Category: Software Announcements

We are happy to announce immediate availability of GIMP 2.8—a new stable version of GNU Image Manipulation Program that culminates 3.5 years of exciting work.

With this version we are introducing some long-anticipated features such as layer groups, on-canvas text editing, advanced brush dynamics and the much desired optional single-window mode. We also started applying other important changes to the user interface that bring us closer to matching the product vision.

For detailed information about changes since 2.6 please read the release notes. Source code is available for downloading from a plethora of mirrors, a build for Windows will soon be available, and we hope to see a build for Mac OS X released as well.

We’d like to thank everyone who participated in development of GIMP 2.8: programmers, translators, documentation writers (updated user manual is a work in progress), and testers. We also thank our user community for the dedication and support—we needed it more than ever.

Now that this version is finally released, we are grasping the future with both hands. Stay tuned: some really exciting news will follow.

We are excited to announce that we have five students to work with us on improving GIMP as part of the Google Summer of Code 2012 program. All the students will be contributing to faster transition of GIMP to GEGL, our new advanced image core.

The projects are:

• Maxime Nicco and hanslo will port GIMP filters to GEGL operations.
• Ville Sokk will port other GIMP features to GEGL.
• Isaac Wagner will create a GEGL-based node compositor that will serve as playground for GEGL development.
• Mikael Magnusson will create a Unified Transform tool.

In the past years Google Summer of Code has proven to be a great source of contributions. We wish our students success and, above all, a lot of fun while making GIMP a state of the art image editor.

In late 2007 we launched smooth transition to GEGL—a new advanced image processing core incepted by a team of Rhythm & Hues developers.

For v2.6 we made an optional GEGL-based implementation of color adjustment tools, and for upcoming v2.8 we implemented optional projection rendering via GEGL. But nobody really had evaluated the amount of the work to be done in order to finalize this transition. Until just now.

Five weeks ago Michael Natterer and Øyvind Kolås decided to finally work out the migration strategy. While working on that they found themselves doing the actual porting. So now about 90% of the GIMP application’s core has been ported to GEGL. When finished, this will be released as GIMP 2.10 along with some other improvements yet to be decided on.

GEGL is quite an exciting project that will make it possible to implement some long anticipated features in a clean, non-sloppy way: high bit depth image processing and deep painting, non-destructive editing, a wider choice of color spaces to work in, mipmaps processing for faster perceived editing etc. This will be the focus of our future work after release of v2.10, along with further user interface improvements thanks to collaboration with Peter Sikking and his team at Man+Machine Works.

Now that we passed the point of no return with regards to GIMP and GEGL, we encourage you to join us and help porting the rest of GIMP. We’d really like to finish the boring part as soon as possible and start new exciting developments where we’d also need your support.

We also encourage you to support Libre Graphics Meeting 2012 where developers of GIMP and other teams such as Scribus, Inkscape and Blender meet to align development strategies.

We released new versions of GEGL and babl, quickly followed by the first release candidate of GIMP 2.8.

GEGL 0.2.0 has some major improvements and breaks API/ABI compatibility with earlier versions for some very good reasons.

Perhaps the most exciting change in GEGL is an initial support for GPU-side rendering and processing via OpenCL. Hardware acceleration makes it possible to leverage many operations to GPUs which can dramatically improve performance.

The foundation for this feature was laid by Jerson Michael Perpetua as the primary objective of his GSoC2009 project. The second part of the project was done by Victor Oliveira during GSoC2011. Victor was also sponsored by AMD to finish the project this winter, with help from GEGL team, Zhang Peixuan and his team from Multicore Ware. Currently you need to run GEGL_USE_OPENCL=yes to use this.

Two new essential operations were contributed to GEGL. Mikael Magnusson implemented perspective transformation, and Jan Rüegg submitted a global matting operation that would be required for a GEGL-based foreground selection tool.

Since this version GEGL also supports internationalization. The final patches for that were delivered by Michael Muré. Translations into German, French, Polish, Russian, Slovenian and Spanish languages are available, and we expect more to follow. Users of GIMP 2.8 will see this in the experimental GEGL operation tool.

The changes in GIMP 2.8rc1 since 2.7.5 are mostly not user-visible. We merely updated the code to work with newer versions of GEGL and babl, fixed GFig rendering issues and used all the translation updates we got to the point. There is still time to review your translations and submit updates, although probably not too much of it.

Please use the Downloads section to fetch source code of GIMP 2.8rc1 and visit gegl.org for source code of GEGL and babl. Let us know if you run into serious regressions that haven’t been reported yet.

GIMP has been accepted to Google Summer of Code 2012 program. This is a great chance for aspiring developers to get a good understanding of remote collaborative work and coincidentally help the project become an even better image editor.

We put together a list of project ideas that you might like to have a look at. But you are also free to suggest your own idea. Here is some more essential info for potential students. If you are eligible for the program, please join the gimp-developer@ mailing list or the IRC channel to discuss your project idea.

Student application period opens on March 26 and closes on April 6. Please contact us prior to submitting your application. We will not accept projects from people we never heard of.

We’ve just released GIMP 2.7.5, the last beta in the 2.7.x series. This version got various fixes and improvements, translation updates and a few minor features such as configurable default color of quick masks.

Since this version GIMP is shipping with a revamped brush pack and a set of ca. 40 tools presets, mostly painting related. The work was done by Ramón Miranda (GIMP Paint Studio) and Guillermo Espertino. This particular change is a first major step in updating the default bundle of resources to match user expectations.

For a complete list of changes since 2.7.4 please refer to the NEWS page, while the release notes summarize changes in the whole 2.7.x series.

There are still some bugs to fix before we can release v2.8. We encourage you to join the team and help us getting 2.8 released.

On May 2–5 we are attending Libre Graphics Meeting 2012, the annual conference for developers and users of free software for graphic design, photography and 3D modeling. The event is taking place in the beautiful city of Vienna, co-located with Linuxwochen.

The conference started in 2006 as an extended version of our annual developers meeting where we met Scribus and Inkscape teams to figure out how we can make our software work better together. Since then LGM has become the premiere event of the year for everyone who cares about free graphics software.

One of the achievements of the conference is OpenRaster, a raster file format that supports layers and blending modes and is intended for long-time archival. It is currently supported by GIMP, MyPaint, Krita and Pinta which makes it possible to use various tools on the same project file.

We have various ideas how else to co-operate with other teams and we tend to use LGM as another venue for our developers to meet each other and our usability team. However we’d like to notice that while your continuous support via donations enables us to travel to LGM, not all of the other teams are in this position. So if you care about co-operation between teams, we humbly ask you to support the conference via Pledgie. The money will be spent on getting other developers to the conference.

We expect the upcoming four days of Libre Graphics Meeting 2012 to be full of sparkling ideas, collaboration and, above all, fun. If you’d like to meet us or any other teams or even give a talk, you still have time to register.

GIMP 2.6.12 is a bug-fix release in the stable GIMP 2.6 series. Its purpose is mostly to wrap up all fixes that have piled up since 2.6.11 into a last release in the stable 2.6 series before we switch to 2.8. Please have a look at the NEWS file for a detailed list of changes.

The source can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org. Binary packages for various supported platforms should become available soon; please check the Downloads section.

Just like you, we want to see v2.8 out in the wild as soon as possible, but there’s still a number of regressions that block this important release.

On a lighter note, v2.8 is going to have an updated default set of brushes for painting and a set of tools presets (new feature in 2.8). The work was done by Ramón Miranda (GIMP Paint Studio project) and Guillermo Espertino.

Meanwhile there is a considerable progress with the GPU-side rendering project we announced in November. Victor Oliveira has brought OpenCL support on GEGL to a level where GIMP can load an image to a GPU and process it there with a brightness-contrast operation. This is only the beginning, but it opens quite a few possibilities.

We also maintain a rather active Google+ page where we post various project related news, links to impressive work done with GIMP and so on.