GIMP

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is an open source application that provides users with a free alternative to commercial image editing programs, such as Adobe Photoshop or Corel Painter.

It’s a sophisticated application, specifically designed for image retouching and editing or for creating stunning digital paintings using state-of-the-art functionality. The application can be used for photo montages, free-form drawing, image conversion, cropping, resizing, as well as more complex tasks.

Features at a glance

Key features include support for layers, layer masks and channels, color management, automation, basic image editing, paths and selections, filters, scripts and plugins. Supported operating systems include Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.

While the program can import and export JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, SVG, and ICO image file formats, it can also read PDF and PostScript documents, as well as various other file formats from well known applications like Adobe Photoshop or Corel Paint Shop Pro.

A wide range of built-in filters will allow users to blur, enhance, distort, render and combine images, as well as to add shadows, borders, noise, maps, animation, and alpha to logo effects. In addition, the plugin architecture can be used to extend the default functionality of the application.

Offers two GUI modes and it's compatible with many desktop environments

Two GUI modes are available, the default one comprised of the main window and two separate dockable dialogs that contain all the tools and layer controls, and a single-window mode.

The graphical user interface is written with the well known GTK+ GUI toolkit, allowing users to install the software on GTK-compatible desktop environments, such as GNOME, Xfce, Cinnamon or MATE.

Bottom line

In conclusion, GIMP is an amazing project that supports multiple operating systems, it’s translated into several languages, and can be used as a simple digital painting tool, a batch image processing system, an image renderer, as well as a complex photo retouching software.

What is new in this release:

• Core:
• Remove gimp_display_shell_draw_background() and all clipping hacks for drawing the canvas background. This optimizes away one entire step of drawing of image size, for each expose.
• Font loading does not block startup anymore. Only consequence is that the Text tool may not be usable immediately if fonts are not fully loaded yet (and will output an appropriate error if you do so). All non-text related activities can be performed right away.
• Change of the URL from bugzilla to gitlab where appropriate.
• New tool option manager to better keep track of user context and paint options in a consistent manner.
• User Interface:
• The Dashboard dockable dialog now has a 'Memory' group that shows memory-usage information: the 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. 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 Dashboard dockable dialog now has "read" and "written" fields in the dashboard swap group, which report the total amount of data read-from/written-to the tile swap, respetively. Additionally, the swap busy indicator (used as the meter's LED) 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.
• Fonts can now be tagged. The user interface is the same as for brushes, patterns etc.
• Some icons fixed: larger spacing between broken chains and gimp-tool-ellipse-select made symmetrical.
• Usability:
• When a plug-in cannot be applied to an image because of mismatch in image types (e.g. layer has no alpha or image is greyscale), GIMP now displays a message listing supported image types for this plug-in.
• Tools:
• The Measurement tool now has an "Auto straighten" option allowing to rotate the active drawable (layer, channel...) so that the measurement line is used as horizon. As other transform tools, the feature will work on linked drawables as well.
• The Smudge tool now paints correctly on images with a color profile other than the GIMP's built-in one.
• Build:
• Installer: set compatibility options to run Python plugins in HiDPI-aware mode.
• Put back compatibility DLLs for really old plugins.
• Install binary tool `gimp-test-clipboard` on the system to allow people to help us debug clipboard bugs.
• --enable-bundled-mypaint-brushes renamed --enable-relocatable-bundle and also make WMF fonts looked up on the runtime prefix of GIMP (instead of the build-time path) when this build option was set.
• Plug-ins:
• gimptool-2.0 binary now accepts source files with non-standard extensions if it can try to guess appropriate language from the compiler being used. It will also properly quote arguments for shell usage.
• Run explicitly Python 2 as Python plug-in interpreter to prevent breakage on systems where Python 3 is the default.
• raw_input()'s argument in Python console is now optional, and input() support has been added.
• File Formats:
• The PSD loader now provides an option to load "merged", pre-composited version of the images that becomes available when a PSD file was saved with "Maximize Compatibility" option enabled in Photoshop. This is useful when loading PSD files that use features that GIMP doesn't currently support, and therefore can't render correctly, such as adjustment layers. When loading the merged image version, we avoid loading certain additional data from the file, such as channels, paths, and guides, while still loading metadata. This option is currently exposed as an additional file type ("Photoshop image (merged)"), which has to be explicitly selected from the file-type list when opening the image.
• Embedding GIMP's built-in sRGB color profile to exported files is now optional. The default choice can be set in the Preferences dialog.
• Translations:
• Updated translations: Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian.

What is new in version 2.10.2:

• Core:
• Remove gimp_display_shell_draw_background() and all clipping hacks for drawing the canvas background. This optimizes away one entire step of drawing of image size, for each expose.
• Font loading does not block startup anymore. Only consequence is that the Text tool may not be usable immediately if fonts are not fully loaded yet (and will output an appropriate error if you do so). All non-text related activities can be performed right away.
• Change of the URL from bugzilla to gitlab where appropriate.
• New tool option manager to better keep track of user context and paint options in a consistent manner.
• User Interface:
• The Dashboard dockable dialog now has a 'Memory' group that shows memory-usage information: the 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. 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 Dashboard dockable dialog now has "read" and "written" fields in the dashboard swap group, which report the total amount of data read-from/written-to the tile swap, respetively. Additionally, the swap busy indicator (used as the meter's LED) 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.
• Fonts can now be tagged. The user interface is the same as for brushes, patterns etc.
• Some icons fixed: larger spacing between broken chains and gimp-tool-ellipse-select made symmetrical.
• Usability:
• When a plug-in cannot be applied to an image because of mismatch in image types (e.g. layer has no alpha or image is greyscale), GIMP now displays a message listing supported image types for this plug-in.
• Tools:
• The Measurement tool now has an "Auto straighten" option allowing to rotate the active drawable (layer, channel...) so that the measurement line is used as horizon. As other transform tools, the feature will work on linked drawables as well.
• The Smudge tool now paints correctly on images with a color profile other than the GIMP's built-in one.
• Build:
• Installer: set compatibility options to run Python plugins in HiDPI-aware mode.
• Put back compatibility DLLs for really old plugins.
• Install binary tool `gimp-test-clipboard` on the system to allow people to help us debug clipboard bugs.
• --enable-bundled-mypaint-brushes renamed --enable-relocatable-bundle and also make WMF fonts looked up on the runtime prefix of GIMP (instead of the build-time path) when this build option was set.
• Plug-ins:
• gimptool-2.0 binary now accepts source files with non-standard extensions if it can try to guess appropriate language from the compiler being used. It will also properly quote arguments for shell usage.
• Run explicitly Python 2 as Python plug-in interpreter to prevent breakage on systems where Python 3 is the default.
• raw_input()'s argument in Python console is now optional, and input() support has been added.
• File Formats:
• The PSD loader now provides an option to load "merged", pre-composited version of the images that becomes available when a PSD file was saved with "Maximize Compatibility" option enabled in Photoshop. This is useful when loading PSD files that use features that GIMP doesn't currently support, and therefore can't render correctly, such as adjustment layers. When loading the merged image version, we avoid loading certain additional data from the file, such as channels, paths, and guides, while still loading metadata. This option is currently exposed as an additional file type ("Photoshop image (merged)"), which has to be explicitly selected from the file-type list when opening the image.
• Embedding GIMP's built-in sRGB color profile to exported files is now optional. The default choice can be set in the Preferences dialog.
• Translations:
• Updated translations: Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian.

What is new in version :

• Core:
• Make it possible to use multithreading in GEGL and raise max amount of threads to 64. Given how unstable this feature is, any value above 1 should be currently treated as a step inside an industrial microwave oven with the on/off switch on the outside.
• New clipboard implementation allows copying/pasting layers and layer groups.
• Color tags simplify managing large projects with a lot of layers and layer groups.
• The Mouse Pointer dialog and colors applied to images are now color-managed.
• Gamma and precision selectors for newly created images.
• Never dither when converting to a higher bit depth, or to anything more than 16 bits; don't offer dithering options in these cases.
• Default to linear TRC when converting to 16-bit float.
• Pre-initialize some babl-based pixel format conversion routines at start-up to decrease the initial lazy intialization cost for some interactions.
• Remove max size limitation of 4GB for XCF files.
• Support clipboard images in the clipboard brush and pattern.
• libgimp calls are now thread-safe.
• Layers and compositing:
• Layer modes' code is now refactored to separate gamma-corrected variations from the linear light ones, legacy modes have been preserved to support older XCF files. UI to switch between the two is experimental and should be treated as a temporary design.
• Blending and compositing of layers are configurable separately for more flexibility now, compositing can be linear TRC, perceptual TRC or CIE LAB.
• Layer blending color space and compositing color space are configurable now.
• Layers created from the GUI and from plug-ins now default to normal mode (not normal-legacy), unless all the existing layers in the image are also in legacy mode.
• New layer modes: linear burn, vivid light, linear light, pin light, hard mix, exclusion, merge, split, luminance (rgb), pass-through (for layer groups only).
• Make erase mode an ordinary layer/paint mode.
• Better performance of HSV-based layer modes.
• Rename "Color (HSV)" mode to "Color (HSL)" to indicate the actual color space being used.
• On-canvas interaction changes:
• Refactor on-canvas interaction code out of some of the tools and make it reusable.
• Update tools accordingly.
• Make on-canvas interaction accessible to GEGL-based filters and use it in the Spiral and Supernova filters as a test case.
• GUI and usability:
• Easily add or remove layer masks by clicking either the layer preview or a new button in the Layers dialog.
• Enhance the Layer Attributes dialog to provide the single UI for setting layer's name, blending mode, opacity, and offset, toggling visibility, link status, various locks, color tags.
• Add a Save As button to the "Quit GIMP" dialog and raise images on click for easy checks.
• Allow to choose fill color when resizing layers and images.
• Quick Mask and Channel Attributes dialogs use the new spinscale widget for the mask opacity slider.
• Enable grid views of dynamics and tool presets.
• Allow to zoom with middle mouse button + control + drag up/down.
• For all paint tools, when switching to the color picker mode, don't rely on the exact modifier being pressed or released. Instead, check if only the right modifier is pressed after *each* modifier change, and switch to color picking if it is.
• On startup, GIMP checks for duplicate accelerators in menus, and removes duplicates.
• Standard (Freedesktop) and GTK+ icons can now be set by the icon theme for a fully consistent style.
• Many new icons.
• Toolbox buttons do not grab focus anymore, which used to break usage of the Tab key and other canvas-related shortcuts after changing tools with a pointing device click.
• Delete Layer/Channel/Path are consistently the last option in respective dialogs now.
• Extend the text along the tangent of the last path stroke, when the length of the path is shorter than the width of the text to be warped.
• Allow to toggle the histogram dialog between gamma and linear.
• New 'Colors -> Linear Invert' command to provide radiometrically correct color inversion.
• Quit dialog now exits when all the images in the list have been saved.
• The built-in error dialog now displays errors outputted by GEGL.
• Shift-clicking the visibility icon of a layer in a layer group now toggles its exclusive visibility within this layer group.
• Color selection and management:
• Add the profile import policy to Preferences -> Import.
• Color management for GEGL-based filters is expensive, so it's off by default for now, and options are hidden by default too.
• Add LCH color selector, with support for gamut checking.
• Default to magenta for out-of-gamut color.
• Make all script-fu color buttons color-managed.
• Configurability:
• Remember settings of many dialogs across sessions.
• New Interface / Dialog Defaults page in the Preferences dialog to control defaults values of various dialogs.
• Settings on some individual pages of the Preferences dialog can be reset separately now.
• Vertical scrollbar added to keep the height of the Preferences dialog fitting small displays.
• Allow mouse to optionally configure tablet devices
• Allow creating shortcuts containing the Cmd key + mouse wheel events.
• Default to 300ppi and 1920x1080px for new documents.
• Default to 62px font size.
• Do not allow Alt+[0-9] shortcuts, they are typically reserved for display switching.
• Icons size is now a configurable option, not a theme feature. The icon size is also auto-guessed from monitor resolution now.
• It is now possible to have keybindings for previous/next/top/bottom vectors.
• Tools:
• Complete the Handle Transform tool and make it available by default.
• Add Hue-Chroma operation/tool that operates in CIE LCH color space.
• Replace Color Balance, Colorize and Hue-Saturation with GEGL-based filters with a custom user interface to ease future transition to non-destructive editing planned for v3.2. Remove the "Image -> Tools -> Color Tools" submenu.
• The Move tool now shows relative coordinates when moving guides and sample points.
• The Measure tool has better digit precision now (before that, at 4000 PPI, up to 7 pixels would show up as 0 mm, then at 0.1 mm from the 8th pixel etc.).
• All paint tools now display the angle (relatively to the horizontal line, centered on previously drawn position) alongside distance in status bar when straight line constraining (holding shift when painting).
• Performance of the Fuzzy Select and the Bucket Fill tool has been improved.
• The Fuzzy Select and the Bucket Fill tool now can select colors by CIE L, C, and H.
• Unclutter transform tools: default to "no grid", hide the original layer during the interactive transform (except for the Flip tool).
• Make the Warp Transform tool faster, add more options, use the linear sampler to ensure crisp lines after an erase.
• Select by Color and Color Picker tools work now correctly in color spaces other than sRGB.
• Free Select tool now waits for Enter being pressed to confirm selection, which enables you to tweak positions of polygonal selection.
• Color Picker doesn't snap to anything when picking colors anymore, always draws the outline of the averaged region (not only while the mouse is being pressed), and supports arbitrary range of values regardless of the actual image color precision.
• Color Picker now displays pick position (also visible in the Sample Points dialog now), as well as values in CIE LAB and CIE LCH.
• Uncommitted selection by the Intelligent Scissors tool is not discarded on tool change anymore.
• For Intelligent Scissors, GIMP now checks whether the first and the last isegments are distinct before closing the curve.
• Flip tool: add Clipping option to the flip tool. Add support for reflecting across guides: when clicking on a guide while using the Flip tool, reflect the active item across the guide, rather than around its center.
• Painting:
• The Smudge tool now has a Flow control that allows mixing in both constant and gradient color while smudging. There's another new option to never decrease alpha of existing pixels while smudging in the tools options now as well.
• Rulers, scrollbars, and the Navigation dialog follow canvas rotation now.
• Canvas rotation is now snappier in certain cases.
• For bitmap brushes, GIMP now caches hardness and disables dynamic change of hardness to improve painting performance. Bitmap brushes also don't get clipped anymore, when hardness is less than 100.
• Allow painting on transparent layers with modes other than normal.
• Add a specialized convolution algorithm for the hardness blur to make it faster.
• Make the Force option insensitive for the Pencil tool.
• Add new "Pressure Size" dynamics.
• File Formats:
• Make the default raw (DSLR) image importer configurable.
• Add RawTherapee plug-in to pre-process various raw (DSLR) images, RawTherapee v5.2 is the minimum requirement.
• Add new file-raw-placeholder plug-in that registers itself for loading all raw formats from file-raw/file-formats.h, but does nothing except returning an error message pointing to darktable and RawTherapee.
• Add native WebP loader/exporter with support for ICC profiles, animation, metadata.
• The TIFF loader will not generate warnings about private tags anymore.
• Handle linear gamma PNG files correctly, provide a combo box for specifying PNG bit depth / variant at exporting time.
• Add support for linear burn, linear light, vivid light, pin light, and hard mix layer modes in PSD (importing and exporting).
• Load PSD files with layers which contain additional information with a length that is not divisible by 4.
• Add support to import/export layer color tags from/to PSD files.
• Optionally convert all imported (not XCF) images to 32-bit linear floating point, and optionally add a little noise in order to distribute the colors minimally.
• Optionally add alpha channel to layers of imported images (configurable in Preferences > Import).
• Support writing PNM files with 16-bit image precision.
• Improve support for PCX files: * saving 1bpp and 4bpp images (according to palette size). * loading 2bpp, 2 planes/1bpp, 3 planes/1bpp and 4bpp images. * non-Black&White monochrome PCX files (any 2 colors according to the palette).
• Add support for exporting multi-page PDF from image layers, with optional reversed order.
• Add RLE support for RGB565 to in file-csource.
• Metadata:
• Add new metadata viewer that uses Exiv2 to display Exif, XMP, IPTC, and DICOM metadata (the latter is displayed on the XMP tab).
• Add metadata editor that supports adding/editing writing XMP, IPTC, DICOM, and GPS/Exif metadata, as well as loading/exporting metadata from/to XMP files.
• Printing:
• Print resolution can now be reset to defaults, new values for the same image is actually used now without reloading the image.
• Plug-ins:
• The Screenshot plug-in now assigns either monitors profile or converts to sRGB.
• The Screenshot plug-in can now take screenshots of a single window and include the mouse pointer in the same time (if the desktop/OS allows it).
• Port smooth-palette to GEGL.
• Enhance the raw (not the digital negative) files plugin: introduce exporting settings and remember them across sessions, make the plugin invokable non-interactively, and more.
• Plug-ins can now be installed into first level directories of a plug-ins/ folder. This is in particular to avoid the "DLL hell" with shared libraries installed by a plug-in, interfering with other unrelated plug-ins. The entry point file has to be named the same as the directory (minus extension).
• Filters:
• Add GEGL-based filters: Neon (Edge detection), Wavelet Decompose, Image Gradient, Symmetric Nearest Neighbor, Extract Component, RGB Clip, Simple Linear Iterative Clustering, Waterpixels, Spiral.
• Add rotate/flip buttons to the Convolution Matrix filter's GUI to rotate/flip the matrix.
• For GEGL-based filters, use a new metadata language to dynamically control UI attributes based on context (e.g. auto-disable unapplicable options).
• Allow filter actions to have hardcoded default operation settings by encoding them directly in the string attached to all filter actions.
• Color Palettes:
• Merge Palettes command is available for multiple selected color palettes now.
• Assets / Resources:
• Some basic presets are available for the Crop tool now: 2x3, 3x4, 16:10, 16x9, and square.
• Documents templates have been updated and now feature popular, contemporary document presets for both print and digital media.
• PDB:
• Rename *-paste-as-new to *-paste-as-new-image.
• Add PDB API for layer blend space, compositing space, and compositing mode.
• Build:
• Depend on LCMS2.7+ now, because earlier LCMS2 releases caused problems with certain GIMP blend modes.
• Depend on libpng 1.6.25+ to avoid warnings about known incorrect sRGB profiles, also avoid various vulnerabilities.
• Depend on glib-networking now for HTTPS support.
• Depend on librsvg 2.40.6 which fixes rendering bugs.
• Add a flatpak-builder manifest.
• OS-specific changes:
• Help browser launches on macOS now.
• Bugs:
• Overall 204 bugs have been fixed or partially addressed since GIMP 2.9.4.
• Translations:
• Updated: Catalan, Chinese (Taiwan), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Kazakh, Occitan, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish.

What is new in version 2.9.6:

• Core:
• Make it possible to use multithreading in GEGL and raise max amount of threads to 64. Given how unstable this feature is, any value above 1 should be currently treated as a step inside an industrial microwave oven with the on/off switch on the outside.
• New clipboard implementation allows copying/pasting layers and layer groups.
• Color tags simplify managing large projects with a lot of layers and layer groups.
• The Mouse Pointer dialog and colors applied to images are now color-managed.
• Gamma and precision selectors for newly created images.
• Never dither when converting to a higher bit depth, or to anything more than 16 bits; don't offer dithering options in these cases.
• Default to linear TRC when converting to 16-bit float.
• Pre-initialize some babl-based pixel format conversion routines at start-up to decrease the initial lazy intialization cost for some interactions.
• Remove max size limitation of 4GB for XCF files.
• Support clipboard images in the clipboard brush and pattern.
• libgimp calls are now thread-safe.
• Layers and compositing:
• Layer modes' code is now refactored to separate gamma-corrected variations from the linear light ones, legacy modes have been preserved to support older XCF files. UI to switch between the two is experimental and should be treated as a temporary design.
• Blending and compositing of layers are configurable separately for more flexibility now, compositing can be linear TRC, perceptual TRC or CIE LAB.
• Layer blending color space and compositing color space are configurable now.
• Layers created from the GUI and from plug-ins now default to normal mode (not normal-legacy), unless all the existing layers in the image are also in legacy mode.
• New layer modes: linear burn, vivid light, linear light, pin light, hard mix, exclusion, merge, split, luminance (rgb), pass-through (for layer groups only).
• Make erase mode an ordinary layer/paint mode.
• Better performance of HSV-based layer modes.
• Rename "Color (HSV)" mode to "Color (HSL)" to indicate the actual color space being used.
• On-canvas interaction changes:
• Refactor on-canvas interaction code out of some of the tools and make it reusable.
• Update tools accordingly.
• Make on-canvas interaction accessible to GEGL-based filters and use it in the Spiral and Supernova filters as a test case.
• GUI and usability:
• Easily add or remove layer masks by clicking either the layer preview or a new button in the Layers dialog.
• Enhance the Layer Attributes dialog to provide the single UI for setting layer's name, blending mode, opacity, and offset, toggling visibility, link status, various locks, color tags.
• Add a Save As button to the "Quit GIMP" dialog and raise images on click for easy checks.
• Allow to choose fill color when resizing layers and images.
• Quick Mask and Channel Attributes dialogs use the new spinscale widget for the mask opacity slider.
• Enable grid views of dynamics and tool presets.
• Allow to zoom with middle mouse button + control + drag up/down.
• For all paint tools, when switching to the color picker mode, don't rely on the exact modifier being pressed or released. Instead, check if only the right modifier is pressed after *each* modifier change, and switch to color picking if it is.
• On startup, GIMP checks for duplicate accelerators in menus, and removes duplicates.
• Standard (Freedesktop) and GTK+ icons can now be set by the icon theme for a fully consistent style.
• Many new icons.
• Toolbox buttons do not grab focus anymore, which used to break usage of the Tab key and other canvas-related shortcuts after changing tools with a pointing device click.
• Delete Layer/Channel/Path are consistently the last option in respective dialogs now.
• Extend the text along the tangent of the last path stroke, when the length of the path is shorter than the width of the text to be warped.
• Allow to toggle the histogram dialog between gamma and linear.
• New 'Colors -> Linear Invert' command to provide radiometrically correct color inversion.
• Quit dialog now exits when all the images in the list have been saved.
• The built-in error dialog now displays errors outputted by GEGL.
• Shift-clicking the visibility icon of a layer in a layer group now toggles its exclusive visibility within this layer group.
• Color selection and management:
• Add the profile import policy to Preferences -> Import.
• Color management for GEGL-based filters is expensive, so it's off by default for now, and options are hidden by default too.
• Add LCH color selector, with support for gamut checking.
• Default to magenta for out-of-gamut color.
• Make all script-fu color buttons color-managed.
• Configurability:
• Remember settings of many dialogs across sessions.
• New Interface / Dialog Defaults page in the Preferences dialog to control defaults values of various dialogs.
• Settings on some individual pages of the Preferences dialog can be reset separately now.
• Vertical scrollbar added to keep the height of the Preferences dialog fitting small displays.
• Allow mouse to optionally configure tablet devices
• Allow creating shortcuts containing the Cmd key + mouse wheel events.
• Default to 300ppi and 1920x1080px for new documents.
• Default to 62px font size.
• Do not allow Alt+[0-9] shortcuts, they are typically reserved for display switching.
• Icons size is now a configurable option, not a theme feature. The icon size is also auto-guessed from monitor resolution now.
• It is now possible to have keybindings for previous/next/top/bottom vectors.
• Tools:
• Complete the Handle Transform tool and make it available by default.
• Add Hue-Chroma operation/tool that operates in CIE LCH color space.
• Replace Color Balance, Colorize and Hue-Saturation with GEGL-based filters with a custom user interface to ease future transition to non-destructive editing planned for v3.2. Remove the "Image -> Tools -> Color Tools" submenu.
• The Move tool now shows relative coordinates when moving guides and sample points.
• The Measure tool has better digit precision now (before that, at 4000 PPI, up to 7 pixels would show up as 0 mm, then at 0.1 mm from the 8th pixel etc.).
• All paint tools now display the angle (relatively to the horizontal line, centered on previously drawn position) alongside distance in status bar when straight line constraining (holding shift when painting).
• Performance of the Fuzzy Select and the Bucket Fill tool has been improved.
• The Fuzzy Select and the Bucket Fill tool now can select colors by CIE L, C, and H.
• Unclutter transform tools: default to "no grid", hide the original layer during the interactive transform (except for the Flip tool).
• Make the Warp Transform tool faster, add more options, use the linear sampler to ensure crisp lines after an erase.
• Select by Color and Color Picker tools work now correctly in color spaces other than sRGB.
• Free Select tool now waits for Enter being pressed to confirm selection, which enables you to tweak positions of polygonal selection.
• Color Picker doesn't snap to anything when picking colors anymore, always draws the outline of the averaged region (not only while the mouse is being pressed), and supports arbitrary range of values regardless of the actual image color precision.
• Color Picker now displays pick position (also visible in the Sample Points dialog now), as well as values in CIE LAB and CIE LCH.
• Uncommitted selection by the Intelligent Scissors tool is not discarded on tool change anymore.
• For Intelligent Scissors, GIMP now checks whether the first and the last isegments are distinct before closing the curve.
• Flip tool: add Clipping option to the flip tool. Add support for reflecting across guides: when clicking on a guide while using the Flip tool, reflect the active item across the guide, rather than around its center.
• Painting:
• The Smudge tool now has a Flow control that allows mixing in both constant and gradient color while smudging. There's another new option to never decrease alpha of existing pixels while smudging in the tools options now as well.
• Rulers, scrollbars, and the Navigation dialog follow canvas rotation now.
• Canvas rotation is now snappier in certain cases.
• For bitmap brushes, GIMP now caches hardness and disables dynamic change of hardness to improve painting performance. Bitmap brushes also don't get clipped anymore, when hardness is less than 100.
• Allow painting on transparent layers with modes other than normal.
• Add a specialized convolution algorithm for the hardness blur to make it faster.
• Make the Force option insensitive for the Pencil tool.
• Add new "Pressure Size" dynamics.
• File Formats:
• Make the default raw (DSLR) image importer configurable.
• Add RawTherapee plug-in to pre-process various raw (DSLR) images, RawTherapee v5.2 is the minimum requirement.
• Add new file-raw-placeholder plug-in that registers itself for loading all raw formats from file-raw/file-formats.h, but does nothing except returning an error message pointing to darktable and RawTherapee.
• Add native WebP loader/exporter with support for ICC profiles, animation, metadata.
• The TIFF loader will not generate warnings about private tags anymore.
• Handle linear gamma PNG files correctly, provide a combo box for specifying PNG bit depth / variant at exporting time.
• Add support for linear burn, linear light, vivid light, pin light, and hard mix layer modes in PSD (importing and exporting).
• Load PSD files with layers which contain additional information with a length that is not divisible by 4.
• Add support to import/export layer color tags from/to PSD files.
• Optionally convert all imported (not XCF) images to 32-bit linear floating point, and optionally add a little noise in order to distribute the colors minimally.
• Optionally add alpha channel to layers of imported images (configurable in Preferences > Import).
• Support writing PNM files with 16-bit image precision.
• Improve support for PCX files: * saving 1bpp and 4bpp images (according to palette size). * loading 2bpp, 2 planes/1bpp, 3 planes/1bpp and 4bpp images. * non-Black&White monochrome PCX files (any 2 colors according to the palette).
• Add support for exporting multi-page PDF from image layers, with optional reversed order.
• Add RLE support for RGB565 to in file-csource.
• Metadata:
• Add new metadata viewer that uses Exiv2 to display Exif, XMP, IPTC, and DICOM metadata (the latter is displayed on the XMP tab).
• Add metadata editor that supports adding/editing writing XMP, IPTC, DICOM, and GPS/Exif metadata, as well as loading/exporting metadata from/to XMP files.
• Printing:
• Print resolution can now be reset to defaults, new values for the same image is actually used now without reloading the image.
• Plug-ins:
• The Screenshot plug-in now assigns either monitors profile or converts to sRGB.
• The Screenshot plug-in can now take screenshots of a single window and include the mouse pointer in the same time (if the desktop/OS allows it).
• Port smooth-palette to GEGL.
• Enhance the raw (not the digital negative) files plugin: introduce exporting settings and remember them across sessions, make the plugin invokable non-interactively, and more.
• Plug-ins can now be installed into first level directories of a plug-ins/ folder. This is in particular to avoid the "DLL hell" with shared libraries installed by a plug-in, interfering with other unrelated plug-ins. The entry point file has to be named the same as the directory (minus extension).
• Filters:
• Add GEGL-based filters: Neon (Edge detection), Wavelet Decompose, Image Gradient, Symmetric Nearest Neighbor, Extract Component, RGB Clip, Simple Linear Iterative Clustering, Waterpixels, Spiral.
• Add rotate/flip buttons to the Convolution Matrix filter's GUI to rotate/flip the matrix.
• For GEGL-based filters, use a new metadata language to dynamically control UI attributes based on context (e.g. auto-disable unapplicable options).
• Allow filter actions to have hardcoded default operation settings by encoding them directly in the string attached to all filter actions.
• Color Palettes:
• Merge Palettes command is available for multiple selected color palettes now.
• Assets / Resources:
• Some basic presets are available for the Crop tool now: 2x3, 3x4, 16:10, 16x9, and square.
• Documents templates have been updated and now feature popular, contemporary document presets for both print and digital media.
• PDB:
• Rename *-paste-as-new to *-paste-as-new-image.
• Add PDB API for layer blend space, compositing space, and compositing mode.
• Build:
• Depend on LCMS2.7+ now, because earlier LCMS2 releases caused problems with certain GIMP blend modes.
• Depend on libpng 1.6.25+ to avoid warnings about known incorrect sRGB profiles, also avoid various vulnerabilities.
• Depend on glib-networking now for HTTPS support.
• Depend on librsvg 2.40.6 which fixes rendering bugs.
• Add a flatpak-builder manifest.
• OS-specific changes:
• Help browser launches on macOS now.
• Bugs:
• Overall 204 bugs have been fixed or partially addressed since GIMP 2.9.4.
• Translations:
• Updated: Catalan, Chinese (Taiwan), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Kazakh, Occitan, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish.

What is new in version 2.9.2:

• Core:
• Seek much less when writing XCF
• Don't seek past the end of the file when writing XCF
• Windows: call SetDLLDirectory() for less DLL hell
• Fix velocity parameter on .GIH brushes
• Fix brokenness while transforming certain sets of linked layers
• GUI:
• Always show image tabs in single window mode
• Fix switching of dock tabs by DND hovering
• Don't make the scroll area for tags too small
• Fixed a crash in the save dialog
• Fix issue where ruler updates made things very slow on Windows
• Plug-ins:
• Fix several issues in the BMP plug-in
• Make Gfig work with the new brush size behavior again
• Fix font export in the PDF plug-in
• Support layer groups in OpenRaster files
• Fix loading of PSD files with layer groups
• General:
• OSX build system fixes
• Bug fixes
• Translation updates

What is new in version 2.8.14:

• The only change is the fixed libtool versioning.

What is new in version 2.8.12:

• Core:
• OSX: Fix migration code for old GIMP directories
• Fix brush sizes when used from plug-ins
• Windows: Allow to Explorer-open files with UTF-8 characters in the filename
• Make XCF loading more robust against broken files
• GUI:
• Make sure the widget direction matches the GUI language
• Remove the option to disable the warning when closing a modified image
• Fix canvas overlay widgets (like the text options) for tablets
• Make DND work between images in one dockable
• Libgimp:
• Make gimp_image_get_name() return the string used for the image title
• Plug-ins:
• Make script-fu-server more secure by listening to 127.0.0.1 by default and add a warning about changing that IP. This breaks the procedure's API, but for security reasons.
• Bring back proper script-fu translations
• General:
• Massively clean up and fix the OSX build and bundle
• Add Jenkins tutorial
• Documentation updates
• Bug fixes
• Translation updates

What is new in version 2.8.10:

• Core:
• Set manifest as Windows 8 compatible
• GUI:
• Indicate if a file was exported in the Quit dialog
• Add shortcuts and hint labels to the close and quit dialogs that make closing and quitting easier and more consistent
• Rename the File->Export menu labels to match Save/Save as
• Fix keyboard shortcuts on OSX Mavericks
• Don't open lots of progress popups when opening many files
• Correctly restore the hidden state of docks in single window mode
• Libgimp:
• Fix exporting an image consisting of a single layer group
• Don't attempt to pick transparent colors
• Plug-ins:
• Fix crash in LCMS plugin if RGB profile was missing
• General:
• Fix compile on NetBSD (missing -lexecinfo)
• Bug fixes
• Translation updates

What is new in version 2.8.6:

• Core:
• Fix saving to URIs, it was broken to only allow exporting, and fix save/export of compressed files
• Fix brush spacing for drawing in any direction
• Increase the maximum size of clipboard brushes and patterns to 1024x1024
• Make sure data objects are saved when only their name was changed
• GUI:
• Don't allow single-window docks to shrink smaller than their requisition
• Make sure a single-window's right docks keep their size across sessions
• Allow to change the spacing of non-generated brushes again
• In single-window mode, make Escape move the focus to the canvas, and beep if the focus is already there
• Be smarter about unavailable fonts, and don't crash
• Make clicking the single-window's close button quit GIMP
• Make view-close (Ctrl+W) only close image windows and tabs, not docks
• Libgimp:
• Add SIGNED_ROUND() which also rounds negative values correctly
• Plug-ins:
• Make GIMP_PLUGIN_DEBUG work again after GLib changed logging
• Fix zealous crop for transparent borders
• Installer:
• Add Hungarian translation
• Data:
• Add a default "Color from Gradient" dynamics and tool preset
• General:
• Lots of bug fixes
• Lots of translation updates

What is new in version 2.8.4:

• Core:
• Move the OSX gimpdir to "~/Library/Application Support"
• GUI:
• Better names for the default filters in save and export
• Make tool drawing (esp. the brush outline) much more responsive
• Remember the "maximized" state across sessions
• Simplify the splash image code a lot, makes it appear immediately again
• Allow the text tool to start on an image without layers
• Various fixes for text style attribute handling
• Set unconfigured input devices to eraser if GTK+ says they are erasers
• Make language selectable in Preferences on OSX
• Libgimp:
• Make libgimp drawable combo boxes aware of layer groups
• Make sure plug-in windows appear on top on OSX
• Fix item width in GimpPageSelector (used e.g. in PDF import)
• Plug-ins:
• Better default values in the Drop Shadow script
• Fix a whole bunch of bugs in the BMP plug-in
• On OSX, use the system's screenshot utility
• Installer:
• Add Brazilian-Portuguese translation to the Windows installer
• Source and build system:
• Many improvements to the OSX bundle build system
• Support automake 1.13
• General:
• Lots of bug fixes
• Lots of translation updates

What is new in version 2.8.2:

• We've just released GIMP 2.8.2, the first update to the new stable version of GIMP. The update brings several dozens of fixes to various issues of all scales.
• Most notorious bugs fixed are: not being able to remember JPEG saving options, slow canvas redraw, not showing page setup options on Windows. There's also a workaround for the bug that used to cause showing incorrect file size values on Windows. For the complete list of changes please see the NEWS file.
• Additionally we did a lot of work to make a native build of GIMP for Mac a possibility. The official GIMP.app will be available soon. Windows installers of v2.8.2 will be available from the usual location shortly.
• Beginning with this version we are also switching to a new versions numbering scheme. Final releases now always have even number of the micro version, and the versions in Git always have an odd number.

What is new in version 2.7.3:

• UI:
• Use GimpSpinScales instead of scale entries in all dockable widgets
• Allow the spin scale to control a range larger than its scale's range
• Implement RTL mode in GimpSpinScale
• Add lots of tooltips to tool options
• Allow to drop more things to the empty image window, and simply create new images from them
• Cage tool: allow to add handle to the cage when clicking on an edge
• Cage tool: allow to remove selected handles from the cage by hitting delete
• Core:
• Add GimpMotionBuffer which abstracts away stroke smoothing behind a simple API and takes it out of GimpDisplayShell
• Add a GimpIdTable utility class
• Add a GimpDockContainer interface
• GEGL:
• foo
• Libgimp:
• Make libgimp depend on GdkPixbuf
• Add API to create layers from cairo surfaces
• Make it impossible to include individual files from any GIMP library. This was always forbidden and designed so it most probably breaks, but now it reliably breaks using #error.
• Plug-ins:
• Use poppler's cairo API to load PDFs, the pixbuf API is removed
• Port screenshot from GdkPixbuf to cairo
• Fix the annoying parser build warnings in imagemap
• Add a check-for-deprecated-procedures-in-script-fu make target
• Update libpng code to not use deprecated API (file-mng and file-png)
• Data:
• foo
• Developer documentation:
• Many updates
• Source and build system:
• Make cairo a global dependency, starting at libgimpcolor
• Require poppler >= 0.12.4
• General:
• foo
• Some more undeprecations now that we use GTK+ 2.24
• Fix lots of warnings that are new in -Wall in GCC 4.6
• Lots of bug fixes and cleanup
• Lots of translation updates

What is new in version 2.7.1:

• UI:
• Add "lock content" button to the layers, channels and paths dialogs, make the lock buttons more compact
• Refuse to edit locked items
• Add support for layer groups
• Improve internals and GUI of the save/export functionality
• Move the shortcut dialog's "clear" button into the entry
• Clean up UI code by introducing GimpDockWindow and GimpImageWindow classes
• Support multi-column dock windows
• Get rid of docking bars, use highlights in existing widget hierarchy instead
• Remove toolbox-window-hint gimprc setting and use dock-window-hint for both toolbox and docks instead
• Move GimpDock::default-height style property to GimpDockWindow
• Polish save+export path-part precedence rules
• Merge the GSoC 2009 Advanced GUI for Brush Dynamics project
• Default to non-fixed-aspect in Canvas Size dialog
• Add a still incomplete and Single-window mode
• Have an Export button, not Save, in export dialogs
• Improve Free Select Tool handle highlightning
• Support changing user interface language from preferences
• Update ps-menurc with PS CS4 keyboard shortcuts
• Reduce spacing around canvas and use it for the canvas itself
• Put name of active dockables in dock window titles
• Don't have Toolbox in list of Recently Closed Docks, handle that directly in the Windows menu
• Support selecting and tagging multiple objects in resource lists
• Improve on-canvas text editing and text attribute setting
• Add GimpContainerTreeStore and use it in all GtkTreeStore based views
• Add a new default "automatic" tab style that makes sure dockable tabs always show as much detail as possible
• Remove the dockable title bar and add the menu arrow button next to the notebook tabs
• Add an icon for the desaturate tool
• Add 'Rule of fifths' crop guide overlay
• Make Alt+Click on layers not affecting active layer
• Core:
• Make all GimpItems lockable so their contents can't be changed
• Make more sense when naming imported layers
• Make group layers work except for layer masks and save them in the XCF
• Change GimpProjectable::update to GimpProjectable:invalidate
• Make sure we don't mix font backends (and crash) by explicitely asking for FT/Fontconfig backends
• Move members of GimpObject to a private struct
• gimp_object_get_name() takes a gconstpointer now, remove casts from all callers
• Let drawables connect to their floating selection's "update" signal instead of letting the image do this job
• Fix brush rotation artifacts at even 90 degree rotation
• Don't leak shared tile memory on Solaris
• Add a PDB procedure to access a text layer's markup
• Remove legacy cruft from pdbgen and make sure number ranges are correct
• Move all image creation functions to a common file
• Add translation context to all undo descriptions
• GEGL:
• Make sure all nodes are added to their resp. graphs
• Use GEGL for layer scaling if use-gegl is TRUE
• Plug-ins:
• Updated script-fu's scheme to latest upstream fixes
• Don't store image-specific print settings globally
• Add fundamental OpenRaster (.ora) import and export support
• Add RGB565 support to the csource plug-in
• Data:
• Add texture/grunge brushes made by Johannes Engelhardt
• Developer documentation:
• Explain GimpContext
• Add SVG graphic with GIMP application core module dependencies
• Add a schedule for 2.8 development
• Source and build system:
• Add more code documentation
• Clean up subsystem linking dependencies in app/
• Add unit testing framework in app/tests/ and some basic tests, including basic UI tests and XCF tests
• Tentatively introduce usage of using Glade + GtkBuilder
• Depend on GLib 2.24.0 and GTK+ 2.20.0
• Add git commit hash in --verbose --version output
• Don't version control gtk-doc.m4, get it from gtkdocize
• Add GimpObject tracking code
• Plug memory leaks
• Lots of bug fixes and cleanup
• Lots of translation updates

What is new in version 2.6.9:

• Bugs fixed:
• 612618 - Font selection remains visible
• 622234 - gimp.desktop: image/x-psd in MimeTypes twice
• 622196 - Unportable test(1) construct in configure script
• 620604 - Description of "histogram" procedure is slightly inaccurate
• 541586 - Tool options not saved/loaded correctly?
• 614153 - Importing PDF files with long titles
• 600112 - blur-gauss-selective.exe crashes
• 599233 - Dialog of "Save as BMP" ignores changes which are not made with a mous
• 565001 - Text-Tool crashes when edit a 2.4.2 version xcf
• 565001 - Text-Tool crashes when edit a 2.4.2 version xcf
• 610478 - Layer preview suddenly stops getting updated
• 609026 - leaks shared memory
• 609056 - Exporting to Alias PIX format fails
• 608188 - a few strings in Save as... > Raw image data dialog are always in English
• 604820 - GEGL Operation "path" crashes GIMP
• 603711 - Crashes when using path tool
• 607242 - GIMP 2.7.0 fails to build against libpng 1.4.0
• 606372 - Saving to .ppm fails on indexed colorspace
• 605237 - the "Antialiasing..." message in the progress bar does not show translated
• 604508 - gimp-layer-new-from-visible should work from updated projection
• Updated and new translations:
• Asturian (ast)
• Basque (eu)
• Burmese (my)
• Catalan (ca)
• Chinese (Hong Kong) (zh_HK)
• Chinese (Taiwan) (zh_HK)
• German (de)
• Italian (it)
• Latvian (lv)
• Low German (nds)
• Romanian (ro)
• Simplified Chinese (zh_CN)
• Slovenian (sl)
• Ukrainian (uk)
• Valencian (ca@valencia)

Requirements:

• GEGL
• Babl