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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.

We released GIMP 2.7.4 with minor improvements and bugfixes. Most improvements are related to user interface and usability, see here for detailed list of changes. Depending on amount of bugs we get reports on this could be the last version before 2.8 release candidates and 2.8 itself.

The other good news is that between 2.7.3 and 2.7.4 Michael Natterer considerably improved GTK+ for Mac, so GIMP is finally going to be first class citizen on that platform.

We also released new versions of GEGL and babl. Changes in babl are mostly improvements of the existing feature set, but GEGL got operations ported from GIMP filters by Robert Sasu during Google Summer of Code 2011, as well as some new operations written by the team.

Resampling was improved in GEGL thanks to Nicolas Robidoux and Adam Turcotte who added a lohalo resampler. There’s API and infrastructure for doing non-affine resampling in place now as well.

Finally, GeglView GTK widget was separated from GEGL into a new project called GEGL–GTK to simplify using GEGL from GTK+ applications. The work was done by Jon Nordby from MyPaint project. Jon started another project, GEGL-Qt, to do the same for Qt. Please read his blog for more details.

Victor Oliveira, our GSoC2011 student, is going to continue his work on getting OpenCL support in GEGL for hardware accelerated rendering and computations. AMD got interested in the project and agreed to sponsor it.

The plan is to implement GPU-side color conversions and compositing operations, as well as some basic filters. Victor is also planning to create a simple API for development of new OpenCL based filters for GEGL.

Currently estimated deadline is March 2012. GIMP already has an optional GEGL based projection rendering as well as an experimental tool to test GEGL operations, so hopefully we are going to see some exciting performance improvements soon.

Our mailing lists have moved to the GNOME list server. All previously subscribed users have automatically been added to the new lists.

The old list mail addresses are no longer valid, please use the new ones from now–note that in addition to the changed domain, the list names got a “-list” appended to them.

The subscription management pages are accessible via the following links:

• gimp-developer-list
• gimp-user-list
• gimp-docs-list
• gimp-web-list
• gegl-developer-list

The list archives will be restored at gnome.org as soon as we get the files.

The gimp-announce, gimp-film, and gimp-win-user lists don’t exist any longer.

The online docs and developer pages are available again:

• Online Docs (docs.gimp.org)
• Developer Pages (developer.gimp.org)