GIMP News

GIMP 2.7.1 RELEASED

Sat, 03 Jul 2010 12:22:36 -0000

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 2.6.10 Released

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 21:36:26 -0000

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 2.6.11 Released

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 13:01:13 -0000

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

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 14:31:17 -0000

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 Manual 2.6.1 released

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 08:58:23 -0000

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 FTP 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.

Plans for 2.8 and beyond

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 20:54:33 -0000

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.

Two interns to work on GIMP's usability

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 18:13:14 -0000

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.

GEGL 0.1.6 and babl 0.1.4

Sun, 13 Feb 2011 19:18:17 -0000

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.

We are participating in Google Summer of Code 2011

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 22:07:20 -0000

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.

Progress of GIMP development is now trackable

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 11:30:24 -0000

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.

GIMP 2.7.2 Released

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 08:33:17 -0000

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.

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.

Two new books on GIMP published

Fri, 06 May 2011 11:56:18 -0000

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

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 11:14:51 -0000

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.

All GSoC students passed midterm evaluation

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 05:12:00 -0000

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.

On GPU-side rendering and further development plans

Sun, 14 Aug 2011 13:08:06 -0000

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.

GIMP 2.7.3 Released

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 19:34:36 -0000

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.

GSoC2011 is over

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 22:25:29 -0000

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.

Mailing list, FTP and documentation outage

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 09:23:46 -0000

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)

FTP and Wiki back online

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 20:12:24 -0000

We managed to get FTP and Wiki back online:

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

Online Docs and Developer Pages restored

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 10:58:22 -0000

The online docs and developer pages are available again:

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

Mailing lists moved to GNOME mailing list server

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 11:23:42 -0000

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.

AMD sponsors further work on OpenCL support in GEGL

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 20:17:36 -0000

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.

GIMP 2.7.4 released, GEGL and babl updated

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 21:20:42 -0000

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.

GIMP 2.6.12 Released - The Final 2.6 Release

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 20:31:47 -0000

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.