GIMP Changelog

What's new in GIMP 2.10.12

Jun 13, 2019
  • Improved Curves tool
  • Layers support for TIFF exporting
  • Support for user-installed fonts on Windows
  • Faster painting
  • Improved symmetry painting support
  • Incremental mode in the Dodge/Burn tool
  • Free Select tool now creates a preliminary selection
  • New Offset tool

New in GIMP 2.10.10 (Apr 8, 2019)

  • Line art detection in the Bucket Fill tool for comic artists
  • Various usability improvements in transformation tools
  • Sample Merged option added to the Heal tool and fixed in the Clone tool
  • Parametric brushes now have 32-bit per channel precision
  • Easier brush and pattern creation workflow
  • On-canvas layer selection
  • Faster saving/exporting and layer groups rendering
  • Initial DDS support
  • Many improvements in GEGL, the image processing engine

New in GIMP 2.10.8 (Nov 12, 2018)

  • Core:
  • Use adaptive chunk size in GimpProjection when rendering the projection asynchronously, rather than using a fixed chunk size. This provides a better trade-off between throughput and responsiveness dynamically, based on how fast the processing is.
  • Tools:
  • In all selection tools, show error on attempt to subtract-from/intersect-with empty selection.
  • Fix text along path not working with vertical text.
  • Fix Text tool's frame position when undoing a move operation.
  • Streamline Text tool's drawing blocking/unblocking logic.
  • When moving a text layer using the text tool (through alt+drag), don't change the layer's box mode to "fixed", which is unnecessary, since the layer's size isn't affected.
  • Transform and deformation operations now maintain color for fully transparent pixels, making unerase and curves manipulation of alpha channel more reliable.
  • All transform tools now apply changes when you save or export/overwrite an image without pressing Enter first to confirm changes.
  • Heal, Dodge/Burn, Smudge, and Convolve tools now adjust the processed buffer and mask_buffer regions according to the changes made to the application region, as calculated by intersecting it with the drawable and mask extents. This fixes wrong application position when painting on a drawable whose origin is above/to the left of the image's origin, and there's a selection active.
  • Plug-ins:
  • Port all plug-ins to the new iterator API in GEGL.
  • Improve automatic detection of HEIC/HEIF files.
  • Improve RawTherapee discovery by looking up registry key (should become useful with RawTherapee 5.5 and more).
  • Usability:
  • Compatibility information in the Save dialog is now more understandable. The minimum GIMP version for the XCF file is always written down when it is GIMP 2.8 or over. The list of features warranting the minimum version is now listed in an expander container rather than as tooltip, which makes it more discoverable. The warning on compression is now displayed as its own text under the checkbox and not as additional text to the minimum GIMP version label.
  • CLI:
  • New self-explanatory --enable-win32-debug-console CLI option
  • Debugging:
  • New GimpBacktrace API provides an interface for creating and traversing multi-threaded backtraces, as well as querying symbol information. Backends are available for Linux and Windows.
  • Performance log recording now available in the Dashboard dock. The log contains a series of samples of the dashboard variables, as well as the full program backtrace, when available. As such, it essentially acts as a built-in profiler, which allows us to correlate program execution with the information available through the Dashboard.
  • New performance-log-expand.py tool decodes a delta-encoded performance log by expanding the deltas, producing a log where each sample (and other relevant elements) contain complete information. The structure of expanded logs is identical to that of delta-encoded logs, the expanded log simply has no deltas.
  • New performance-log-resolve.py tool resolves symbol information in backtraces. The logs produced by GIMP only specify the program counter at each stack frame, providing an address-map to map program-counter addresses to actual symbols separately. This tool looks up each program-counter address in the address map, incorporating the relevant symbol information directly into the backtrace.
  • New performance-log-deduce.py tool that statistically deduces the correct thread states based on backtrace address frequency, fixing local inaccuracies.
  • New performance-log-viewer.py tool that is a viewer for GIMP performance logs, with a sample-selection area at the top and an information area at the bottom. The sample-selection area visualizes the sampled variables and markers using a simultaneous set of plots, and displays the currently selected samples. The information area shows global information stored in the log, as well as information specific to the currently selected samples, including variable listing and statistics, full backtrace, and profile/call-graph information.
  • Translations:
  • Updated translations: Danish, Dutch, Finnish, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian.

New in GIMP 2.10.6 (Aug 20, 2018)

  • Core:
  • Render drawable previews asynchronously.
  • Merge the file view filter and file format lists in GimpFileDialog. The presence of 2 lists was very confusing.
  • DLL search priority is now updated before running a plug-in on Windows, depending on the executable bitness. This gets rid of one of the last remnant of DLL hell in GIMP, which was when running 32-bit plug-ins from a 64-bit build of GIMP.
  • Filters:
  • New "Little Planet" (gegl:stereographic-projection) filter.
  • New "Long Shadow" (gegl:long-shadow) filter.
  • Tools:
  • Halt the Measure tool after straightening.
  • Add an "orientation" option to the measure tool, corresponding to the "orientation" property of GimpToolCompass (i.e., it controls the orientation against which the angle is measured, when not in 3-point mode.) The orientation is "auto" by default, so that the angle is always

New in GIMP 2.10.4 (Jul 5, 2018)

  • Core:
  • Remove gimp_display_shell_draw_background() and all clipping hacks for drawing the canvas background. This optimizes away one entire step of drawing of image size, for each expose.
  • Font loading does not block startup anymore. Only consequence is that the Text tool may not be usable immediately if fonts are not fully loaded yet (and will output an appropriate error if you do so). All non-text related activities can be performed right away.
  • Change of the URL from bugzilla to gitlab where appropriate.
  • New tool option manager to better keep track of user context and paint options in a consistent manner.
  • User Interface:
  • The Dashboard dockable dialog now has a 'Memory' group that shows memory-usage information: the currently used memory size, the available physical memory size, and the total physical memory size. It can also show the tile-cache size, for comparison against the other memory stats. Note that the upper-bound of the meter is the physical memory size, so the memory usage may be over 100% when GIMP uses the swap.
  • The Dashboard dockable dialog now has "read" and "written" fields in the dashboard swap group, which report the total amount of data read-from/written-to the tile swap, respetively. Additionally, the swap busy indicator (used as the meter's LED) has been improved, so that it's active whenever data has been read-from/written-to the swap during the last sampling interval, rather than at the point of sampling.
  • Fonts can now be tagged. The user interface is the same as for brushes, patterns etc.
  • Some icons fixed: larger spacing between broken chains and gimp-tool-ellipse-select made symmetrical.
  • Usability:
  • When a plug-in cannot be applied to an image because of mismatch in image types (e.g. layer has no alpha or image is greyscale), GIMP now displays a message listing supported image types for this plug-in.
  • Tools:
  • The Measurement tool now has an "Auto straighten" option allowing to rotate the active drawable (layer, channel…) so that the measurement line is used as horizon. As other transform tools, the feature will work on linked drawables as well.
  • The Smudge tool now paints correctly on images with a color profile other than the GIMP's built-in one.
  • Build:
  • Installer: set compatibility options to run Python plugins in HiDPI-aware mode.
  • Put back compatibility DLLs for really old plugins.
  • Install binary tool `gimp-test-clipboard` on the system to allow people to help us debug clipboard bugs.
  • --enable-bundled-mypaint-brushes renamed --enable-relocatable-bundle and also make WMF fonts looked up on the runtime prefix of GIMP (instead of the build-time path) when this build option was set.
  • Plug-ins:
  • gimptool-2.0 binary now accepts source files with non-standard extensions if it can try to guess appropriate language from the compiler being used. It will also properly quote arguments for shell usage.
  • Run explicitly Python 2 as Python plug-in interpreter to prevent breakage on systems where Python 3 is the default.
  • raw_input()'s argument in Python console is now optional, and input() support has been added.
  • File Formats:
  • The PSD loader now provides an option to load "merged", pre-composited version of the images that becomes available when a PSD file was saved with "Maximize Compatibility" option enabled in Photoshop. This is useful when loading PSD files that use features that GIMP doesn't currently support, and therefore can't render correctly, such as adjustment layers. When loading the merged image version, we avoid loading certain additional data from the file, such as channels, paths, and guides, while still loading metadata. This option is currently exposed as an additional file type ("Photoshop image (merged)"), which has to be explicitly selected from the file-type list when opening the image.
  • Embedding GIMP's built-in sRGB color profile to exported files is now optional. The default choice can be set in the Preferences dialog.
  • Translations:
  • Updated translations: Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian.

New in GIMP 2.10.2 (May 21, 2018)

  • Core:
  • Discard fonts which fail to load and popup an info dialog to allow people debug their fonts.
  • New API to suppress updates in UI until plug-ins are done introducing changes.
  • New API to calculate histograms in separate threads, with possible further extension to handle similar cases elsewhere in GIMP.
  • Tool options are now properly saved and reloaded per-device at startup.
  • Plug-ins:
  • New plug-in for importing and exporting HEIF images.
  • Enable visibility of rasterized vector layer from PSD.
  • Single-window screenshots in Windows fixed to correctly snap a window even when it is partly off-screen or covered by another window or when display scaling is not set to 100%.
  • Filters:
  • New Spherize filter to wrap an image around a spherical cap
  • New Recursive Transform filter to create Droste effect.
  • Usability:
  • Warn users, when alpha-only painting has no effect. E.g. when target drawable doesn't have an alpha channel, or the alpha channel is locked.
  • Make the splash texts dynamic, so they are larger on larger splashes.
  • Mention pressing Enter to complete Foreground selection in the status bar.
  • Make sure that clicking outside any selection prevents Rectangle Select and Ellipse Select tools from creating empty selections.
  • Improve mouse wheel zooming behavior to keep the same point centered under the pointer even if the image is completely visible in the canvas.
  • Add "View -> Center Image in Window" (Shift+J) as a quick way to center the image at any zoom level.
  • Translations:
  • Updated translations: Catalan, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Latvian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian.
  • New translation of Windows installer: Chinese (Taiwan)
  • Build:
  • Add a --with-bug-report-url configure option allowing packagers to set the address of their own bug tracker. This address will be the one opened by the debug dialog for reporting bugs.
  • Add a flatpak manifest for the gtk3-port branch.
  • Remove the possibility to disable script-fu.
  • Add a --with-icc-directory configure option to customize the colorbprofile directory. By default, it is set to the common path /usr/share/color/icc.
  • Documentation:
  • Updating the description of the XCF format "devel-docs/xcf.txt", for third-party readers wishing to support GIMP 2.10 XCF files.
  • Add documentation skeletons for all enums in libgimpbase/, there is much room for improvement.

New in GIMP 2.10.0 (Apr 27, 2018)

  • Image processing nearly fully ported to GEGL, allowing high bit depth processing, multi-threaded and hardware accelerated pixel processing, and more.
  • Color management is a core feature now, most widgets and preview areas are color-managed.
  • Many improved tools, and several new and exciting tools, such as the Warp transform, the Unified transform and the Handle transform tools.
  • On-canvas preview for all filters ported to GEGL.
  • Improved digital painting with canvas rotation and flipping, symmetry painting, MyPaint brush support…
  • Support for several new image formats added (OpenEXR, RGBE, WebP, HGT), as well as improved support for many existing formats (in particular more robust PSD importing).
  • Metadata viewing and editing for Exif, XMP, IPTC, and DICOM.
  • Basic HiDPI support: automatic or user-selected icon size.
  • New themes for GIMP (Light, Gray, Dark, and System) and new symbolic icons meant to somewhat dim the environment and shift the focus towards content (former theme and color icons are still available in Preferences).
  • And more, better, more, and even more awesome!

New in GIMP 2.9.6 (Sep 4, 2017)

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

New in GIMP 2.8.22 (May 11, 2017)

  • GUI:
  • improve drawing performance in single window mode, especially with pixmap themes
  • macOS DMG:
  • Make the launcher script also set BABL_PATH
  • Add patch for GTK+ Bug 743717 to the build which concerns crashes during clipboard operations with a clipboard manager active
  • Add patch for GTK+ Bug 767091 to the build which concerns crashes on some drag & drop operations
  • generate OSX package metadata during build
  • Plug-ins:
  • Fix for CVE-2007-3126, a bug in the ICO plug-in which allowed context-dependent attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) via an ICO file with an InfoHeader containing a Height of zero. We couldn't reproduce any crash in recent version, but fixed the error messages for good measure
  • Avoid creating wrong layer group structure when importing PSD files (already fixed in 2.8.20, didn't make it to the NEWS)
  • Prevent a crash in PDF plug-in if images or resolution are large
  • stop parsing invalid PCX files early and prevent a segmentation fault
  • General:
  • if NOCONFIGURE is set, autogen.sh won't run configure
  • VPATH builds for win32 targets have been fixed
  • Updated Translations:
  • Basque
  • Brazilian Portuguese
  • Catalan
  • Chinese (PRC)
  • Finnish
  • Greek
  • Hungarian
  • Italian
  • Kazakh
  • Norwegian
  • Polish
  • Slovenian
  • Spanish
  • Swedish

New in GIMP 2.8.20 (Feb 3, 2017)

  • Core:
  • Avoid D-Bus error message when built without D-Bus support
  • fix OS X min required conditional in gimpimagewindow.c
  • Saving to existing .xcf.bz and .xcf.gz files didn't truncate them and could lead to unnecessarily large files
  • Text layer created by gimp-text-fontname doesn't respect border when resized
  • avoid seeking when saving XCF files to prevent corruption with file network shares (fixed since 2014, but not mentioned in NEWS yet)
  • GUI:
  • Flow on Paint Dynamics editor dialog: the 'y' axis is indicating 'Rate' instead 'Flow'
  • Vertical ruler shows artifacts if the status bar isn't showing
  • Tablet stylus misbehaves when crossing the edge of a dock in multi-window-mode
  • Disable the new "automatic window tabbing" feature introduced on macOS Sierra
  • Improve the visiblity of slider handles with dark themes
  • Make it harder to switch to renaming if selecting already selected items in resource lists
  • Tools:
  • make toggling to color picker mode of paint tools more robust
  • Libgimp:
  • call gimp_file_entry_set_filename() with filename encoding
  • Windows Installer:
  • Reduce the memory requirement when running the installer (has already been shipped in a 2.8.18 installer-only update)
  • Ship an updated libcairo to fix GTK+ UI rendering problems, like missing palette border/bevel and shadowa under tab labels
  • macOS DMG:
  • Ship the Tango icon theme with the DMG for a complete set of icons
  • fix the way mime data is copied into the bundle
  • no longer copy Pango modules into the bundle
  • prevent a crash caused by drag&drop on OSX by patching the included GTK+
  • ship a patch for gettext to make sure the preferred UI language will be used
  • Plug-ins:
  • Prevent the Python console from closing by the Escape key
  • Help browser does not launch on OS X
  • Filter 'Edge Detect/Difference of Gaussians' returns empty image
  • only use -xobjective-c for compile commands
  • mkgen.pl: fix calls to write_file() routine to write to current directory
  • When printing, the images are composed onto a white background to prevent printing a black box instead of a transaprent image
  • Fix color visison deficiency display filters to apply gamma correction directly
  • Updated Translations:
  • Catalan
  • Czech
  • Danish
  • Finnish
  • French
  • German
  • Greek
  • Hungarian
  • Icelandic
  • Italian
  • Polish
  • Portuguese
  • Slovak
  • Slovenian
  • Scottish Gaelic
  • Spanish
  • Swedish
  • General:
  • Bug fixes

New in GIMP 2.8.18 (Jul 14, 2016)

  • Core:
  • Initialize fontconfig cache in separate thread to keep GUI responsive on first startup
  • Properly recognize layer masks as deactivated, e.g. for moving layers
  • Create $XDG_DATA_HOME if it doesn't exist
  • (CVE-2016-4994) Multiple Use-After-Free when parsing XCF channel and layer properties
  • Fix progress access to prevent crash on rapid sequence of commands
  • Fix crash in gimp-gradient-segment-range-move
  • GUI:
  • Disable color picker buttons on OS X to prevent a GUI lockup
  • Disable "new-style" full-screen mode on OS X to prevent a crash
  • Pulsing progress bar in splash screen to indicate unknown durations
  • Fix gamut warning color for lcms display filter
  • Fix unbolding of bold font on edit
  • Prevent accidental renaming of wrong adjacent item
  • Installer:
  • Change compression settings to decrease size by 20%
  • Add Catalan, Danish, French, Dutch
  • Plug-ins:
  • Fix crash on sRGB JPEG image drag & drop
  • Fix ambiguous octal-escaped output of c-source
  • Fix KISS CEL export
  • Fix progress bar for file-compressor
  • Make Script-Fu regex match return proper character indexes for Unicode characters
  • Fix Script-Fu modulo for large numbers
  • General:
  • Documentation updates
  • Bug fixes
  • Translation updates

New in GIMP 2.9.4 (Jul 12, 2016)

  • Core:
  • Color Management:
  • add new GimpColorTransform object to create abstraction from LittleCMS
  • now color-managed: - layer/image/color palette/gradient/pattern previews - Color Picker tool - color buttons of GimpColorHistory - GimpFgBgEditor, as used e.g. in the toolbox - color selectors - DND widget - painting tools - copying layers/paste buffer between images - Colors applied to images - GimpColorPanel and its color dialog (color widgets in dialogs) - color areas created from menu actions
  • color management for grayscale images, including setting preferred ICC profile
  • add fast switching between color managed display and soft-proofing
  • add a per-image "is color managed" switch and show the image's "is color managed" state in the window title string
  • add basic support for creating images with color profiles
  • add "Optimize" options for display and soft-proofing to optionally speed-up rendering at the cost of color fidelity
  • add Image -> Color Management -> Save Color Profile to File...
  • improve the naming of generated ICC profiles
  • add a shortcut to the profile chooser dialog on OS X too
  • don't let display color management settings affect file import
  • enable color management when a profile is assigned to the image
  • enable color management when the image is converted from/to grayscale
  • pass the right color profile around in gimp_selection_float()
  • hardcode the CMYK selector's conversion parameters, as well as NTSC parameters in babl/GEGL/GIMP
  • have all previews track the monitor they are on
  • Core:
  • add "Select -> Flood" select action
  • add "Select -> Remove Holes" action
  • add "Border style" combo to the "Select -> Border..." dialog
  • do not request xcf compat mode when compat_toggle not sensitive
  • initialize fontconfig in the background to be able to show a pulsing progress bar when rebuilding the list of fonts (typically, the first time GIMP runs)
  • fix the Behind blending mode
  • make Burn mode output match Gimp 2.8 (partial revert of bug 744265)
  • improve file magic matching
  • add a custom guide concept
  • improve updating the statusbar messages and icons
  • GUI:
  • Menus:
  • move the image-duplicate action next to image-new
  • add Image -> Color Management -> Color Management Enabled
  • change "Select _Custom Color..." to "_Custom Color..."
  • change "Export" to "Export..." in the File menu
  • Dialogs:
  • include recently used colors in the Dockable Colors dialog
  • add RGB-based Luminance channel to the Histogram dialog
  • fix remembering the order of dockable dialogs
  • Preferences:
  • reorder the prefs categories tree and rename some pages
  • move "Snap Distance" to the prefs dialog's "Snapping" page
  • add configuration for undo preview size
  • clean-up Preferences -> Color Management
  • add "Shortcut [some modifier] + Mousewheel" for changing pen size
  • Themes:
  • rename theme "Default" into "System"
  • add new GUI themes: Lighter, Light, Gray, Dark, Darker
  • Icons:
  • add icon theme selection and make the icon theme path configurable in prefs
  • preserve 2.8 pixel-perfect icon theme under the name "Legacy"
  • add new symbolic icon theme for GIMP
  • add a scalable icon theme and a configure option --enable-vector-icons
  • Widgets:
  • add new GimpBufferSourceBox widget and use it in GimpOperationTool
  • View/Display:
  • fix various bugs related to rotated canvas
  • make GIMP not ignore 'Maximized' hints on startup in Windows
  • enable a pulsing progress bar in the splash
  • make new images jump around much less
  • fix image position when entering/leaving fullscreen mode
  • make layer boundary re-drawn correctly on scrolling
  • make images not appear completely black when images dockable is visible
  • have all previews track the monitor they are on
  • Tools:
  • Fuzzy Select:
  • add "Diagonal neighbors" option
  • Foreground Select:
  • fix ghost brush outline
  • Bucket Fill:
  • add "Diagonal neighbors" option
  • Posterize:
  • turn the posterize tool into an ordinary GEGL filter
  • remove posterize from Tools -> Colors
  • Desaturate:
  • turn the Desaturate tool into a normal GEGL filter
  • move "Desaturate" to Colors -> Desaturate
  • Align:
  • add vertical offset to distribution options
  • Paths:
  • improve performance
  • Flip:
  • rename options to "Transform" and "Direction"
  • Cage Transform:
  • fix a few performance issue
  • Unified Transform:
  • make the tool not fail when currently selected layer is hidden
  • Text:
  • fix text input methods to work in-place (not in an overlayed box)
  • add background colors setting, only exposed for advanced input methods
  • Blend:
  • use gegl:distance-transform in the blend tool, it has a progress now
  • make shapeburst work with the new interactive gradient code
  • All Painting Tools:
  • add mirror symmetry
  • remove artifacts from painting tools in Burn blending mode
  • add shortcut actions for changing spacing, hardness, and force
  • MyPaint:
  • dramatically improve performance of the tool and enable it by default
  • add Colorize mode
  • add a toggle to change between erase & paint mode
  • add a brush selector to the MyPaint brush options
  • add a dockable dialog to choose a brush, with tagging
  • read tags from MyPaint brushes
  • improve blend math
  • allow plug-ins to register procedures in the < MyPaintBrushes > menu
  • Smudge:
  • fix the clipping of out-of-gamut channel values
  • fix the handling of layers with alpha channels
  • Ink:
  • the range of angle is now [-PI..PI]
  • Plug-ins/GEGL Filters:
  • Preview:
  • add a "split preview" feature to GEGL ops
  • allow to switch the split preview between horizontal and vertical
  • allow to swap the before/after position
  • Filters:
  • update the "Recently used" menu with GEGL filters
  • replace Selective Gaussian Blur with the GEGL version
  • add gegl:saturation as Colors -> Saturation
  • add gegl:high-pass as Filters > Enhance > High Pass
  • add new gegl:gegl filter that executes a custom processing chain
  • port Tile and Pagecurl plug-ins to GEGL
  • refactor the screenshot plug-in into backend and front-ends, one per X.org, Wayland, Windows, OS X
  • add Monochrome option to the GEGL version of Channel Mixer
  • bring dialog titles and help IDs to GEGL filter dialogs
  • File Plug-Ins:
  • add darktable plug-in top pre-process varios raw images
  • port file-gif-save and file-tiff to GIO
  • TIFF support: - make libtiff a hard dependency - merge the file-tiff-load and file-tiff-save plug-ins - fix various tiff exporting bugs
  • EXR support: - read comment, Exif, and XMP data from EXR files - use GIMP's internal profile when loading EXR
  • PSD support: - fix the loading of files with adjustment or fill layers - fix the reading of layer group structure
  • fix the raw image loader
  • fix the layer groups support in OpenRaster
  • code cleanup in file-bmp
  • fix the exporting of KISS - CELL (*.cel) images
  • resurrect the email plugin
  • use GIO to figure if a file is hidden
  • PyGimp:
  • update pyconsole code
  • add binding for GimpImageType
  • add GimpColorConfig object
  • add type definition for GimpColorManaged
  • make GimpParasite type known to the code generator
  • require Pycairo in configure, link gimpui against pycairo
  • fix the application of paintbrush size in Python scripts
  • Script-Fu:
  • make regex matching return character indexes
  • fix the hanging of Script-fu on machines with 64-bit longs
  • update tinyscheme code from upstream
  • PDB:
  • Bug 759104 - Allow coordinates of sample points to be accessed from scripts
  • Build:
  • build/win:
  • Start building libmypaint.
  • Add pcre and upgrade glib2 to 2.48.1
  • Upgrade exiv2 to 0.25
  • Clear DISPLAY before building
  • Disable webkitgtk
  • OS-specific changes:
  • Windows:
  • Add support for generating crash backtraces using Dr. MingW

New in GIMP 2.8.16 (Nov 22, 2015)

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

New in GIMP 2.8.14 (Aug 26, 2014)

  • The only change is the fixed libtool versioning.

New in GIMP 2.8.12 (Aug 26, 2014)

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

New in GIMP 2.8.10 (Nov 29, 2013)

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

New in GIMP 2.8.6 (Jun 22, 2013)

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

New in GIMP 2.8.4 (Feb 6, 2013)

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

New in GIMP 2.8.2 (Aug 24, 2012)

  • 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.

New in GIMP 2.7.3 (May 26, 2011)

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

New in GIMP 2.7.1 (Jun 29, 2010)

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

New in GIMP 2.6.9 (Jun 23, 2010)

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

New in GIMP 2.7.0 (Aug 18, 2009)

  • UI:
  • Change the Text Tool to perform text editing on-canvas (GSoC 2008)
  • Add support for tagging GIMP resources such as brushes and allow filtering based on these tags (GSoC 2008)
  • Separate the activies of saving an image and exporting it, there is now an 'File->Export...' for example
  • Port file plug-ins to new export API which gets rid of many annoying export dialogs
  • Add a simple parser to size entry widgets, images can be scaled to e.g. "50%" or "2 * 37px + 10in"
  • Arrange layer modes into more logical and useful groups
  • Added support for rotation of brushes
  • Make the Pointer dockable show information about selection position and size
  • Get rid of the Tools dockable and move toolbox configuration to Preferences
  • Add status bar feedback for keyboard changes to brush paramaters
  • Add diagonal guides to the Crop Tool
  • New docks are created at the pointer position
  • Add support for printing crop marks for images
  • Move 'Text along path' from tool options to text context menu
  • Change default shortcuts for "Shrink Wrap" and "Fit in Window" to Ctrl+R and Ctrl+Shift+R respectively since the previous shortcuts are now used for the save+export feature
  • Make Alt+Click on layers in Layers dockable create a selection from the layer
  • Allow to specify written language in the Text Tool
  • Plug-ins:
  • Map the 'Linear Dodge' layer mode in PSD files to the 'Addition' layer mode in GIMP
  • Add JPEG2000 load plug-in
  • Add X11 mouse cursor plug-in
  • Add support for loading 16bit (RGB565) raw data
  • Add palette exporter for CSS, PHP, Python, txt and Java, accessed through palette context menu
  • Add plug-in API for getting image URI, for manipulating size of text layers, for getting and setting text layer hint, and for unified export dialog appearance
  • Data:
  • Add large variants of round brushes and remove duplicate and useless brushes
  • Add "FG to BG (Hardedge)" gradient
  • GEGL:
  • Port the projection code, the code that composes a single image from a stack of layers, to GEGL
  • Port layer modes to GEGL
  • Port the floating selection code to GEGL
  • Refactor the layer stack code to prepare for layer groups later
  • Prepare better and more intuitive handling of the floating selection
  • Add File->Debug->Show Image Graph that show the GEGL graph of an image
  • Allow to benchmark projection performance with File->Debug->Benchmark Projection
  • When using GEGL for the projection, use CIELCH instead of HSV/HSL for color based layer modes
  • Core:
  • Make painting strokes Catmull-Rom Spline interpolated
  • Add support for arbitrary affine transforms of brushes
  • Add support for brush dynamics to depend on tilt
  • Add aspect ratio to brush dynamics
  • Add infrastructure to soon support vector layers (GSoC 2006)
  • Rearrange legacy layer mode code to increase maintainability
  • Drop support for the obsolete GnomeVFS file-uri backend
  • Allow to dump keyboard shortucts ith File->Debug->Dump Keyboard Shortcuts
  • Prepare data structures for layer groups
  • Remove gimprc setting "menu-mnemonics", "GtkSettings:gtk-enable-mnemonics" shall be used instead
  • Remove "transient-docks" gimprc setting, the 'Utility window' hint and a sane window manager does a better job
  • Remove "web-browser" gimprc setting and use gtk_show_uri() instead
  • General:
  • Changed licence to (L)GPLv3+
  • Use the automake 1.11 feature 'silent build rules' by default
  • Lots of bug fixes and cleanup

New in GIMP 2.6.7 (Aug 14, 2009)

  • Bugs fixed:
  • 591017 – Tablet pan is not working as fast as it should
  • 577581 – Crashes when using any colors tool/function on Windows
  • 589667 – GIMP crashes when clicking GEGL Operation on Windows
  • 569833 – file-jpeg-save erroneous with small quality values
  • 590638 – Changing palettes from list to grid view loses "locked to dock" status
  • 589674 – "Send by Email" does not update "Filename"
  • 589674 – "Send by Email" does not update "Filename"
  • 586851 – Transparent BMP files fail to load
  • 589205 – help-browser uses deprecated (and sometimes broken) webkit call
  • 582821 – 'Sphere Designer' does not reset correctly...
  • 570353 – first time open of .svg file ignores the requested units
  • 555777 – Export to MNG animation fails
  • 577301 – Dithering with transparency is broken for "positioned" method
  • 493778 – metadata plug-in crashes on some images
  • 567466 – PNG comment not found if more than 1 tEXt chunks
  • 585665 – Exporting to PSD with a blank text layer creates a corrupt file
  • 586316 – Levels tool does not adjust output levels correctly if input levels are changed
  • 569661 – Import from PDF throws errors when entering resolution in pixels per millimetre
  • 567262 – Black pixels appear in "Spread" filter preview
  • 554658 – Path Dialog: Path preview pics not to see constantly
  • 167604 – gimp_gradient_get_color_at() may return out-of-bounds values
  • 567393 – Rectangle select tool size shrinks to 0 if size is larger than the image and the up or down arrow is pressed
  • 587543 – crash when invoking certain actions by keyboard shortcut
  • 563029 - Closing maximized image doesn't restore document window size
  • 585488 – Perspective transformation on a layer with a mask causes crash
  • 586008 - GIMP crashes when right-click canceling a drawing action initiated outside layer boundaries
  • 584345 – when printing, the number of copies should be reset to 1
  • 557061 – Alpha to Logo
  • 472644 – Rotate with clipping crops the whole layer
  • 577575 – transform tool fills underlying extracted area wrongly
  • 555738 – Image display is wrong after undoing canvas size
  • 577024 – help-browser plugin crashes when used with webkit 1.1.3
  • 555025 – Action GEGL box widgets weirdness
  • Updated and new translations:
  • Czech (cs)
  • Danish (da)
  • German (de)
  • Spanish (es)
  • Basque (eu)
  • Finnish (fi)
  • Hungarian (hu)
  • Italian (it)
  • Gujarati (gu)
  • Japanese (ja)
  • Kannada (kn)
  • Marathi (mr)
  • Norwegian bokmål (nb)
  • Oriya (or)
  • Portuguese (pt)
  • Romanian (ro)
  • Sinhala (si)
  • Swedish (sv)
  • Simplified Chinese (zh_CN)
  • Traditional Chinese - Hong Kong (zh_HK)
  • Traditional Chinese - Taiwan (zh_TW)

New in GIMP 2.6.6 (Mar 17, 2009)

  • Bugs fixed:
  • 571117 – lcms plug-in crashes on broken profile
  • 575154 – changing the help browser preference may not work
  • 573542 – blur plugin: bug in the first line
  • 572403 – gimp-2.6 crashed with SIGSEGV in IA__g_object_get()
  • 573695 – 1-bit white background saved as PBM becomes all black
  • 573488 – Small bug in Filter>Distorts>Ripple
  • 572156 – top left pixel position/coordinate is not 0,0 but 1,1
  • 472644 – Rotate with clipping crops the whole layer
  • Updated translations:
  • German (de)
  • Spanish (es)
  • Estonian (et)
  • Basque (eu)
  • French (fr)
  • Italian (it)
  • Portuguese (pt)
  • Simplified Chinese (zh_CN)

New in GIMP 2.6.5 (Feb 16, 2009)

  • Bugs fixed:
  • 571628 – Scaling image to 25% turn background from white to grey
  • 567840 – GIMP's GtkScaleButton conflicts with GTK's
  • 569043 – GEGL tool - missing Operation Settings for all sub-tools
  • 568890 – don't rely on GtkAction implementation details
  • 568909 – wrong RGB values for color names in libgimpcolor/gimprgb-parse.c
  • 568839 – wrong hex RGB value for the color names slategrey and slategray
  • 559408 - Brushes dragged to the image window look strange
  • 563337 – Rectangle Select Tool does not allow 1:1 fixed ratio
  • 568016 – Black pullout parameter of plug-in-newsprint has no effect
  • 562818 – First image opened in GIMP offset
  • 562213 – Align Tool doesn't work properly if it is the active tool at startup
  • Updated translations:
  • Spanish (es) Estonian (et)
  • Hindi (hi) Italian (it)
  • Brazilian Portuguese (pt_BR)
  • Romanian (ro)
  • Russian (ru)
  • Serbian (sr)
  • Tamil (ta)
  • Simplified Chinese (zh_CN)

New in GIMP 2.6.4 (Jan 2, 2009)

  • Bugs fixed:
  • 565223 Perspective transformation jagged edges / comb effect
  • 563985 jpg save dialog: "cancel" is treated like "commit" for settings
  • 564087 Using clone tool on a layer with a part out of canvas causes crashes
  • 564593 crash when the drawable is changed while a color tool is active
  • 564869 GIMP crashes on selecting Tools->GEGL operation
  • 565138 python-fu-foggify does not check if image is in rgb mode
  • 563130 Hue selection mode does not cross the 0-360 degrees line
  • 563179 Scrollbars not resized when we extend the canvas size
  • 562459 PF_PALETTE: 'TypeError' when used in a plugin that is registered in < Image >
  • 562427 Compilation with --as-needed
  • 562386 PF_SLIDER and PF_SPINNER 'Step' values do not change consistently...
  • 562366 Default image dimensions are not correctly transferred in the file/new dialog box
  • 561899 GIMP can't save to mounted filesystem if file exists
  • Updated translations:
  • Greek (el)
  • Hindi (hi)
  • Hungarian (hu)
  • Italian (it)
  • Japanese (ja)
  • Korean (ko)
  • Slovenian (sl)
  • Swedish (sv)
  • Tamil (ta)
  • Simplified Chinese (zh_CN)

New in GIMP 2.6.3 (Nov 22, 2008)

  • Bugs fixed:
  • 558454 – Plugin Map Color Range disappears from GIMP
  • 559239 – Error while loading psd-data
  • 560903 – Explicit zooming with e.g. '1' should handle zoom-focus better
  • 560245 – Zoom selection always centered in the Navigation tab
  • 559490 – Wrong lang tags for 'no'
  • 559292 – SOTA Chrome cannot accept different textures
  • 560375 – Clearing an already empty document history crashes GIMP
  • 559580 – Image windows need better default locations
  • 560283 – "Scale image..." causes distortion around edges
  • 559716 – Changing crop size in Crop Tool Options can make UI unresponsive
  • 558549 – Stroking a single-point path with a paint tool crashes GIMP
  • 559015 – Move tool gives bad information about px moved
  • 558660 – help behavior for locales without manual translation
  • Updated translations:
  • Belarusian (be)
  • Dutch (nl)
  • German (de)
  • Japanese (ja)
  • Lithuanian (lt)
  • Norwegian Bokmål (nb)
  • Norwegian Nynorsk (nn)
  • Polish (pl)
  • Romanian (ro)

New in GIMP 2.6.2 (Oct 30, 2008)

  • Bugs fixed:
  • 557950 – Scaling in Gimp 2.6 is much slower than in Gimp 2.4
  • 558215 – unit and zoom entries in Statusbar not visible
  • 558451 – Cannot build GIMP using Sun CC on Solaris 2.8
  • 558420 – projection incorrect with alpha-less layers
  • 556603 – Zoom region always zooms in center of image
  • 557870 – "Qmask" message popping up here and there
  • 557705 – compatibility with GEGL > 0.0.20
  • 556248 – Scaling gives 'jagged' edges
  • 556804 – Zoom drop down doesn't update
  • 524615 – Print not to scale
  • 555246 – gimp crashes when a file is opened while a preview is generating
  • 556741 – Alpha layer automatically added (in psd format)
  • 556182 – Could you please explain a few strings [I18N]
  • 555697 – build fails if configured with --without-libjpeg
  • 134956 – Curves tool doesn't save free curves

New in GIMP 2.6.0 (Oct 1, 2008)

  • GIMP 2.6 is an important release from a development point of view. It features changes to the user interface addressing some often received complaints, and a tentative integration of GEGL, the graph-based image processing library that will eventually bring high bit-depth and non-destructive editing to GIMP.

New in GIMP 2.5.4 (Sep 17, 2008)

  • improved look and feel of the Navigation dialog and navigation popups
  • improved positioning of the image in the image window
  • by default turned off use of GEGL for color operations
  • moved the "Use GEGL" checkbox to the Debug menu
  • optimized the new scaling code
  • various fixes to the Python bindings
  • added Python bindings for most GIMP widgets to the gimpui module
  • merged GimpHRuler and GimpVRuler classes into GimpRuler
  • added Search entry to the Keyboard Shortcuts and Input Controller configuration dialogs
  • allow to drop images (in addition to URIs) on the empty image window
  • improved error handling in Script-Fu
  • merged upstream TinyScheme changes into Script-Fu interpreter
  • bug fixes and code cleanup
  • Contributors: Sven Neumann, Michael Natterer, Martin Nordholts, Tor Lillqvist, Lars-Peter Clausen, Michael Schumacher, Kevin Cozens, LightningIsMyName, David Gowers, Dennis Ranke

New in GIMP 2.4.7 (Sep 17, 2008)

  • fixed issue in GIF load plug-in (bug #535888)
  • fixed event handling in MIDI controller (bug #537960)
  • fixed handling of the 'Highlight' tool option in Crop and Rectangle Select tools (bug #536582)
  • various fixes to the Python bindings:
  • fixed crash with Python 2.5 on 64 bit systems (bug #540629)
  • added missing validity checks (bug #536403)
  • allow to pass None for PDB_DISPLAY
  • plugged a memory leak in gimp-text-get-extents-fontname PDB call
  • fixed potential timeout issues in org.gimp.GIMP.UI D-Bus service
  • fixed endianness issue in the ICO save plug-in (bug #529629)
  • translation fixes and updates (be, it, lt, nn, vi)
  • Contributors: Sven Neumann, Michael Natterer, Martin Nordholts, Manish Singh, Lars-Peter Clausen, Rik Snel, S. Fielding, Joao S. O. Bueno, Aurimas Ju�ka