GIMP 2.7 Release Notes

This is an unstable development version of the GNU Image Manipulation Program. Please realize that this is just a snapshot of the development tree. We are working hard towards GIMP 2.8, the next stable release. GIMP 2.7 is in no way a final product. A lot of new features are incomplete and some things may even be completely broken. If you need to get work done, please use the stable version, GIMP 2.6.

What's New in GIMP 2.7

These release notes are very sketchy. More complete release notes will be written when GIMP 2.8 is released. For a complete, summarized list of changes, refer to the NEWS file.

UI Changes and Improvements

Text editing with the Text Tool is now performed on-canvas instead of in a separate window. The editing on-canvas is rather sophisticated and tries to mimic text editing capabilities of gedit. There are still some polishing left to do here, but it works rather nice already. This features was developed during GSoC 2008.

It is now possible to tag GIMP resources such as brushes and patterns. The tagging is performed from the respective dockables e.g. the Brushes dockable, and it is possible to filter resources based on these tags. The tags are saved to an XML file, external to the data files themselves. This feature finally enables grouping of resources and the plan is to add a bigger set of default resources for GIMP 2.8. There are still work that needs to be done here, for example providing a set of default brushes. This feature was developed during GSoC 2008.

A rather big conceptual change is that saving and exporting images are clearly separated activities. Saving an image can only be done in the XCF format, to export into other formats 'File->Export...' needs to be used. There are some optimizations for alternative workflows such as opening a jpg, polishing it, and quickly exporting back to the original file. This conceptual change has also allowed us to get rid of the annoying dialogs that warned about the flatting of images when saving to non-layered formats. The complete UI spec for this can be found here.

Since the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+E and Ctrl+Shift+E has been taken over by the image export mechanisms, new keyboard shortcuts have been setup for "Shrink Wrap" and "Fit in Window", namely Ctrl+R and Ctrl+Shift+R respectively.

Enhancements have also been made to the size entry widget, the widgets that are used for most of the x, y, width, height input. For example, in the scale dialog it is now possible to write "50%" in the Width field to scale the image to 50% of the width. Expressions such as "30in + 40px" and "4 * 5.4in" works too.

The layer modes have been rearranged into more logical and useful groups based on the effect they have on compositing of a layer. Layer modes that makes the composite lighter are in one group, layer modes that makes the composite darker in another group, and so on.

Gimp now supports rotating brushes and has had additional enhancements to the brush dynamics engine, for example allowing to base dynamics on tilt and dynamically change the aspect ratio of brushes.

Data

We have started to overhaul the default set of resources and in this version there have been some changes to the default set of brushes.

Plug-ins

A plug-in for loading JPEG2000 images have been added, and also a plug-in for X11 Mouse Cursor files.

GEGL

The projection code, the code that composes a single image from layers, have been ported to GEGL. This includes the layer modes. Refactorings to prepare for adding support for nested layers aka layer groups has also been performed, such as preparations for better and more intuitive handling of the floating selection.

What's Left To Do

This is an incomplete list of things we want to do before releasing GIMP 2.8:

Download

The development snapshots of GIMP can be downloaded as source code from ftp.gimp.org or from one of the mirrors listed in the Downloads section.

Distribution of binary packages of the development version is discouraged unless it is made clear that this is an early development snapshot. Users should be referred to these release notes or similar information.

Installation

GIMP 2.7 must not be installed in the same prefix as other GIMP 2.x versions. If you want to keep your GIMP 2.4 installation in parallel to GIMP 2.7, you have to choose a separate installation prefix at compile-time and ensure that you use different library search paths for each version. If you do not set up your environment differently for each version, you will experience conflicts with the libraries and at least one version is likely to fail.

You install the new version into a separate prefix, say /opt/gimp-2.7 by passing --prefix=/opt/gimp-2.7 to the configure script. Then, in order to run the binary installed there, you change your environment to look for executables in /opt/gimp-2.7/bin by setting PATH=/opt/gimp-2.7/bin and you tell your linker to pick up libraries from /opt/gimp-2.7/lib by setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/gimp-2.7/lib. Do not forget to export both variables.

You can use a tiny wrapper script called gimp-2.7 and place it into /usr/local/bin or elsewhere in your PATH. The script would look something like this: 

#!/bin/sh

PATH=/opt/gimp-2.7/bin:$PATH
export PATH
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/gimp-2.7/lib
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH

/opt/gimp-2.7/bin/gimp-2.7 "$@"

Bugs

If you think you found a bug in a development version, please make sure that it hasn't been already reported. Search Bugzilla before filing a new bug-report. Here are some interesting Bugzilla queries:

Contributing

We need your help to make GIMP 2.8 a success. There's still a lot to do. If you want to join us hacking, show up in #gimp or introduce yourself on the gimp-developer mailing-list. We are also looking for people to look after the web-site and update the tutorials. Or you might want to join the documentation team.