Category: Articles

In 2014, we spent most of the time on improving GIMP’s usability and finalizing the GEGL port of GIMP to lay the foundation for various advanced features in demand by professionals. Some of the 2014 highlights are:

• Redesigned Blend tool, now you can tweak end points before applying the gradient fill;
• Improved foreground selection tool that handles fine details like hair;
• Finer control over painting dynamics;
• Up to 64bit per color channel processing;
• Improved file formats support, including 32bit TIFF loading/saving.

A far more detailed report has been posted to project’s mailing lists.

When software is popular, then there are elements out there who seek to profit from it by less ethical means. Installer packages with added spyware, adware or even malware are apparently part of the (Windows) user experience these days.

GIMP is being attacked in that manner as well, In order to keep safe, get GIMP from our own downloads pages or the sites we link to, and be very cautious when going elsewhere.

One victim of this is GIMPshop—started as a fork of GIMP to add UI terms that are more familiar to users of Adobe Photoshop, it is nowadays used to load third-party software onto the unwary user’s system. Thankfully, the original author is not to blame, as this operation is run by someone else.

The newly released issue #6 of GIMP Magazine features a “Using GIMP for portrait and fashion photography” master class by Aaron Tyree who uses GIMP professionally, and a gallery of other artworks and photos made or processed with GIMP.

The team is planning to switch to monthly releases, however they need your support to cover the costs of publishing a free magazine. You can sponsor the project at Patreon or visit the magazine’s gift shop to make a donation.

We have released an updated 2.8.14 installer (http) for Microsoft Windows. This one fixes the crash on window resize and the missing icons bugs – all by updating the included GTK+ library to 2.24.24.

Still unsolved are the missing spacing character in the zoom drop down and the disappearing background on high zooms (updating the Pango and Cairo libraries that are didn’t change anything there), investigations continue.

Please continue to report bugs, we can’t fix what we don’t know about.

Yesterday’s 2.8.12 release had broken library versioning, so we had to roll out GIMP 2.8.14 today.
The only change is the fixed libtool versioning.
Please do not distribute any binaries of yesterday’s broken 2.8.12 release, and get GIMP 2.8.14 using the torrent: http://download.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.8/gimp-2.8.14.tar.bz2.torrent

A new version of the user manual has been released. Changes include:

• complete translation to Brazilian Portuguese
• many, many, many bugfixes

You can click here to download the 2.8.2 release package. This release provides only the sources to build the help used by the GIMP Help browser. Find the packages on our download server.

For easy installation we suggest that you wait until an installer for this release has been packaged for your platform. Find more releases and information about our goals and how you can help at http://docs.gimp.org.

It’s been possible to use various scripting languages to automate GIMP for a long time. But until recently Perl bindings for GIMP were considerably out of date due to lack of interest from contributors. Fortunately, a while ago Ed J started working on updating those, and now a release candidate is available for testing.

Gimp-Perl version 2.30_05 is on CPAN now. It supports GIMP 2.8 and provides the following features:

• An autosave script (not installed by default, examples/autosave2) will save in its own directory files that were opened and changed, then reopen them on GIMP startup; if installed, will start along with GIMP.
• A plugin registry viewer, installed by default to Filters/Browse Plug-in Registry.
• A Perl console, installed by default to Filters/Perl/Console.

The way to install the release candidate on Linux is:

perl -MCPAN -e "install 'ETJ/Gimp-2.30_05.tar.gz'"

If you encounter any bugs, please report them on bugzilla.gnome.org.

Heads-up if you are still accessing the downloads via ftp.gimp.org:

The downloads server has been renamed to download.gimp.org, and it doesn’t support FTP anymore. If you have linked any file, installer package, source archive or directory with an ftp://-Link, please change it to http://. The directory structure is unchanged.

The Libre Graphics Meeting is a conference where artists, users, developers, designers, contributors,… who use, plan, develop, play with, tamper with free, libre and open source graphics applications, libraries, concepts,…

It is an unparalleled opportunity for them to meet, talk, discuss, listen, experience and learn about their favorite tools, the uses, the undiscovered potential, the new ideas that come with them

This year, Libre Graphics Meeting will happen at the University of Leipzig, April 2-5.

The attendees arrive from all over the world—last year, people from 26 countries traveled to Madrid to attend. Maybe there will be even more this year?

You can help to make this happen—and many of you already did.

We, the GIMP team, are covering the travel and accommodation expenses for our own team members, and we contribute to the global LGM funds as well. These funds are used to reimburse the travel expenses of contributors and speakers.

Our contribution is possible due to your donations—many, many thanks for this, the return on investment from such meetings for the projects is invaluable.

But, the LGM organizers, they ask for modest contributions, always keen not to drain the funds of the projects that attend the meeting. We’ve got our planned expenses covered for this LGM, so we’ll ask you to force them to take more! 🙂

LGM runs a travel fund pledgie campaign with an ambitious goal: $12,000. Please go there and contribute to make this awesome meeting possible.