GIMP

GIMP 2.8.18 Released

2016-07-14T00:00:00+02:00

We are releasing GIMP 2.8.18 to fix a vulnerability in the XCF loading code (CVE-2016-4994). With special XCF files, GIMP can be caused to crash, and possibly be made to execute arbitrary code provided by the attacker.

This release includes additional bug fixes since 2.8.16. An important change has happened to the initial startup experience on Microsoft Windows and OS X platforms - any “GIMP is not responding” errors encountered there should be gone.

The source code for GIMP 2.8.18 is available from our downloads page; pre-built packages for Microsoft Windows and OS X will follow shortly.

GIMP 2.9.4 Released

2016-07-13T00:00:00+02:00

We have just released the second development version of GIMP in the 2.9.x series. After half a year in the works, GIMP 2.9.4 delivers a massive update: revamped look and feel, major improvements in color management, as well as production-ready MyPaint Brush tool, symmetric painting, and split preview for GEGL-based filters. Additionally, dozens of bugs have been fixed, and numerous small improvements have been applied.

GIMP 2.9.4 is quite reliable for production work, but there are still loose ends to tie, which is why releasing stable v2.10 will take a while. Please refer to the Roadmap for the list of major pending changes.

Revamped User Interface and Usability Changes¶

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.

Note that we still consider this feature a work in progress, as dark themes still need some fine-tuning (especially regarding the color of inactive menu items).

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.

Note that themes and icon themes are now separate: you can easily mix your favorite UI with various icon sets. Also since most 2.8 themes would end up broken in 2.9.x, themes are not migrated from GIMP < 2.9. Users who want custom themes will have to install ones specifically made for GIMP 2.9/2.10.

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.

We cleaned the Preferences dialog a little and reordered options in a more logical manner. The Color Management page was redesigned following both internal and user-visible changes in relevant parts of GIMP (see below), and the Snap Distance options have been moved to a dedicated Snapping page.

Additionally, it is now possible to configure the size of undo step previews in the Undo dialog via the Preferences dialog, which was previously only possible by manually editing GIMP’s configuration file GIMP’s configuration file, by a complete oversight on our part.

The startup splash screen now features a pulsing progress bar to indicate that GIMP is not frozen. This, as well as initializing fontconfig in the background (also a new feature in 2.9.4), is meant to address a common issue where rebuilding the fonts cache (or building it for the first time) can take a lot of time hence making an impression that GIMP freezes at startup. We acknowledge that this is a workaround. Fixing the actual reason involves hacking on fontconfig. If you are interested, there is a bug report on that.

Color Management Improvements¶

The color management implementation got a complete overhaul in this version of GIMP. Instead of being a pluggable module, it is now a core feature. Moreover, we added an abstraction layer that makes GIMP less dependent on LittleCMS. This means that in the future GIMP could use native APIs on Windows and OS X, and/or use OCIO.

For now, it has helped us to clean up the code a lot and introduce a clean implementation of color management to various bits of GIMP such as: previews for color swatches and gradients, patterns, various color widgets (including the drag-and-drop color widget), the Color Picker tool, layer and image preview etc. The only unmanaged bit for now is the color widget in the Script-Fu and Python-Fu plug-ins. Moreover, GIMP will track which monitor the widget is currently on (different monitors would have different ICC profiles assigned to them) and color-correct it accordingly.

Grayscale images are first class citizens in GIMP once again: since v2.9.4, GIMP can color-manage them as well.

Since GIMP currently relies on sRGB (this is bound to change in future versions of GIMP), we decided to expose that in the user interface. So currently GIMP has an option called ‘Color-manage this image’ in two places: the New Image dialog and the Image > Color Management submenu. What it means is that instead of taking into consideration the ICC profile embedded into an image (whichever profile it is) it will just treat everything as sRGB. Please note that we are likely to reword the option to make it even more explicit about what it does.

Additionally, there’s now a View > Color Management submenu where you can enable and control softproofing.

The Color Management section of the Preferences dialog has been reorganized to reflect recent changes and provide more consistent wording of options.

Since color management comes with a speed penalty (at least with LittleCMS), there’s a new option that enables you to choose either better color fidelity of faster processing depending on the kind of work you usually do.

Among smaller changes there’s a new Image > Color Management > Save Color Profile to File... command that does exactly what it says: it dumps an embedded ICC profile to disk as a file. Note that copyright restrictions on ICC profiles may apply, so please be careful.

GEGL¶

GIMP now keeps track of all GEGL-based filters that you used within one session and allows re-running them via the Filters > Recently Used submenu, just like old GIMP plug-ins.

The Posterize and Desaturate color tools have been converted to regular GEGL-based filters, and both the Tile and Pagecurl filters have been converted to use GEGL buffers. A quite popular “photographic” Highpass filter commonly used for enhancing details was added to the Filters > Enhance submenu.

A way more noticeable new feature, however, is split preview for GEGL-based filters. You can compare before/after versions right on canvas and move a “curtain” around to see more of “before” or “after”, and swap their positions (Shift + click on the guide). You can also switch between vertical and horizontal division (Ctrl + click).

darktable as Raw Processing Plug-in¶

On Linux, GIMP is now capable of using darktable for pre-processing raw images from DSLRs (Canon CR2, Nikon NEF etc.). darktable is an amazing project whose developers stick around at our IRC channel and even contribute to GIMP (most recently, they added reading various metadata from EXR files).

Note that the file-darktable plug-in is activated only when darktable is built with Lua support. Make sure your build of darktable for Linux is feature-complete.

It is still possible to use other raw development plug-ins like UFRaw. For cases when multiple plug-ins are installed in your system, we intend to add a preference option.

Screenshots¶

The code for capturing screenshots has undergone a major reorganization. It’s now split into a front-end and several back-ends specific for Windows, OS X, Wayland and X.org (Linux and UNIX systems).

While there are no immediate user-visible changes, this reorganization will greatly simplify further improvements, hence improving user experience on different operating systems.

Painting¶

MyPaint Brush Tool¶

The new MyPaint Brush tool is now enabled by default. Daniel Sabo and Michael Natterer improved its performance and made MyPaint brushes available via an already familiar dockable dialog interface, with previews and tagging.

Jehan Pagès collaborated with the MyPaint team: he ported libmypaint to autotools, allowing, in particular, standard builds on all platforms, and work is being done to turn the default brushes into a separately shipped package.

Symmetry Painting¶

Another major new feature is symmetric painting mode, also developed by Jehan Pagès with financial support from the GIMP community. It can be activated through the new Symmetry Painting dockable dialog and allows to use all paint tools with various symmetries (mirror, mandala, tiling…).

“Mirror” allows to paint with horizontal, vertical (axial), and/or central symmetry. The symmetry guides can be placed anywhere on canvas.
“Mandala” is a rotational symmetry of any order. The center can be placed anywhere on canvas.
“Tiling” is a translational symmetry, which can be finite (with a maximum of strokes) or infinite. In the latter case, it is the perfect tool to create patterns or seamless tiles, with instant rendering of what it will look like, at painting time.

Quick 1-minute test by Aryeom Han:

Tool Options¶

The mouse scroll-wheel action mappings have been improved, allowing, in combination with various modifiers, to do useful things on the currently selected tool’s options:

Alt + Mousewheel: opacity increase/decrease;
Shift + Primary + Mousewheel: aspect increase/decrease;
Shift + Alt + Mousewheel: angle increase/decrease;
Primary + Alt + Mousewheel: size increase/decrease;
Shift + Primary + Alt + Mousewheel: spacing increase/decrease.

Note: the Primary modifier is usually Ctrl or Cmd, depending on your platform.

Selections¶

For cases when your selection has a lot of small unselected regions, you can now use the Select > Remove Holes command.

The Select > Border... dialog now provides several border style options: hard, smooth, and feathered. Feathered creates a selection which goes gradually from 1 to 0 the farther you get from the middle of the border. Smooth preserves partial selection (antialiasing) along the edges of the selection.

Better Tools¶

The Fuzzy Select and Bucket Fill tools got a new feature for selecting/filling diagonally neighboring pixels.

The Blend tool got shapeburst fills resurrected, and allows the placement of their handles on the canvas, outside of the image area. Additionally, the Blend tool now displays its progress thanks to a new GEGL feature available in several GEGL operations including gegl:distance-transform.

The Text tool now fully supports advanced input methods for CJK and other non-western languages. Minimal support already existed, but the pre-edit text was displayed in a floating pop-up instead of inline, within the text tool box, and without any preview styling. It is now displayed just as expected, depending on your platform and Input Method Engine. Several input method-related bugs and crashes have also been fixed.

Batch Processing on Command Line¶

A new macro with-files is now available in order to easily process multiple files through GIMP from the command line, which was a much awaited feature.

For instance, if you want to invert the colors of all PNG images in the current folder, then save them as JPEG, you could run the following from the command line:

gimp -i -b '(with-files "*.png"
                (gimp-invert layer)
                (gimp-file-save 1 image layer
                    (string-append basename ".jpg")
                    (string-append basename ".jpg")
                )
            )
            (gimp-quit 0)'

Note: the name of the macro may change before the release of v2.10.

Email Plug-in Resurrected¶

The File > Send by email… dialog will open your default email client with an attached copy of the current image, to share your work-in-progress with a single click. This is available only on operating systems with xdg-email (likely GNU/Linux, BSD only).

The original implementation using sendmail is also available. Yet since it requires a properly configured sendmail, which is not common on desktop machines, the explicit --with-sendmail option has to be set at build time to replace the xdg-email implementation.

Debugging Facilities for Windows¶

In the unlikely event that GIMP crashes, we need as much information as possible to find out the actual bug. The raw crash log is one such source of information. Windows builds can now generate backtrace logs upon a crash with Dr.MinGW’s ExcHndl library, which must be available at build time. The logs will be stored in %APPDATA%\GIMP\2.9\CrashLog\.

What’s Left To Do for GIMP 2.10¶

Since the release of v2.9.2 we have been mostly fixing bugs and completing the work we had started earlier. We are not planning to add any major new features in v2.10. If you are interested in helping us release v2.10 earlier, you can find the list of bug reports in our bugtracker.

Some Statistics on Our Awesome Contributors¶

GIMP 2.9.2 was released on November 27, 2015. Since then, the work to reach GIMP 2.9.4 was done in 1348 commits, making an average of 5.9 commits a day, of which 894 are (mostly) code-related, 241 are icon-related, and 213 are translation updates.

As usual, the GIMP team is small yet as dedicated as ever: more than a third of the commits have been done by Michael Natterer (514), the next biggest contributors being Jehan Pagès (192) and Klaus Staedtler (187). The three of them represent 66% of all commits.

Note: contributions by Jehan Pagès were made on behalf of ZeMarmot Open Movie project: symmetry painting, MyPaint library integration, email plugin, Input Methods, management of the new themes and icons contributions, and more…

We have prolific newcomers among developers:

Ell joined us with significant code contributions (32 commits), such as the diagonal neighbours, the “Remove Hole” command, and many other fixes;
Tobias Ellinghaus, a darktable developer, contributed 14 commits on darktable integration and improving EXR and PNM support.

Of course, we also have our usual suspects with 10+ code commits: Alexandre Prokoudine, Daniel Sabo, Kristian Rietveld, Massimo Valentini, and Michael Henning.

And since no patch is too small, it would be completely unfair to forget all other code contributors: Adrian Likins, A S Alam, Carol Spears, Eugene Kuligin, Jasper Krijgsman, João S. O. Bueno, nmat, Richard Kreckel, saul, Shmuel H, Jonathan Tait, Michael Schumacher, Pedro Gimeno, Richard Hughes, Benoit Touchette, Hartmut Kuhse, Kevin Cozens, Elle Stone, Mukund Sivaraman, Øyvind Kolås, Sven Claussner, Thomas Manni, Alexia Death, Andrew Worsley, Simon Budig, and Piotr Drąg.

New icons are a big work in progress, with 241 commits, mostly by Klaus Staedtler, with additional contributions from Aryeom Han, Benoit Touchette, Jehan, Kevin Payne, Michael Natterer and Øyvind Kolås. We should not forget Benoit Touchette for his work in progress on themes, as well as some code contribution.

We would like to thank as well every 30 translators: Alexandre Prokoudine, Ask Hjorth Larsen, Balázs Meskó, Balázs Úr, Christian Kirbach, Cédric Valmary, Daniel Korostil, Daniel Mustieles, Dimitris Spingos, Dušan Kazik, Gábor Kelemen, Hartmut Kuhse, J.M. Ruetter, Jordi Mas, Khaled Hosny, Marco Ciampa, Mario Blättermann, Martin Srebotnjak, Mónica Canizo, Necdet Yücel, Pedro Albuquerque, Piotr Drąg, Rūdolfs Mazurs, Sebastian Rasmussen, Sveinn í Felli, Tiago Santos, Yolanda Álvarez Pérez, Klaus Staedtler, kolbjoern, and Милош Поповић.

Note: Statistics based on the number of commits provide valuable information regarding the activity of a project, yet they are not always a perfect indicator of contribution, so the goal of this section is not to have any kind of contributor rank. For instance, one commit could be a one-liner, whereas another could contain several hundreds of lines (and even this may not always be a good indicator of the time spent on and the difficulty of the fix).

Moreover we should not forget all the “shadow contributors”, whose contributions cannot be counted as easily, working on things such as code review (which Massimo Valentini should be especially commended for), bug triaging and follow-up (Michael Schumacher here would get a prize!), community, website, and communication (Akkana Peck, Patrick David, and others)…

We sincerely hope we did not forget anyone, and we want to say: thank you.

Downloads¶

The source code is available from the Downloads page. An installer for Windows will be available shortly. A build for Mac OS X is not available at this time.

GIMPers at Texas Linux Fest 2016

2016-07-04T08:00:00-05:00

If you happen to be anywhere near Austin, TX next weekend (July 8-9) then mosey on down to Texas Linux Fest 2016 and meet some of your friendly neighborhood GIMP crew!

Akkana Peck and Pat David will be hosting a photowalk from 0900-1100 on Friday, July 8^th (first day of the meeting) to socialize, talk photography, and capture some images for their workshop sessions later that same day. Pat will be talking about various Free Software photography tools and using them to create high quality results. Akkana will focus on using GIMP as a primary photo editing tool.

Both sessions will be immediately following the photowalk, before and after lunch. They will also be in attendance for the “Graphics Hackathon” at the end of the first day.

They are part of a full “open graphics” track on the first day that includes Ted Gould creating technical diagrams using Inkscape, Brian Beck doing a Blender tutorial, and Jonathon Thomas showing off OpenShot 2.0!

More information can be found on the 2016 Texas Linux Fest website. We look forward to seeing you there!

GEGL 0.3.8 and babl 0.1.18 Released

2016-06-14T00:00:00+02:00

New version of GEGL and babl are out with new features, minor improvements, and fixes. These releases in particular are intended to accomodate upcoming GIMP 2.9.4 that depends on several important bugfixes from both babl and GEGL. However there have been some interesting new features.

First of all, now GEGL operations can report processing progress so that GIMP or e.g. GNOME Photos could correctly render progress indication. So far this is only used in two operations, gegl:cartoon and gegl:distance-transform. We expect to propagate this new feature to more operations in the coming releases.

Secondly, linear and cubic resamplers provide better default image quality at downscaling now. In terms of quality, the output is comparable to that of NoHalo and LoHalo samplers, but processing time is shorter.

Additionally, file handlers finally register MIME types for loaders and try to guess file types by analyzing file content before falling back to file extension detection. This makes the file loading routine a little smarter.

Finally, the ‘gegl’ binary keeps getting more features like simple video filtering and encoding audio alongside video.

For the first time in quite a while a new GEGL release contains no new ports of existing GIMP filters. This is because there have been no related contributions for the last few months. There is still a lot of work to do, and we greatly appreciate your help with getting more filters ready for non-destructive workflows.

The complete list of changes is available in the NEWS file. Tarballs are up at download.gimp.org/.

Updated 2.8.16 Installer with a Major Bugfix Released

2016-06-05T00:00:00+02:00

With the past few releases, users on the 32-bit versions of Microsoft Windows platforms were plagued by an annoying bug — resizing a window crashed GIMP. We believe this to be fixed, and have released an updated installer.

The crash was caused by a problem in libpixman, and is fixed in current version of this library. This has been packaged, so if you were suffering from this issue, you can get an updated installer from our downloads page.

Call for GIMP 2.10 Documentation Update

2016-05-23T00:00:00+02:00

With the upcoming GIMP 2.10 release we intend to finally close the time gap between releases of source code, installers, and the user manual. This means that we need a more coordinated effort between the GIMP developers team and the GIMP User Manual team.

For the past several months we’ve already been working on GIMP mostly in bugfix mode. It’s time to start updating the user manual to match all the changes in GIMP 2.10, and we would appreciate your help with that.

What Needs Doing¶

Updating the content. There have been a lot of changes since 2.8. For quite a while, we’ve been maintaining a structured list of changes in 2.10 specifically to assist technical writers in updating the user manual.
Translating the content. At some point we’d like to “freeze” the documentation so that translators could start updating localized versions of the user manual. Since GIMP is hosted at GNOME, you would have to contact your local GNOME translation team to get involved.
Resurrecting PDF builds. Years ago we chose DocBook/XML as a way to build both web (HTML) and printable (PDF) copies of the user manual from a single source. Unfortunately, there appear to be some issues with building PDF files presently. Someone would have to investigate, what’s causing this, and act accordingly.
Adding Search to the Online Docs. We’ve heard a number of requests to add basic search to the online docs. If you have an idea how to do that, please contact us.

How To Contribute¶

Technical documentation on hacking on the user manual is available in the respective Git repository.

The primary communication environment for all things documentation in the project is the gimp-docs@ mailing list. We encourage you to talk to fellow team members publicly about which part of the documentation you are hacking on. This is because efficient collaborative effort requires full transparence.

If you have technical questions about features in GIMP 2.10, you can use either gimp-docs@ mailing list or join the IRC channel, ask your question, and stick around for the answer.

We do not yet have an estimated time of arrival for GIMP 2.10, but there’s only so much time we can spend on completing this release before we can move to the next development cycle.

Revamping Tutorials

2016-05-05T00:00:00+02:00

As part of building a new GIMP website we had to sort through all of the legacy pages in order to migrate content properly. A nice side effect of this sorting included addressing tutorials that were out of date (or in some cases, really out of date). This gave us an opportunity to re-build the tutorials index to focus on (more) current content as well as ensure that everything is being licensed in a permissive manner.

Cool URIs don’t change¶

It was true in 1998 and is still just as true today. Possibly more so. Great care was taken to make sure that we didn’t break all of the inbound links to the old tutorials during the site update.

This means that if there were any links to the previous tutorials they will still work. They are still at the same URL they had always been. What we did change was the listing of tutorials on the index page:

www.gimp.org/tutorials/

That list now includes only more current content that has been permissively licensed for use. If you need the deprecated tutorials for some reason, see the complete list.

An unfortunate side-effect of pruning old material is that we are now a little light on good tutorials…

Help Write More Tutorials¶

Which is where you, the community, comes in! If you were looking for a way to contribute to the project, and you don’t feel up to coding^*, this is a great way to share and help others learn GIMP. We encourage you to come tell us about your tutorial on the gimp-user mailing list or, even better, drop by the IRC channel and let us know what you’re thinking (this is strongly encouraged to make sure there’s not something already being worked on)!

^*Of course, if you do feel up to coding we’d love to hear from you too!

There’s usually helpful team members around who can guide you with both ideas and content if needed. We have a tutorial template, and you can find the markdown file used to generate it in git.

We can use tutorials of all types and skill levels, so don’t feel intimidated by what you might see on the current tutorials page. Indeed many common questions we see might have solutions that are not obvious to others - the perfect opportunity to write a tutorial about it! We’ll absolutely consider all proposed tutorials.

New Tutorial - Tone Mapping with Levels¶

Speaking of tutorials, Elle Stone has just published a new tutorial on doing some simple tone mapping and shadow recovery of images using high bit depth GIMP and the GEGL Exposure operation.

The GEGL Exposure dialog.

The tutorial covers a method for adding exposure compensation to an image’s shadows and midtones while retaining highlight details. She does this using Exposure and combining the results with a mask based on a grayscale version of the working image (similar to using a luminosity mask). This is also one of the first tutorials using the high bit depth version of GIMP. Head over to the tutorials page and have a look:

Tone Mapping and Shadow Recovery Using GIMP’s ‘Colors/Exposure’

Updated Windows Installer Signature

2016-03-27T00:00:00+01:00

We have published an updated installer package for the Microsoft Windows platforms. If you have experienced problems in the past few weeks due to corrupt installer warnings, please go to our downloads and try again.

Corrupt Windows Installer Warnings

2016-03-17T00:00:00+01:00

For the past few weeks, we have been receiving reports that some users can’t download our installer packages for the Microsoft Windows platforms. Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer 11 mark them as corrupt and discourage users from running them.

Turns out this is a policy change by Microsoft, gone into effect on January 1, 2016. The new policy affects all kinds of security certificates as of specific deadlines, and this includes code signing certificates. Jernej Simončič, who creates the Windows installer packages, signs them to make their authenticity verifiable. But the way this signature is done is no longer considered safe by Microsoft, and there are justified technical reasons for that.

Administrators and users of Microsoft Windows systems are well advised to make themselves familiar with the implications of this policy; the TechNet article on the subject is available at Windows Enforcement of Authenticode Code Signing and Timestamping.

We are working to resolve the issue — this requires a more recent code-signing certificate and signing the installer packages with it. Stay tuned for updates.

As a temporary workaround, you can use other web browsers to download the installer packages.

GEGL 0.3.6 Released

2016-03-15T00:00:00+01:00

Last weekend, we released a new version of GEGL, graph based image processing framework used by GIMP and other free/libre graphics applications. Here are some of the most important changes.

There are two new operations: Saturation (works in both CIE LAB and CIE LCH color spaces) and the port of GIMP’s Selective Gaussian Blur filter. The operations for loading and saving video frames have been updated to work with FFmpeg 3.0. We also disabled the dcraw-based operation for loading raw images by default: the LibRaw-based operation does the job just as well and provides a better API.

Additionally, there have been some improvements in the ‘gegl’ binary: now you can change graph composition (namely, connect buffers to aux and other input pads) via the command line, and when a project is loaded for viewing, you can zoom in/out at cursor position on scroll wheel events. Moreover, you can now specify properties of operations on the command line, e.g.:

$ gegl input.png -o output.png -- threshold value=0.23

Among general improvements, copy-on-write handling for the gegl_buffer_clear function is now available. This should make clearing of buffers an initially cheaper and faster operation, with the actual allocation of tile memory (copying) amortised over subsequent pixel data writes to the buffer.

GEGL 0.3.6 is available at download.gimp.org.

There are still many GIMP filters to be rewritten as GEGL operations. Contributions are welcome!

StreamComputing launches GEGL-OpenCL project

2016-01-28T00:00:00+01:00

This week, StreamComputing launches an educational initiative that aims to get more developers to study and use OpenCL in their projects. Within this project, up to 20 collaborators will port as many GEGL operations to OpenCL as possible.

Vincent Hindriksen and Adel Johar who organize this project seek a way for the group to educate themselves. One of the ways is to gamify the porting by benchmarking the kernels and defining winners, and another way is to optimize kernels within StreamComputing to push the limits. Victor Oliveira, who wrote most of the OpenCL code in GEGL, joined the GEGL-OpenCL project to advise.

So far 7 participants have joined the project, so if you are interested in learning OpenCL and helping GEGL and GIMP get hardware acceleration for more of their features, email Vincent.

All work is being done on GitHub (check out the project’s description there for information on porting and benchmarking). The communication between participants is taking place in a dedicated Slack channel (request an invite from Vincent or Adel).

StreamComputing is a Dutch software development company that provides training and consulting services in the area of GPU programming and parallel processing.

GEGL is a free/libre graph based image processing framework used by GIMP, GNOME Photos, and other free software projects.

Libre Graphics Meeting 2016

2016-01-12T00:00:00+01:00

Join us April 15-18 at the 11th annual Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) hosted by the Westminster School of Media Arts and Design, University of Westminster, in London, UK. Come and meet developers of free graphics software, participate in a workshop, or collaborate with other visual artists who choose to work in free software.

LGM is an amazing opportunity for developers, contributors, visual artists, and supporters of free software projects to come together to work, discuss, and learn from each other. The meeting will have multiple days of presentations, birds of a feather meetings, and many types of wonderful workshops. There’s also an opportunity to meet some of the GIMP team as well!

This year the host is the Westminster School of Media Arts and Design, University of Westminster at their Harrow Campus:

Harrow Campus
Watford Road
Northwick Park
Middlesex
HA1 3TP

View Larger Map

If you are unable to join us at the meeting, please consider donating something to help offset the costs of project participants to make the trip out to collaborate with so many other awesome projects! LGM has a Pledgie campaign running to assist with travel costs for participants:

Funds from their Pledgie go towards helping contributors from all around the world converge at the meeting to share and present their work with others.

Special Focus: Other Dimensions¶

For the 2016 edition of LGM, they are looking at a different aspect of Libre Graphics, Other Dimensions:

For the 2016 edition of LGM we continue speculating and will expand Libre Graphics into Other Dimensions. We are looking for presentations and workshops that explore the dimensions of space and material: 3D modelling and animation, Libre architecture, Open Source product design and other fields of digital making and manufacture. We are also seeking contributions that offer reflections on the ‘other dimensions’ of open source communities and that engage with FLOSS tools in various contexts including but not limited to teaching, learning, practice and co-production. This represents a desire to address the future sustainability of the Libre Graphics movement, through a growth of the core projects and topics that will, we hope, allow us to welcome more and more FLOSS projects and participants to our community.

A History of GIMP + LGM¶

Over 10 years ago the annual meetings of GIMP developers branched out to LGM, and we have been attending the event every year since. It’s an opportunity to hold project meetings, talk to fellow contributors to other libre projects, and to get inspired by the work that you, our users, create.

At the 2014 LGM in Leipzig, Germany, members of the GIMP team were cornered for a few moments to capture some portraits. Here are just some of the faces you might get to see at LGM 2016!

Bring this image along as a reference when you want to buy a round of drinks!
For complaints, see this guy.

If you’d like an opportunity to show off your work, come check out others awesome results, or are just curious what’s new and interesting in the world of free software, graphics, and visual art - then we encourage you to come attend LGM2016.

We’ll be excited to meet you in person!

GIMP and GEGL in 2015

2015-12-31T00:00:00+01:00

We hope you are having great holidays. Here is our annual report about project activities 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.

The few missing features are color management for the color picker tool and color selection dialogs. This will be completed before the final v2.10 release.

Michael Natterer also resurrected Intelligent Scissors selection tool—the last one that wasn’t ported to GEGL—and added undo support for selections in progress.

Elle Stone added decomposition and composition of images to/from CIE LCH, a perceptually uniform color space that includes all perceivable colors and thus has a gamut larger than color spaces based on RGB and CMYK color models.

Rupert Weber, Jörn Meier, Massimo Valentini, Elle Stone, Thomas Manni, and Michael Natterer introduced a few improvements to the blending modes:

The Overlay mode is not identical to Soft Light mode anymore and relies on a widely used formula from both PDF AND W3C’s “Compositing and Blending Level 1” specification now.
There are CIE LCH based version of Hue, Chroma, Color, and Lightness blending modes available now in addition to their HSV based versions. See an explanation by Elle Stone for details.

Another development focus was on painting features. As requested by people using GIMP for digital painting, Jehan Pagès and Michael Natterer added the automatic saving of used colors into a new Color History palette. The palette is also part of the color selection dialog and the FG/BG dockable dialog.

In early 2015, Michael Natterer added a quick first version of MyPaint Brush tool that used MyPaint’s brush engine available separately. Daniel Sabo, Alexia, and Jehan Pagès revisited this mini-project in December and vastly improved it by making its performance comparable to GIMP’s own brush engine and adding support for smoothing brush strokes. Michael also made it possible to tag and filter MyPaint brushes. The tool is now very stable enough and will be enabled by default in future releases of GIMP.

MyPaint Brush tool in action. Painting courtesy by Alexia

Additionally, Michael Natterer added canvas flipping that nicely complements canvas rotation and is intended to help painters evaluate their work mirrored horizontally or vertically without having to undo the transformation. Thanks to Simon Budig you can map shortcuts to various commands related to both canvas rotation and flipping to speed up your workflow.

Rotating and flipping the canvas. Painting courtesy by Evelyne Schulz

We also improved support for various file formats:

Tobias Ellinghaus from the darktable team made the EXR loading color-managed by generating an ICC profile from the embedded white point and chromaticities on the fly, assuming linear gamma images.
ShadowKyogre, Massimo Valentini, and Michael Natterer fixed several existing bugs in the PSD plugin and improved support for PSD files with greater than 8-bit depth precision.
Mukund Sivaraman and Tobias Ellinghaus added the reading and writing of PFM (portable floatmap) files commonly used in HDR imaging.
Joao S. O. Bueno implemented exporting and loading group layers in OpenRaster files—a new feature in upcoming MyPaint 1.2.0.

Adjusting exposure of a 32-bit float PFM file

The next development focus was on GIMP’s visual identity.

Benoit Touchette, Michael Natterer, and Jehan Pagès added the ability to switch between icon themes. GIMP now ships with an optional symbolic icon theme originally created by Barbara Muraus with contributions from Jakub Steiner, and Klaus Staedtler.

Benoit Touchette also added an experimental dark theme that should work better for people who work on hi-color images. GIMP also ships a negative version of the symbolic icon theme to go with the dark theme.

Editing a photo in GIMP with a dark theme enabled. Photo courtesy by Pat David

Michael Natterer revisited the screenshot plug-in’s source code. It is now easier to add support for new screenshooting backends (Windows, Wayland etc.).

Michael Henning and Massimo Valentini fixed several bugs in the image ruler code that affected performance during painting. This vastly improved painting experience on Linux, but we hear that Windows users still experience issues, so we’d appreciate a wider testing and code contributions. For now, you can temporarily disable the ruler for your painting sessions.

Johannes Matschke contributed an experimental Handle Transform tool that allows scaling, rotation, shearing, and adjusting perspective with handles placed by a user on the canvas. Michael Natterer further improved the tool’s usability.

Michael also merged, improved, and marked as experimental another new tool, N-Point Deformation, contributed by Marek Dvoroznak a few years ago as the main objective of his Google Summer of Code project. The tool makes it possible to apply rubber-like transformation to objects.

GEGL 0.3.0, released in June, featured over 70 new filters/operations, as well as experimental multithreading and mipmaps support. We do not extensively use mipmaps in GIMP yet, but this will change in the coming releases. Further GEGL updates released this year reintroduced the loading and saving of video frames via FFmpeg, various optimizations, and more new operations, such as libraw based operation for loading RAW images (not yet exposed in GIMP).

Most of the work we did this year is available in v2.9.2, the first development release in 2.9.x series made in late November. Improved MyPaint Brush tool and visual changes (icon themes, dark theme) will be available in upcoming v2.9.4 release.

We expect to continue finalizing the GEGL port and the existing feature set in 2016. There are two branches with new features to review, but other than that we do not expect any major changes in the 2.9.x series of releases.

Last but not least, we owe a great debt to Pat David for redesigning and launching our new website for the 20th anniversary of the project that we celebrated in November.

Libre Graphics Meeting 2016 Calls For Participation

2015-12-03T00:00:00+01:00

On April 15—18, the Libre Graphics Meeting 2016 conference is taking place in London. We invite you to attend and meet developers of free graphics software, lead a workshop, or participate in one.

The GIMP team and Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) go way back. In 2005, annual meetings of GIMP developers branched out to a new conference that embraced developers of free software, graphic and type designers, photographers, and 3D artists. That conference was LGM.

Ever since then we attend the event every year to hold project meetings, talk to fellow developers from other libre projects, and get inspired by the work that you, our end-users, present.

If you are a GIMP user with outstanding skills in graphic design, painting, illustration, or photography, we encourage you to attend LGM 2016 and do a GIMP workshop. Please use this submission form to send a proposal. Submission deadline is January 10, 2016.

There are, of course, more formats for active participation: longer and shorter talks, hackathons, Bird of a Feather meetings, etc. You can learn more about those from the press release.

We’ll be excited to meet you in person!

GIMP 2.9.2 Released

2015-11-27T00:00:00+01:00

We are excited to announce the first development release of GIMP in the 2.9.x series. It is another major milestone towards making GIMP a state-of-the art image editing application for graphic designers, photographers, illustrators, and scientists.

The new version is already available in the Downloads section.

GEGL Port¶

GEGL is GIMP’s new image processing engine. The GEGL project was originally launched in 2000 by several developers from visual effects company Rhythm&Hues who needed a versatile image editor for movie production.

From the very beginning, GEGL was a challenging project, since no general image editing software at the time was built on top of the node compositions concept, and GEGL had to be designed with just that in mind.

In 2007, GIMP developers Sven Neumann, Michael Natterer, and Øyvind Kolås started porting GIMP to use GEGL. However, this process had to be broken up into several stages, because GIMP’s source code was already huge at the time.

So GIMP 2.6 (released in 2008) featured optional use of GEGL-based color grading tools and an experimental tool to use GEGL “filters”. Then GIMP 2.8 (released in 2012) featured GEGL-based projection—flattened representation of stacked layers.

Now upcoming GIMP 2.10 is going to use GEGL for pretty much everything under the hood, and v2.9.2 is the first technical preview release on the way towards v2.10.

While a few advanced features of GEGL such as non-destructive editing are planned to be exposed in GIMP at a later development stage (v3.2 and onwards), with 2.9.2, you can already benefit from certain aspects of the new engine, such as:

16/32bit per color channel processing
Basic OpenEXR support
On-canvas preview for many filters
Experimental hardware-accelerated rendering and processing via OpenCL
Higher-quality downscaling

Additionally, native support for PNG, TIFF, PSD, and FITS files in GIMP has been upgraded to read and write 16/32bit per color channel data.

GIMP loads simple 32bit float OpenEXR files and automatically switches to the respective precision mode (featuring a Cornell box reference file).

New and Improved Tools¶

All tools in GIMP are now GEGL-based and fully functional in up to 32bit per color channel precision mode.

GIMP 2.9.2 also introduced two new tools that we consider mostly complete:

Unified Transform, designed by Peter Sikking and implemented by Mikael Magnusson, combines rotation, scaling, skewing, and adjusting perspective in a single tool.
Warp Transform, implemented by Michael Muré, replaces the old iWarp plugin and provides its features in a tool that works directly on images, without a preview window.

We have also improved several existing tools:

Blend tool, worked on by Michael Henning, is now more interactive. After drawing with the tool to define the beginning and the end of the gradient fill, you can adjust start/end positions and change colors.
Align tool now features vertical and horizontal fill modes thanks to João S. O. Bueno.
Foreground Select tool can finally make subpixel selections in complex cases such as strays of hair on textured background. Two new masking methods for that were added by Jan Rüegg and Daniel Sabo, and the user interface was updated by Michael Natterer.

Several new experimental tools can be enabled on the Playground page of Preferences dialog:

N-Point Deformation, by Marek Dvorožňák, implements a new way to bend objects while preserving a natural look.
Handle Transform, by Johannes Matschke, is an interesting approach at applying scaling, rotating, and perspective correction using handles placed on the canvas.
Seamless Clone, by Barak Itkin, simplifies merging one image into another by adjusting brightness and colors of the pasted image to match the look of the image it is pasted to.
MyPaint Brush tool is our first shot at using more brush engines in GIMP. The code was written by Michael Natterer.

All the experimental tools are subject to performance optimizations, bugfixes, user interface redesign etc. We do not guarantee that they will be enabled in v2.10 by default.

File Format Support¶

Thanks to Mukund Sivamaran, Rasmus Hahn, and Øyvind Kolås, GIMP now features basic support for OpenEXR files, both loading and exporting. It’s currently missing advanced features such as layered or multiresolution EXR files, or unpremultiplication when exporting etc., but you should be able to load, process, and export a “regular” floating point EXR file just fine.

Additionally, GIMP 2.9.2 features initial support for WebP images, also both loading and exporting. Missing features so far are ICC profiles, metadata, and animation.

Color Management¶

The color management plugin has been replaced with completely new code by Michael Natterer to provide a more complete set of features, as well as better color fidelity preservation. E.g. GIMP can finally handle cases, when one image is pasted into another, and color spaces don’t match.

GIMP now uses LittleCMS v2 which minimizes color fidelity loss during conversions between 8, 16, 32, and 64bit per channel data, and provides support for ICC v4 color profiles.

Displaying ICC color profiles metadata

There are still some parts of GIMP like color choosers that need to become color-managed. We expect to complete this in time for v2.10.

Layers Blending¶

We have introduced some important changes to blending modes.

Overlay mode is not identical to Soft Light mode anymore and finally relies on a widely used formula from both PDF specification, as well as W3C’s “Compositing and Blending Level 1” spec.

When opening legacy XCF files, GIMP will automatically map the old Overlay mode to the Soft Light during compositing to preserve the rendering of your old artwork. For all newly created layers with Overlay mode the new formula will be used instead.

In addition to HSV-based Hue, Saturation, Chroma, and Value modes GIMP now features their CIE LCH based counterparts: Hue, Chroma, Color, and Lightness. Elle Stone provided a nice example of using them to post-process photos.

Contributors are Rupert Weber, Jörn Meier, Massimo Valentini, Elle Stone, Thomas Manni.

Metadata¶

GIMP 2.9.2 features an experimental dialog to view Exif, XMP, and IPTC metadata—something that we’ve been meaning to provide photographers for quite a while. It doesn’t yet support adding or editing existing metadata—this will be addressed at a later stage of development.

Just like the new color management implementation, metadata support is an integral part of GIMP now.

Digital Painting¶

Apart from the newly added experimental MyPaint Brush tool, there are several major and minor changes:

Canvas rotation and flipping have been added to facilitate users who need to paint from a different angle or check composition for errors.
You can optionally lock brush size to zoom.
All tools that use GIMP’s brush engine now have hardness and force sliders.

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The final v2.10 release is expected to feature configurable mirror painting implemented by Jehan Pagès thanks to GIMP users who supported his crowdfunding campaign. The code is mostly complete and will undergo review in the coming weeks.

Configurability¶

To help interested users test experimental features, we added a new Playground page to the Preferences dialog. In v2.9.2, it serves to enable experimental tools that we mentioned earlier in the news.

Behaviour, another new page in the Preferences dialog, helps configuring default snapping in normal and fullscreen modes.

Behaviour page in the Preferences dialog

Finally, the user interface to enable and disable tools in the toolbox has moved to the Toolbox page in the Preferences dialog.

Known Issues¶

At this stage, GIMP 2.9.x is mostly very stable and is known to be used in production by some brave users. However, certain image processing operations are currently slow. This has been partially remedied by rendering changes in the viewport first. We expect to do a lot of optimization work later on.

Further Plans¶

We are not planning any epic changes in the next 2.9.x releases. We want to release it as fast as we can, so we will be focusing on wrapping up what we have already started any maybe merging a few feature branches we have.

When GIMP 2.10 is out, we shall focus on the GTK+3 port to provide a more up-to-date user interface and restore rock-solid Wacom support on Windows and OS X.

Following GIMP 3.0 release, we shall start working on non-destructive editing and other much anticipated features.

20 Years of GIMP, release of GIMP 2.8.16

2015-11-22T09:32:24-05:00

This week the GIMP project celebrates its 20th anniversary.

Back in 1995, University of California students, Peter Mattis and Spencer Kimball, were members of the eXperimental Computing Facility, a Berkeley campus organization of undergraduate students enthusiastic about computers and programming. In June of that year, the two hinted at their intentions to write a free graphical image manipulation program as a means of giving back to the free software community.

On November 21st, 20 years ago today, Peter Mattis announced the availability of the “General Image Manipulation Program” on Usenet (later on, the acronym would be redefined to stand for the “GNU Image Manipulation Program”).

Since its public release the project has been evolving in many ways as a testbed for new ideas, which was considerably assisted by adding plug-in architecture. Over the years, GIMP amassed a huge amount of new features designed for all kinds of users and practical applications: general image editing, retouching and color grading, digital painting, graphic design, science imaging etc.

Between 2006 and 2012, the team collaborated with Peter Sikking of man+machine works to define product vision and improve user experience. Thanks to this collaboration GIMP’s user interface has become more conventional for professional users, and various tools have become more powerful and easy to use. But more importantly, we got a much better idea how to design good interfaces.

In the past several years we’ve been working hard on porting GIMP to a newer image processing engine called GEGL. The switch to GEGL made us rewrite or at least tweak pretty much every part of GIMP’s source code. Fortunately, this work is nearing completion, and you’ll soon be able to benefit from all the changes that it’s bringing.

New Releases and The Future¶

To celebrate the 20th anniversary, we released an update of the current stable version of GIMP. Newly released GIMP 2.8.16 features support for layer groups in OpenRaster files, fixes for layer groups support in PSD, various user inrterface improvements, OSX build system fixes, translation updates, and more changes.

Our immediate future plans are to release first public version in the unstable 2.9.x series that will feature fully functional GEGL port, 16/32bit per channel processing, basic OpenEXR support, vastly improved color management implementation, new tools, on-canvas preview for many filters, and more. This release will encompass over three years of work and become the first milestone towards 2.10.

Following v2.10 release, we shall complete the GTK+3 port that is required to bring back state of the art Wacom support for Windows users. When it’s done and GIMP 3.0 is out, we shall finally be able to get started on some very exciting and much anticipated features like non-destructive editing. Please refer to Roadmap for more details.

New website¶

In conjunction with the 20th anniversary we have updated and revamped the website. The vast majority of the work on the new website was done by Pat David.

The update (finally) includes some much needed improvements such as news items with permalinks and full RSS/Atom feeds. The site is also now responsive to adapt to various screen sizes. Try it on a mobile device or tablet!

Wilber & Co. comics courtesy of Aryeom & Jehan.

GEGL 0.3.0, babl 0.1.12 Released

2015-06-04T00:00:00+02:00

We have just released new versions of GEGL and babl, the libraries that take all the heavy lifting for color space conversion and image processing in GIMP. Both releases are considered a pre-requisite for doing a first 2.9 (development series) GIMP release.

The babl library got floating point conversions optimized. Additionally, HSV and HSL color models were added, CIE LAB conversions were fixed.

Most exciting improvements, however, are in the new GEGL release. A total of 71 new image processing operations were added: mostly these are ports of existing GIMP filters. Some of the existing operations were improved, and some got OpenCL versions.

Another focus of this release was performance: OpenCL support is now enabled by default when detected, there’s experimental multithreading support (use GEGL_THREADS= environment variable) and experimental mipmap rendering (use GEGL_MIPMAP_RENDERING=true environment variable). There’s also a new default tile backend that writes to disk in a separate thread.

The Grid project contributed several major improvements: support for using URIs in image loaders and the loading of meta-operations in JSON, created with imgflo’s online graph editor.

GEGL’s website now features a gallery of available operations and an API browser.

This release of GEGL was brought to you through contributions from 92 people. Respective source code downloads are available on gimp.org: babl 0.1.12, GEGL 0.3.0.

There is still a lot of work to be done. If you are interested to contribute ports of GIMP filters to GEGL or entirely new GEGL operations, please visit our wiki and join #gegl on irc.gimp.net.

GIMP Project’s Official Statement on SourceForge’s Actions

2015-05-27T00:00:00+02:00

This is the GIMP project’s official statement on SourceForge’s actions in regard to “abandoned” projects on their service.
It is archived in the GIMP Developer mailing list archive.

We are fully aware that since their launch in 1999, SourceForge had been providing a valuable service to the Free Software community and that this service may still be relevant to some Free and Open Source Software projects today.

The GIMP project did benefit from this service: SourceForge was the place to download the Windows installer for GIMP for many years and we appreciate it as an important part of GIMP history.

When it comes to distributing GIMP, our goal is to make it as easy as possible for users to install GIMP.
We do not want our users having to dodge any “offers” or to worry about possibly installing malware in the process.

With our shared history, it was painful to watch the invasion of the big green “Download” button ads appearing on the SourceForge site. Our decision to move the Windows installers away from SourceForge in 2013 was a direct result of how its service degraded in this respect.

The situation became worse recently when SourceForge started to wrap its downloader/installer around the GIMP project binaries. That SourceForge installer put other software apart from GIMP on our users’ systems. This was done without our knowledge and permission, and we would never have permitted it. It was done in spite of the following promise made by SourceForge in November 2013:

we want to reassure you that we will NEVER bundle offers with any project without the developers consent. (emphasis in original)

To us, this firmly places SourceForge among the dodgy crowd of download sites.
SourceForge are abusing the trust that we and our users had put into their service in the past.

We don’t believe that this is a fixable situation.
Even if they promise to adhere to the set of guidelines outlined below, these promises are likely to become worthless with any upcoming management change at SourceForge.

However, if SourceForge’s current management are willing to collaborate with us on these matters, then there might be a reduction in the damage and feeling of betrayal among the Free and Open Source Software communities.

An acceptable approach would be to provide a method for any project to cease hosting at any SourceForge site if desired, including the ability to:

completely remove the project and URLs permanently, and not allow any other projects to take its place
remove any hosted files from the service, and not maintain mirrors serving installers or files differing from those provided by the project or wrap those in any way
provide permanent HTTP redirects (301) to any other location as desired by the project

This is not unreasonable to expect from a service that purports to support the free software community.

SourceForge, What the…?

2015-05-27T00:00:00+02:00

Some of you might remember that in November 2013, we abandoned SourceForge (SF) as the primary download site for the GIMP installers for Windows platforms and moved the files to our own download server, download.gimp.org

The tons of links on the web pointing to the former site made keeping the installers there as well a necessity, though, and since SF claimed that our outrage over their “installer with benefits” was based on a misunderstanding, this seemed to be a low-risk approach.

However we are receiving reports that people who get there by chance receive small installers that include additional software. And it’s no clicks on those ‘big green download arrow’ ads this time, we’ve tried ourselves. SF has not responded to our inquiry yet, and we found that the maintainer of the GIMP for Windows installers is locked out of that SF project now.

Update:
And now SF is launching an attempt at damage control.

Ars Technica has a nice summary, with insightful comments.

Please go to our own downloads page to get the GIMP for Windows installers.

ZeMarmot, Libre Movie to be Made with GIMP, Blender, Ardour

2015-05-05T00:00:00+02:00

During Libre Graphics Meeting 2015 last week in Toronto our very own Jehan Pagès announced a new open animated movie project, ZeMarmot. It’s a road movie with a marmot as protagonist.

The team will be using just free/libre applications for the production: GIMP, Blender, Ardour, and a few others. Jehan will also resume his work on animation features in GIMP, extend OpenRaster file format to support animation, and improve Blender’s non-linear video editor as much as he can.

You can support the campaign at IndieGoGo.

Libre Graphics Meeting 2015

2015-02-27T00:00:00+01:00

Two months to go till Libre Graphics Meeting 2015 happens in Toronto, Canada. This conference is a great place to meet the people who make and use free and open source graphics software.

Participation is gratis and open to all. Every year, donations from supporters make it possible for LGM to subsidize the travel costs of participants:

gimpguru.org — R.I.P.

2015-01-22T00:00:00+01:00

We noticed that gimpguru.org, once the host of GIMP tutorials (some of which are also present in our Tutorials section) has been abandoned by its original owner and is redirecting visitors to some very suspicious downloads—don’t go there.

We have removed all links pointing there from the tutorials (please do tell if we missed one), and caution everyone to only consider links on our own downloads page and the sites linked from there.

Special announcement for domain owners: if you own a domain with gimp in its name and host a forum or something else, and don’t feel like you want to continue to do so or renew it some day, please approach us - we’d rather take it over ourselves and have it point to www.gimp.org than see it being abused like that.

GIMP and GEGL in 2014

2015-01-05T00:00:00+01:00

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.

The Price of Being Popular

2014-12-26T00:00:00+01:00

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.

GIMP Magazine Issue #6 Released

2014-11-19T00:00:00+01:00

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.

Updated 2.8.14 Installer for Microsoft Windows

2014-09-02T00:00:00+02:00

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.

GIMP 2.8.14 Released

2014-08-26T00:00:00+02:00

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

GIMP Manual 2.8.2 released

2014-08-14T00:00:00+02:00

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.

Gimp-Perl release candidate ready for testing

2014-06-12T00:00:00+02:00

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.

Download server renamed to download.gimp.org, no FTP anymore

2014-05-13T00:00:00+02:00

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.

Libre Graphics Meeting 2014

2014-01-23T00:00:00+01:00

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.

What we did in 2013

2013-12-24T00:00:00+01:00

Before you leave for the holidays, we thought you’d like an overview of what we did this year to improve GIMP for you.

Most of the time was spent on improving the GEGL-based version of GIMP (to be released as v2.10) and porting GIMP plugins to GEGL, so that you could benefit from 32bit float precision per color channel as much as possible.

We also successfully participated in Google Summer of Code 2013 and merged more code from GSoC2012 into the main development branch, namely Seamless Clone and Warp Transform tools.

You can find out a lot more in this detailed report. We wish you to have a great time with your family and friends!

GIMP 2.8.10 released

2013-11-28T00:00:00+01:00

We just released GIMP 2.8.10 ! This is a release in the stable GIMP 2.8 series. This release fixes a bug that prevented older GIMP versions from running on OS X Mavericks. We also did some small adjustments to the Save/Export code in order to make things a bit easier. For the complete list of changes please see the NEWS file.

GIMP Manual 2.8.1 released

2013-11-28T00:00:00+01:00

We’ve released a new version of the user manual with:

Many, many, many bugfixes
New (incomplete) translations: Brazilian Portuguese, Danish, Catalan
The online version of the manual provides a language menu. Readers are now able to easily switch to a different language of the same page.
It is now easier to report bugs: each page has a link at the bottom to report errors straight into Bugzilla.

Find the packages on our FTP server.

An additional bug fix release for GIMP 2.6 has been prepared as well: 2.6.2. It contains content fixes and an improved build system.

Google Summer of Code 2013 Results

2013-10-04T00:00:00+02:00

GSoC2013 program is over now, and 3 out of 4 students successfully completed it.

Carlos Zubieta ported 13 GEGL operations to use GPU via OpenCL, and the gegl-random module used by noise generation operations, then made noise-hsv and noise-cie-lch operations use it. You can read his report.

Simon Lui ported the PSD plug-in to use GEGL. GIMP is now capable of loading 16bit and 32bit per color channel PSD files, saving those is a work in progress. The updated plug-in also reads additional data from PSD files (text, slicing information, layer effects), but cannot use it yet: text support needs the relevant API in GIMP, and layer effects and slicing aren’t implemented in GIMP yet, so there’s nothing to map the information to as of now. His public report is here.

Marek Dvorožňák implemented a new N-Point deformation tool that makes it possible to deform objects while preserve shapes consistency. You can watch a video demonstration of the tool on YouTube. The work is based on a “As-Rigid-As-Possible Image Registration for Hand-drawn Cartoon Animations” paper by Daniel Sykora et al.

Finally, Ajay Ramanathan attempted to merge selection tools into a single tool selection with modes (rectangular, ellipse, single row/column, N-side polygon selection modes).

All the source code created by our students is available in respective Git branches. We will review it and make sure we use the most of it. We thank Carlos, Simon, Marek, and Ajay for working with us over the summer and we are looking forward to working with them in the future!

Sponsoring symmetric painting mode

2013-09-23T00:00:00+02:00

Jehan Pagès, one of our active contributors, started a personal crowdfunding campaign to sponsor his work on symmetric painting in GIMP. You can find more information in his blog, and there’s a video of a proof-of-concept implementation on YouTube. If you care about GIMP as a tool for digital painting, supporting this project is likely to benefit your workflow.

While we are not ready for a full-fledged crowdfunding campaign for GIMP yet, we think that this kind of focused campaigns, tailored for particular audiences, definitely have merit.

GIMP Magazine #4 published

2013-09-05T00:00:00+02:00

The fourth issue of GIMP Magazine is now out and available as a digital download, a printed copy, and an e-zine for iPad. In just a year the project got a huge following, and now it’d a 100 pages large magazine with interviews, tutorials, a gallery section, and a graphic novel of its own.

Creating a full-fledged magazine takes a lot of time, so while GIMP Magazine is a free download, we kindly suggest you to consider premium options. That way you will ensure its continuity.

GIMP 2.8.6 Released

2013-06-21T00:00:00+02:00

We just released GIMP 2.8.6! This is a release in the stable GIMP 2.8 series, featuring lots of bug fixes and translation updates. For the complete list of changes please see the NEWS file.

Four Students to Work on GIMP During GSoC2013 Program

2013-05-27T00:00:00+02:00

Four students will be working on GIMP and GEGL this summer thanks to Google Summer of Code 2013 program.

Ajay Ramanathan will be working on a combined selection tool;
Carlos Zubieta will be porting GEGL operations to OpenCL;
Simon Lui will improve support for PSD in GIMP (text layers as text etc.);
Marek Dvorožňák will add a new tool to deform an image objects in a way that they behave like real world objects (see YouTube demo).

We are looking forward to the upcoming three months of exciting work with our new contributors.

While getting prepared to a new run of the Google Summer of Code program, we merged code from a few past GSoC projects, namely Warp Transform and Seamless Paste tools.

The Warp Transform tool is an interactive on-canvas version of our old iWarp plug-in, and it’s in a good shape to be part of a future v2.10 release. It still needs a few internal and user interface changes, though.

The Seamless Paste tool does just that: seamless pasting of an object from one picture into another, optionally updating color characteristics. This tool needs a lot more work. Barak Itkin recently posted an update in his blog to outline the changes to be made.

Stay tuned for more development news.

Four Students to Work on GIMP During GSoC2013 Program

2013-04-08T00:00:00+02:00

GIMP will be taking part in this year’s Google Summer of Code program as a mentoring organization. We are inviting interested students to get in touch with us and start discussing potential projects.

Some project ideas have already been posted in the wiki, but you are free to come up with your own ones. At this point porting existing plug-ins to GEGL has the highest priority, as it will aid us in releasing GIMP 2.10 sooner.

If you are eligible for participation and eager to contribute to our project, please introduce yourself on the mailing list for developers or in the #gimp channel at irc.gimp.net. In the latter case please bear in mind that the core team is mostly in the Western Europe timezone.

Four Students to Work on GIMP During GSoC2013 Program

2013-02-12T00:00:00+01:00

Yesterday Google announced Summer of Code 2013 program. Participating at GSoC has proved to be rather beneficial to us. Here are just some of the features implemented during past runs of the program: five new tools (Heal, Perspective Clone, Cage Transform, Warp Transform, Seamless Paste), resources tagging, hardware acceleration in GEGL. Needless to say, we’ll try to participate this year again.

We already have a preliminary list of project ideas for this year’s program: improving selection tools, implementing sophisticated slicing tool for web designers, creating a full-featured OpenEXR plug-in. However, the top priority project for us would be porting more plug-ins to GEGL, which is one of the issues that block the release of GIMP 2.10.

Even though we won’t know whether we are participating until April 8, if you are considering to work with us this summer, we suggest that you start talking to us already. When we vote for students, we need to know you well enough to make a fair judgment. Please find out if you are eligible for the program, then join the developers mailing list or talk to us on IRC.

GIMP 2.8.4 for OSX Available

2013-02-10T00:00:00+01:00

GIMP 2.8.4 is now available as disk image for Mac OSX.

Please note that with this release, we have moved GIMP’s per-user data from “~/Library” to “~/Library/Application Support”. If you had installed GIMP 2.8.2 before, please open a terminal and enter the following command, so GIMP 2.8.4 will pick up your data from the right location:

mv ~/Library/GIMP ~/Library/Application\ Support

GIMP 2.8.4 Released

2013-02-05T00:00:00+01:00

GIMP 2.8.4 is out! This is a release in the stable GIMP 2.8 series, featuring lots of bug fixes and translation updates. For the complete list of changes please see the NEWS file.

Pre-built binaries for Mac will be available soon.

GIMP in 2012

2012-12-27T00:00:00+01:00

As 2013 is fast approaching, we’d like to take a quick look at 2012 and what we did during the year.

In May we released the long anticipated new stable version, v2.8, with many improvements such as layer groups, tagging of resources, new Cage transform tool and more.

We also started the final transition to GEGL as a new image processing core. All legacy from the libgimp has already been removed.

Unstable version of GIMP is now capable of working in 16 and 32 bit per channel modes, both integer and float. Color management has been improved as well, and thanks to support by AMD and Google the GEGL library can do GPU-side rendering and processing with OpenCL.

We successfully participated at Google Summer of Code 2012. Our students ported more GIMP filters to GEGL operations, created a node compositing application for testing GEGL, and implemented a unified transform tool for GIMP.

In past years we let our work with community slip, so this year we also tried to establish a better connection with our user base. Our Google+ page, where we now regularly share project news and useful GIMP tutorials we come across, is currently circled by ca. 22.000 people (as compared to 1.000 in January 2012).

Last, but not least, we are happy to see the community actively promoting GIMP of its own accord. E.g. this year the GIMP Magazine project was started, with two issues already published and the 3rd issue currently in the works.

Thanks to all contributors our project vision is becoming a reality. GIMP already works in HDR, partially uses GPU for rendering and processing, has better transformation tools.

Our primary focus for 2013 will be finishing the transition to GEGL. We don’t expect it to be an easy job: it’s likely to keep us busy most of 2013, if not longer. You can help us to boost the development. Come join us to complete the rewrite and deliver the new generation of GIMP as a polished stable product.

GIMP Gets ICC v4 Color Profiles Support

2012-11-21T00:00:00+01:00

For the last few weeks GIMP has been capable of using ICC v4 color profiles thanks to a patch by Laurent Martelli who ported the color management plug-in to use LittleCMS v2.

There is also an ongoing work by Elle Stone to adapt that plug-in to the new GEGL-based architecture and make color space conversions just work between various bit depth precision levels — from 8-bit to 32-bit floating point.

Once it’s done, GIMP will be capable of converting images between different color spaces with little to no loss of color fidelity. In fact, it already works, with some caveats.

Meanwhile Michael Natterer is busy porting plug-ins for loading and saving files to GEGL and GIO. The latter means that GIMP doesn’t create temporary files anymore when loading files from remote locations, and previews in the Open File dialog 100% match actual images.

There is still a lot of work to do before GEGL-based version of GIMP is completely functional. We encourage you to join the team and help making the future closer.

Google Summer of Code 2012 Is Over

2012-09-03T00:00:00+02:00

Four out of five GIMP students successfully finished their work in the Google Summer of Code 2012 program. Unfortunately one of the students wasn’t able to complete all of the work.

The code written by the students has already been merged to main development branches and is expected to be available in the next releases of GIMP and GEGL.

While the first public version of the Unified Transform Tool will only be available in the 2.9.x series, new GEGL operations will be present in the next release of GEGL already.

The students ported the following GIMP filters to GEGL operations: Shift, Wind, Cartoon, Photocopy, Oilify, Softglow, and a variety of noise generators.

The GEGL-based node editor is a standalone project and will eventually be released separately.

It was a great summer. We thank all the students for participating and we would love to see them around in years to follow.

GIMP 2.8.2 Released

2012-08-24T00:00:00+02:00

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.

We Are Looking for Windows Developers

2012-07-25T00:00:00+02:00

It’s been a long time since we last had an active Windows-based developer. Consequently, GIMP has accumulated a plethora of bugs specific for that operating system. As much as we’d like to provide a smooth user experience for Windows users, we simply do not have the required human resources.

Hence, if you are an experienced Windows-based developer who is interested to help GIMP become a first-class citizen in the Windows world, please get in touch with us. Our main communication channels are the gimp-developer mailing list and IRC. Here is the list of all reported bugs for the Windows version of GIMP.

If you go for IRC, we recommend sticking there for several hours, since we are mostly Europe-based, and you maybe aren’t in the same timezones span. Most development talks happen on IRC anyway, so staying online helps the communication.

All GSoC 2012 Students Passed Midterm Evaluation

2012-07-20T00:00:00+02:00

We are glad to announce that all of our Google Summer of Code 2012 students passed the midterm evaluation last week.

All projects are coming along nicely. The unified transform is already quite functional, the experimental GEGL editor is maturing, more filters were rewritten into GEGL operations, and more parts of GEGL were adapted for the new image processing core.

There’s also substantial progress with the Seamless Clone tool that was part of Google Summer of Code 2011 program. The tool relies on Poly2tri — a C++ library for generating constrained Delaunay triangulations. You can read more about this project in the developer’s blog.

The Poly2tri library is likely to be used by the next generation of the Cage Transform tool (available since v2.8). This is expected to simplify and hence speed up calculations which are currently slow when used on large images.

New Usability Project

2012-05-14T00:00:00+02:00

Since 2006 we’ve been improving GIMP’s user interface with help from Peter Sikking and his team at man + machine interface works. Some of the best improvements in GIMP’s UI over past several years are the direct result of our collaboration.

We are happy to announce that for the next 10 weeks Marinus Schraal is joining Peter Sikking to work on a concept of a new widget set for tools’ options in GIMP. The net outcome will be a functional spec for new UI elements that will be compact and easy to use.

By the way, recently Peter did another GIMP related interaction design course at the FH Vorarlberg, Austria. His students worked on possible new user interfaces for Liquid Rescale plug-in that implements content-aware scaling.

High Bit Depth Processing Available Now

2012-05-04T00:00:00+02:00

Today at Libre Graphics Meeting 2012 in Vienna we announced that the development version of GIMP is now capable of processing images in 16bit and 32bit modes, integer or float at your preference.

Transformation, painting and color adjustment tools will just work in higher bit depth precision modes. More than that, GIMP can load and save 16bit PNG images and save EXR and HDR files now. We also improved support for indexed images, so that you could finally paint over them with the Smudge tool or apply filters.

There is still a lot of work left to do, and this is a great chance for potential contributors to step up and begin improving the application. Low-hanging fruits include porting of file loaders and savers, filters and other small bits of GIMP that don’t require a lot of familiarity with the internal structure. Please contact us in the gimp-developer mailing list.

Decision on the final feature set in 2.10 is yet to be made, no time-based schedule is available either. However we fully intend to make development cycles much shorter.

GIMP 2.8 Released

2012-05-03T00:00:00+02:00

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.

GIMP and GEGL Projects for GSoC2012 Announced

2012-04-23T00:00:00+02:00

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.

GIMP’s Core Getting Ported to GEGL

2012-04-17T00:00:00+02:00

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.

GEGL and babl Updated, GIMP 2.8rc1 Released

2012-04-08T00:00:00+02:00

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 Accepted for GSoC2012

2012-03-21T00:00:00+01:00

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.

GIMP 2.7.5 Released

2012-03-14T00:00:00+01:00

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.

GIMP at Libre Graphics Meeting 2012

2012-02-27T00:00:00+01:00

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 Released – The Final 2.6 Release

2012-02-01T00:00:00+01:00

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.

GIMP 2.7.4 Released, GEGL and babl Updated

2011-12-13T00:00:00+01:00

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.

AMD Sponsors Further Work on OpenCL Support in GEGL

2011-11-28T00:00:00+01:00

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.

Mailing Lists Moved to GNOME Mailing List Server

2011-10-26T00:00:00+02:00

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:

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.

Online Docs and Developer Pages Restored

2011-10-21T00:00:00+02:00

The online docs and developer pages are available again:

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

FTP and Wiki Back Online

2011-10-18T00:00:00+02:00

We managed to get FTP and Wiki back online:

FTP Downloads (ftp.gimp.org)
Developer Wiki (wiki.gimp.org)

Mailing list, FTP and Documentation Outage

2011-10-16T00:00:00+02:00

Due to relocation onto a different server, the following services are currently not available:

Mailing lists (lists.xcf.berkeley.edu)
FTP Downloads (ftp.gimp.org)
Documentation (docs.gimp.org)
Developer website (developer.gimp.org)
Developer Wiki (wiki.gimp.org)

GSoC2011 is Over

2011-09-17T00:00:00+02:00

Google Summer of Code 2011 is over, and all of our students have successfully finished their respective projects. All of the code is available in Git repositories, but not all of it is going to be part of the next released versions of GEGL and GIMP. Here is why.

Both new tools, Seamless Clone and Warp Transform, as well as new size entry widget are too late to become part of 2.8. We are planning to make them part of 2.10, when they are better tested for reliability and usability. The OpenCL project needs more work to become part of GEGL’s main development branch. However the project to port more GIMP filters to GEGL operations is already part of master branch in GEGL and will be available in the next version of GEGL.

Some of our students are taking a well deserved break from GSoC or are back to study, while others continue hacking on their projects. Michael Muré recently started work on undo/redo support in the Warp Transform tool and works now on extending GEGL’s capabilities regarding transformations. Barak Itkin continues working on his Seamless Paste tool and intends to make it usable with larger images as well as fix some bugs and make it more flexible. Victor Oliveira keep working on his OpenCL/GEGL project as well.

GIMP 2.7.3 Released

2011-08-22T00:00:00+02:00

We are pleased to announce availability of a new development version that brings us closer to GIMP 2.8. This version is packed with important new features and improvements.

The most visible changes in 2.7.3 are the fully working single-window mode, including working session management, and the introduction of a new hybrid spinbutton/scale widget which takes less space in dockable dialogs.

For a complete list of changes since 2.7.2 please refer to NEWS page, while the release notes summarize changes in the whole 2.7.x series.

Please note that the whole 2.7.x series of versions is considered unstable and is not recommended for use in production even though it might just work for you. Our intention is to make development versions available for passionate users who can provide useful feedback to help us fix bugs and streamline implementation of some of the new features. The upcoming v2.8 also introduces a huge amount of API deprecations and additions that have the potential to break existing 3rd party scripts and plug-ins. Please file bugs for all plug-ins and scripts that do work in v2.6, but don’t work in 2.7.3. A migration guide for developers will be provided when v2.8 is out.

There is still a lot of work to do on v2.8. Please refer to this page to find out what the current estimation of v2.8 release is, and what bugs you can help us fixing to make the new stable version happen sooner.

On GPU-side Rendering and Further Development Plans

2011-08-14T00:00:00+02:00

While GEGL gradually replaces GIMP’s old core, it’s time for us to consider long-term strategy for improving performance. The trend these days seems to be a combination of multithreading, GPU-side processing and networks. Most of that can be handled thanks to OpenCL standard by Khronos Group.

Back in 2009 we already had a Google Summer of Code project by Jerson Michael Perpetua who introduced basics of GPU-side rendering to GEGL. This year we have even more progress. Another GSoC student, Victor Oliveira, has been working on support for OpenCL in GEGL since late May. If you are interested in details, please read his latest report.

The upcoming GIMP v2.8 isn’t going to do GPU-side rendering and processing, because it’s simply too late for this development cycle. The next version, v2.10, is going to feature all of our other GSoC projects this year and more API cleanup. With v3.0 we are doing the final switch to GEGL, and this is where we currently expect OpenCL support in GEGL to be mature enough to be used. For more details please refer to our feature roadmap.

We aim to make GIMP a state of the art image editing tool. We know that our past approach to development of new versions didn’t exactly encourage contributions that helped making it happen. This is why starting with v2.10 we are switching to a shorter development cycle. In other words, new stable versions will have less new features and will get released sooner, helping us to process queue of incoming new features much faster.

All major new features are now being developed in dedicated Git branches so that you could easily merge our latest upstream changes into your feature branches, and we then could easily review and merge your new features into upstream. If the new proposed workflow sounds appealing to you, and you are interested to contribute to the project, please let us know.

In the mean time we are preparing another development version of GIMP with quite a lot of fixes gathered over last 4 months. Stay tuned for more news.

All GSoC Students Passed Midterm Evaluation

2011-07-20T00:00:00+02:00

We are glad to announce that all of our Google Summer of Code students have passed midterm evaluation. All the code is being maintained in respective Git branches of GEGL and GIMP.

As a reminder, this year Google Summer of Code is bringing us two new tools, Seamless Clone and Warp Transform, several GEGL operations, support for OpenCL based rendering in GEGL, and a new widget for size entry.

We also reviewed projected date of GIMP 2.8 release, and it still looks like end of 2011. This version is going to introduce dramatic user interface improvements as well as a multitude of new features including new Cage Transform tool and much more sophisticated painting options.

Two New Books on GIMP Published

2011-05-06T00:00:00+02:00

Two new books on GIMP have been published recently. “GIMP 2.6 Cookbook”, in English, by Juan Manuel Ferreyra is a collection of straightforward instructions that will help you accomplishing typical design and photography related tasks. This book is packed with answers to get you preparing great images with the GIMP immediately.

“GIMP”, in French, by Olivier Lecarme and Karine Delvare is, on the contrary, a complete user guide and a reference to GIMP features. The book explains basics of digital imaging, retouching photos, creating animations, preparing pictures for publishing on the Web etc.

Google Summer of Code 2011 Projects Announced

2011-04-26T00:00:00+02:00

We are pleased to announce that we have five projects accepted for Google Summer of Code 2011 program:

Adaptive cloning will provide means to paste an object from a different picture in a way that it will seamlessly blend into the new image, matching its brightness and color characteristics. This will be a very useful tool for users who do a lot of photo manipulation.
New GimpSizeEntry widget will place unit selection inside the widget. The project will also bring major refactoring to the code.
The iWarp filter as a tool project will make it possible to apply various local transformations right on canvas.
Porting GIMP plugins to GEGL operations will boost long anticipated transition to GEGL.
The OpenCL in GEGL project will bring to GEGL automatic memory management and migration of tiles between GPU and CPU, as well as possibility to write GEGL operations in OpenCL.

We are wishing our students success with their respective projects and we are looking forward to working with them.

GIMP 2.7.2 Released

2011-04-15T00:00:00+02:00

We are pleased to announce availability of a new development version that brings us closer to GIMP 2.8. This version is packed with important new features and improvements. For a complete list of changes since 2.7.1 please refer to NEWS page, while the release notes summarize changes in the whole 2.7.x series.

Please note that the whole 2.7.x series of versions is considered unstable and is not recommended for use in production even though it might just work for you. Our intention is to make development versions available for passionate users who can provide useful feedback to help us fix bugs and streamline implementation of some of the new features. The upcoming v2.8 also introduces a huge amount of API deprecations and additions that have the potential to break existing 3rd party scripts and plug-ins. Please file bugs for all plug-ins and scripts that do work in v2.6, but don’t work in 2.7.2. A migration guide for developers will be provided when v2.8 is out.

Progress of GIMP development is now trackable

2011-04-04T00:00:00+02:00

One of the most common questions we keep hearing is when the next version of GIMP is released. While it’s difficult to define exact dates, it is possible to estimate how far away a new stable release from now is based on amount of work that has to be done. We intend to make development of GIMP as transparent as possible, so Martin Nordholts, our core team developer, created a web app that adds previously missing alpha channel to development process. If you want to track progress of v2.8 at any given time, please use this page for reference.

We have also finally revived the development wiki that contains introductional information for newly joined developers. Since we are still quite short-handed, that documentation should come in handy for anyone willing to make GIMP 2.8 a reality sooner than currently expected.

We Are Participating in Google Summer of Code 2011

2011-03-18T00:00:00+01:00

This year we are participating in the Google Summer of Code program again. If you are a student who is willing to improve GIMP and be financially rewarded ($5000), please have a look at the list of project ideas, pick one or come up with your own idea, then join #gimp IRC channel or gimp-developer@ mailing list and introduce yourself.

GEGL 0.1.6 and babl 0.1.4

2011-02-13T00:00:00+01:00

After a year of work new versions of GEGL, new non-destructive image processing core, and babl, a bitmap format conversion library, are out with several major changes.

The new version of GEGL features code created during Google Summer of Code 2010 by Danny Robson and Michael Muré. Danny Robson created GEGL operations for loading and saving RGBE images (HDR), merging exposure brackets into HDR and three tonemapping operations, as well as a matting operation. You can read more about his project here. Michael Muré created a new map-absolute operations that provides pixel mapping render capability for new Cage transform tool, expected in upcoming GIMP 2.8.

Another major change is support for pluggable buffers that will assist transition of GIMP to using GEGL buffers directly, as well as provide means of using arbitrary buffers (think Google Maps).

JPEG2000 and PPM loaders and savers for GEGL were contributed by Mukund Sivaraman, and some existing GIMP filters were ported to GEGL operations by Alexia Death, Barak Itkin and Andy Gill.

The babl library has less changes, but one of the important ones is support for n-component formats.

There’s still a lot of work to be done on GEGL. Øyvind Kolås created a list of high priority tasks that need solving. If you wish to contribute, don’t hesitate to join gegl-developer mailing list and/or IRC (#gegl on irc.gimp.org) and ask around.

Two Interns to Work on GIMP’s Usability

2011-02-02T00:00:00+01:00

Since 2006 our project has been collaborating with Peter Sikking of m+mi works to improve GIMP’s usability. Peter is behind many positive changes in GIMP’s UI, such as new selection tools in v2.4 and v2.6, as well as some new features in upcoming v2.8.

This year m+mi works is making a new step to further strengthen our partnership and is now looking for two interns to work on GIMP’s interaction design for 3-6 months. You will work in Berlin and as contributor to the GIMP project you will travel to Libre Graphics Meeting in May, in Montreal. Please read the full announcement for details and contacts.

Plans for 2.8 and Beyond

2011-01-11T00:00:00+01:00

In the face of all sorts of rumours and interpretations about the future of the project there is a call for clarification regarding development of GIMP.

Currently GIMP team is working on finalizing the new stable v2.8 with many improvements such as layer groups, improved brush dynamics, a new unique transformation tool, optional single-window mode and more. There are two big obstacles in our way right now: missing specification on the last change in user interface and broken graphic tablets support in GTK+.

We have already invested a lot of time into UI changes and brush dynamics, we treasure your continuous support for the project and thus we are determined to release v2.8 only when it’s working out of box as expected for everybody.

After releasing v2.8 the focus of development will shift to deep integration of GEGL — our new non-destructive image processing core. Results of this work will enable many features considered critical for use of GIMP in professional environment which is part of GIMP’s product vision. It’s a lot of work, and currently we don’t have enough developers to make this change happen very fast. If you want to help us to get there faster, we encourage you to join gimp-developer mailing list and/or the IRC channel to discuss how you could contribute.

GIMP Manual 2.6.1 Released

2010-12-21T00:00:00+01:00

We’ve released a new version of the user manual with:

many, many, many bugfixes
spelling fixes and new translations for: Italian, English, German, French, Japnese, Norwegian, Swedish, Russian, Korean
website typo fixes

This release does not only include pre-built documentation for all the supported languages, we also publish the source of the user manual. Find the packages on our downloads server.

For easy installation we suggest that you wait until an installer for this 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.

GIMP 2.6.11 Released

2010-10-04T00:00:00+02:00

GIMP 2.6.11 is a bug-fix release in the stable GIMP 2.6 series. Among other bug-fixes, it makes printing work with the recently released version 1.10 of the Cairo library. 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.

Google Summer of Code 2010 Results

2010-10-04T00:00:00+02:00

This year GIMP participated in the annual Google Summer of Code program with three projects. Two out of three projects have been successful: Cage transform tool in GIMP and HDR and matting functions in GEGL.

The new Cage transform tool allows doing shape-preserving deformations of objects. The tool is based on a research paper by Yaron Lipman, David Levin and Daniel Cohen-Or, and was implemented by Michael Muré. The tool is implemented on top of a GEGL operation that can be reused to create more transformation tools. For more information please refer to Michael’s blog or description of the project’s outcome. The code lives in soc-2010-cage-2 branch.

A project by Danny Robson resulted in a number of new, mostly HDR related features in GEGL: a standalone HDR merge tool, RGBE loading and saving, three tone mapping operators and one matting operator. You can read about them in details on the project’s page.

The Cage transform tool is likely to be included in version 2.10, and features implemented by Danny Robson will be available in the next release of GEGL.

GIMP 2.6.10 Released

2010-07-08T00:00:00+02:00

Unfortunately a rather bad bug sneaked into GIMP 2.6.9, so here’s another release in the stable GIMP 2.6 series to fix this issue. Please have a look at the NEWS file for a more 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.

GIMP 2.7.1 Released

2010-07-03T00:00:00+02:00

It is about time… For a new development snapshot on the way to the next stable version GIMP 2.8. This release brings a whole lot of new features and improvements, see the release notes and the NEWS file for details.

The source can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org and its mirrors. Have fun!

GIMP 2.6.9 Released

2010-06-23T00:00:00+02:00

It’s been a while since the last release. Quite a few bug-fixes have piled up in the stable branch, so here’s another release in the stable GIMP 2.6 series. 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.

GIMP 2.6.8 Released

2009-12-10T00:00:00+01:00

GIMP 2.6.8 is a bug-fix release in the stable GIMP 2.6 series. 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.

Gimp Help Released for GIMP 2.6

2009-10-09T00:00:00+02:00

The GIMP documentation team has been working hard and is proud to announce the availability of the first release of the user manual for GIMP 2.6.

The release is split into several files that provide pre-built HTML per language. Because of a major change in how the manual is translated, most translations are work-in-progress and may contain untranslated strings. You can find the releases on our FTP server: ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/help/. Users should wait until this release has been packaged for their platform.

Find more information about our goals and how you can help at http://docs.gimp.org/. The user manual project is looking for a new project maintainer. If you want to help, please join our mailing list or have a look at http://docs.gimp.org/help.html.

GIMP 2.7.0 Development Release

2009-08-16T00:00:00+02:00

The release of GIMP 2.7.0 is a first step towards GIMP 2.8, the next stable release. Please note that this is an unstable development snapshot and read the GIMP 2.7 release notes. A more complete list of changes can be found in the NEWS file. The source code can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org.

GIMP 2.6.7 Released

2009-08-14T00:00:00+02:00

GIMP 2.6.7 comes with lots of bug-fixes and it contains an important fix for using GIMP with the latest GEGL and babl releases. 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 the various supported platforms should become available soon; please check the Downloads section.

GIMP Animation Package 2.6.0 Released

2009-06-05T00:00:00+02:00

GAP 2.6.0 is a stable release of the video menu intended for use with the GIMP 2.6.x series.

This release contains updates for video encoding/decoding, undo support for the storyboard feature and fixes for better compatibility with the GIMP 2.6.x releases. Please have a look at the NEWS file included in the download for a detailed list of changes.

Google Summer of Code - Student Application Period Has Started

2009-03-24T00:00:00+01:00

Google has started to accept applications from students for Summer of Code.

If you are interested in our proposals, then check if you meet Google’s requirements; have a look at their advices and check what we want to read in your application.

GIMP Has Been Accepted for Google Summer of Code!

2009-03-19T00:00:00+01:00

The the list of accepted organizations is published. This page is the main gateway for students to find the projects that they are looking for, and the guidelines of each org for successful applications.

Check our wiki ideas page for suitbale projects, or propose your own ideas on our IRC channel and the gimp-developer mailing list.

GIMP 2.6.6 Released

2009-03-17T00:00:00+01:00

GIMP 2.6.6 is a bug-fix release in the stable GIMP 2.6 series. This release contains an important fix for compiling GIMP against the recently released GTK+ 2.16. Please have a look at the NEWS file for a list of other changes.

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

Libre Graphics Meeting 2009

2009-03-07T00:00:00+01:00

For four years, the Libre Graphics Meeting has been the premiere conference for developers, users and supporters of free software graphics applications. Developers from projects such as GIMP, Inkscape, Blender, Krita, Scribus, Hugin, the Open Clipart Library, and the Open Font Library gather to work on interoperability, shared standards, and new ideas. Work at prior LGMs has pushed the state of the art in important areas such as color management, cross-application sharing of brushes and other assets, and common formats.

The face-to-face meetings and opportunities for collaboration are important to developers, but LGM offers plenty for end users as well. Tutorials, talks, and birds-of-a-feather (BOF) meetings to help free software users get the most out of their applications fill out the LGM schedule, and demonstrations from artists showcase what is possible.

Click here to lend your support to: Support the Libre Graphics Meeting and make a donation at www.pledgie.com ! The fourth annual LGM will be held May 6–9, 2009 in Montreal, Canada at École Polytechnique. Donations will be used solely to help cover travel costs for volunteer developers and presenters. Last year’s campaign raised more than $12,000 dollars from individuals and corporations in the community. As with last year, pledges can be made online. Visit pledgie.com to make your contribution. All donations are tax deductible for US taxpayers.

GIMP 2.6.5 Released

2009-02-15T00:00:00+01:00

GIMP 2.6.5 is a bugfix release in the stable GIMP 2.6 series. The NEWS file lists the changes in details. As usual, the source can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org. Binary packages for the various supported platforms should become available soon; please check the Downloads section.

Happy New Year

2009-01-01T00:00:00+01:00

The GIMP developers welcome you in the new year with the fourth bug-fix release in the stable GIMP 2.6 series. The NEWS file lists the changes in GIMP 2.6.4. The source can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org. Binary packages for the various supported platforms should become available soon; please check the Downloads section.

Users and distributors are also encouraged to update GEGL to version 0.0.22, which has been released yesterday.

GIMP 2.6.3 Released

2008-11-22T00:00:00+01:00

GIMP 2.6.3 is another bugfix release in the stable GIMP 2.6 series. The NEWS file lists the changes in details. As usual, the source can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org. Binary packages for the various supported platforms should become available soon; please check the Downloads section.

GIMP 2.6.2 Released

2008-10-30T00:00:00+01:00

The GIMP development team has made another bugfix release in the stable GIMP 2.6 series. The NEWS file lists the changes in details. As usual, the source can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org. Binary packages for the various supported platforms should become available soon; please check the Downloads section.

GIMP 2.6.1 Released

2008-10-09T00:00:00+02:00

GIMP 2.6.1 is a bugfix release in the stable GIMP 2.6 series. The NEWS file lists the changes in details. You may also want to have a look at the Release Notes to find out what’s new in GIMP 2.6.

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

GIMP User Manual 2.4.2 Released

2008-10-06T00:00:00+02:00

An update of the GIMP user manual is available. The gimp-help-2.4.2 tarball can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org. Users should wait until this release has been packaged in more easily installable form for their platform.

This release is still focused on GIMP 2.4. Work has started on updating the user manual for GIMP 2.6. If you want to help, have a look at docs.gimp.org.

GIMP 2.6.0 Released

2008-10-01T00:00:00+02:00

he GIMP developers are proud to release GIMP 2.6.0 today. Please have a look at the Release Notes to find out what’s new in GIMP 2.6. The source can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org. Binary packages for the various supported platforms should become available soon; please check the Downloads section.

Update: There was a minor glitch in the original 2.6.0 tarball. A new tarball has been uploaded that fixes this issue.

GIMP 2.5.4 Development Version Release

2008-09-17T00:00:00+02:00

GIMP approaches the next stable release and only a handful bugs are left to be fixed before GIMP 2.6 is ready. If you want to give the GIMP 2.5.4 development snapshot a try, please have a look at the Release Notes for GIMP 2.5.

GIMP 2.5.3 Development Version Release

2008-08-22T00:00:00+02:00

GIMP 2.5.3 is a fresh snapshot from the 2.5 development series. It gives developers and interested users a preview of the upcoming GIMP 2.6 release. If you want to give the GIMP 2.5.4 development snapshot a try, please have a look at the Release Notes for GIMP 2.5.

Open Usability and GIMP

2006-08-11T00:00:00+02:00

The GIMP team is proud to announce that the GNU Image Manipulation Program has been chosen as the first Open Source Software project for a sponsored student project on usability.

OpenUsability Sponsored Student Projects¶

OpenUsability (www.openusability.org) is an initiative that brings Open Source Software (OSS) development and usability together. This symbiosis is beneficial for both sides: Developers can make difficult user interface (UI) decisions together with usability specialists, while usability specialists can explore and further develop their skills in real-world projects without the pressure of a commercial market.

Likewise, OpenUsability’s mentored student projects are an excellent way for usability, user-interface design, and interaction design students to gain experience in the interdisciplinary and collaborative development of user interface solutions in international software projects.

During a three-month cooperation, you will closely work together with experienced professionals and get insights in to their way of work. An involvement of 20 hours per week is expected.

Depending on your location, you will be invited to a kickoff-meeting with the development team, the interaction architect, usability specialist and user support. Otherwise the collaboration will take place via the established channels of OSS development - email, IRC, VoIP, and etc.

OpenUsability student projects are sponsored with $700 USD. The sponsorship will be paid after the successful accomplishment of the student project goals.

Project Opening: GIMP¶

This project offers the opportunity to work as an Associate Interaction Architect, and to shape the user interface of the next generation of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (www.gimp.org).

You will be working with Peter Sikking, principal interaction architect at M+MI Works (www.mmiworks.net). Activities include methodically performing a full expert evaluation and analysis of the software, being fully involved in every decision, and performing the bulk of the project work. You will have a great opportunity to learn the ropes in interaction architecture in a project that matters.

There is the opportunity to give your role a stronger usability component by being involved with the workplace observation project that is integrated with this project. Also there is the opportunity at the end of this first phase to stay on board and to play a strong part in the design phase that follows.

Requirements¶

Interaction architects need to see from the user point of view, know what makes user interfaces tick, have a mathematical eye for the beauty of the simplest solution, a sense for clean layouts and know what can be developed in practice. GIMP is an international project, so you need to be able to communicate and write in English.

There are no specific degree requirements. We welcome students from all usability-related backgrounds including communication, media, psychology, interface design or computer science. We know there are no standard university diplomas for interaction architects. So we know you had to define your education yourself, and may not perfectly match all our requirements. Don’t be deterred.

GIMP or Photoshop experience is not required, in fact if you have extensive GIMP or Photoshop preferences then this project might be not for you.

How To Apply¶

To participate in this project, send your application to students@openusability.org. The application period ends at the 10th of September.

Please send us a short CV or (in PDF), a couple of paragraphs about why you want to be an interaction architect, some of your past experiences which have shaped your current skills, and what you expect from this profession in the future.