feature in GIMP 2.10.4

Another improvement with GIMP 2.10.4 is the asynchronous loading fonts. Earlier, the startup time was suffered in Windows and macOS due to loading of all fonts at the beginning. GIMP 2.10.4 introduces asynchronous loading of fonts. 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.

Other updates in GIMP 2.10.4 includes:

• Michael Natterer introduced some internal changes to make fonts taggable. The user interface is the same as for brushes, patterns, and gradients.
• 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.
• 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.
• GIMP 2.10.x for macOS builds are available now

You can read the complete list of changes in GIMP 2.10.4 in official release announcement.

GIMP 2.9.6 released with experimental support for multithreading

Concluding more than a year of development effort, Mr Alexandre Prokoudine of GIMP has announced release of GIMP 2.9.6. This release comes with various exciting features, bug fixes and translation improvements.

One of the important highlight in GIMP 2.9.6 release is experimental multit-hreading in GEGL (Generic Graphics Library). Since the support is at it's early stage of development, it may possible that GIMP exhaust when using multiple cores. This is done deliberately to collect as many bug reports as possible, so that most of the issues can be fixed prior to release of GIMP 2.10. If you don't want to play with this experimental support, it is possible to limit number of threads in Preferences -> Resources.

Picture courtesy : GIMP 2.9.6 release announcement

While most changes for better Hi-DPI displays support are planned for v3.0, when GIMP is expected to be based on either GTK+3 or GTK+4, we were able to remove at least some of the friction by introducing icon sizes at different resolutions and a switch for icon sizes on the Icon Theme page of the Preferences dialog.

Since we want to make workflows in linear color spaces more prominent in GIMP, it was time to update the blend modes code. You can now switch between two sets of layer modes: legacy (perceptual) and default (linear). The user interface for switching was a quick design, we’d like to come up with something better, so we are interested in your input.

For more feature updates on GIMP 2.9.6, see original release announcement published on GIMP blog. Alternatively, you may browse through GIMP repository to get a list of complete changes included in this release.

GIMP 2.8.20 released with numerous bug fixes

Mr Wilber of GIMP project has announced release of GIMP 2.8.20, latest bug fix cum maintenance release of popular free/open source image editing tool which was initially started as a GNOME project.

Being a maintenance release in GIMP 2.8.x stable branch, this release does not bring any new features, but only ships several bug fixes to make it more stable. Among the bug fixes, most notable one is fix for weird user interface shown in macOS to set preferred language.

Other changes in GIMP 2.8.20 comparing to 2.8.18 can be summarized as follows:

Core:

• Avoid D-Bus error message when built without D-Bus support
• fix OS X min required conditional in gimpimagewindow.c
• Saving to existing .xcf.bz and .xcf.gz files didn't truncate them and could lead to unnecessarily large files
• Text layer created by gimp-text-fontname doesn't respect border when resized
• avoid seeking when saving XCF files to prevent corruption with file network shares (fixed since 2014, but not mentioned in NEWS yet)

GUI:

• Flow on Paint Dynamics editor dialog: the 'y' axis is indicating 'Rate' instead 'Flow'
• Vertical ruler shows artifacts if the status bar isn't showing
• Tablet stylus misbehaves when crossing the edge of a dock in multi-window-mode
• Disable the new "automatic window tabbing" feature introduced on macOS

Sierra

• Improve the visiblity of slider handles with dark themes
• Make it harder to switch to renaming if selecting already selected items in resource lists

Tools:

• make toggling to color picker mode of paint tools more robust

Libgimp:

• call gimp_file_entry_set_filename() with filename encoding

Windows Installer:

• Reduce the memory requirement when running the installer (has already been shipped in a 2.8.18 installer-only update)
• Ship an updated libcairo to fix GTK+ UI rendering problems, like missing palette border/bevel and shadowa under tab labels

macOS DMG:

• Ship the Tango icon theme with the DMG for a complete set of icons
• fix the way mime data is copied into the bundle
• no longer copy Pango modules into the bundle
• prevent a crash caused by drag&drop on OSX by patching the included 

GTK+

• ship a patch for gettext to make sure the preferred UI language will be used

Plug-ins:

• Prevent the Python console from closing by the Escape key
• Help browser does not launch on OS X
• Filter 'Edge Detect/Difference of Gaussians' returns empty image
• only use -xobjective-c for compile commands
• mkgen.pl: fix calls to write_file() routine to write to current directory
• When printing, the images are composed onto a white background to prevent printing a black box instead of a transaprent image
• Fix color visison deficiency display filters to apply gamma correction directly

For further details, see release announcement published in GIMP blog. You may also checkout complete change log.

Download GIMP 2.8.20 for macOS

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Download GIMP 2.8.20 for Windows

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GIMP 2.9.4 released with massive updates

The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) development team announced availability of GIMP 2.9.4, second development release in GIMP 2.9.x series. GIMP 2.9.4 is coming after 6 months of development efforts and it offers massive updates including revamped appearance, updated color management, a better MyBrush tool and also several bug fixes.

GIMP 2.9.4 is stable enough to use in production environment. However, there some issues that needs to be taken care and due to the same, next scheduled stable release v2.10 will take some time to be ready.

Different themes available in GIMP 2.9.4

The new version features several new themes by Benoit Touchette in various shades of gray: Lighter, Light, Gray, Dark, Darker. The system theme has been preserved for users who prefer a completely consistent look of user interfaces across all desktop applications.

The new UI themes are accompanied by symbolic icons originally created by Barbara Muraus and Jakub Steiner, and heavily updated and completed by Klaus Staedtler. The existing icon theme from past releases of GIMP has also been preserved, and users can freely switch between available icon themes and easily add their own ones.

All work on icons by Klaus Staedtler is made on vector (SVG) images, which should allow better support for HiDPI displays (also commonly known as Retina) soon. Vector icons are an experimental feature, available after using the --enable-vector-icons build configure option. Note that this option does not allow HiDPI support at this time.

More information on GIMP 2.9.4 is available in release announcement published in official website.

Quick Overview of GIMP - Powerful Image Editor

GIMP or GNU Image Manipulation Program is a powerful, open source, cross platform supported image editor. It will allow us to do almost every tasks performed by any other commercial alternative. In additions to a wide range of options available with this software tool, at also let us to install 3rd party plugins to improve productivity further.

Fedora Magazine has published an article which introduces different aspects of GIMP image editor. It covers topics like features, installation in Fedora, getting started with GIMP, and gives a quick overview of advanced options available.

source : Fedora Magazine

GIMP (short for GNU Image Manipulation Program) is an open source image editor that is available in the Fedora repositories. GIMP is primarily used for editing, cropping, retouching, resizing, and converting many different formats of raster images such as JPEGs and PNGs. This article will lead you through some of the basic tasks to get you started in GIMP, like how to open a new image, basic colour manipulation of an image and basic freehand drawing in GIMP.

GIMP capable of creating and editing images in many different ways. Using GIMP you can:

• Paint freehand.  Using brushes and pencils you can draw and paint directly on a picture or start a new design.
• Retouch photos.  With Filters, FX-Foundry, Scripts and other assorted addons, you can add, take and modify almost everything in a photo or a picture.
• Make quick banners with text effects.  You can open an existing picture or make a new one and apply any of the tools and effects available by default or by downloading from specialised websites.
• Convert graphic formats.  You can take your picture and export it in another format through  File => Export as.  Unlike other programmes like Digikam or Shotwell, you’re able to fully control quality, details, size, etc.
• Create and edit animations.  Using the GAP package you can make some interesting things with animation.  Isn’t a professional tool, there’s already applications fully aimed to this kind of work, but you’ll be surprised with the results.

Read complete article in Fedora Magazine

GIMP and GEGL in 2015 - Annual Report

Thus, an eventful year passed. It is time to look back, to see achievements and falls in past year. Mr Alexandre Prokoudine, has summarized achievements of GIMP-Most widely used open source image editor, and GEGL in 2015.

It’s been an interesting year for GIMP. For the most part, we focused on completing the GEGL port which involved rewriting all the source code related to color management. The vast majority of this work was done by Michael Natterer between April and November. The new implementation is much cleaner and is built right into the core of GIMP. Here are some of the new features:

• pasting an image into another image that has a different color space just works now;
• GIMP detects color space defined in Exif 2.21/DCF 2.0 option files;
• greyscale images are finally color-managed;
• layer and image previews are color managed too now.

Read complete report in GIMP portal.