The team has released a new GIMP (only a few months since the last release)!
Windows and macOS builds are coming (probably tomorrow?).
From the post on the GIMP website:
GIMP 2.10.12 is mostly a bug fix release as some annoying bugs were
discovered, which is to be expected after a 2.10.10 with so many
changes!
Still, some very cool improvements are also available:
- 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
Improvements and features
Improving curves editing and Curves tool
Generic curves interaction
The interaction with curves in general has been greatly enhanced, which
is an improvement both to the Curves tool and all other places where
curves need tweaking (currently paint dynamics and input device settings):
Relative motion when dragging points
When dragging an existing curve point, it won’t “jump” anymore to the
cursor position upon pressing the button. Instead it will move
relatively to its current position as the cursor moves. This allows
selecting a point with a quick click without moving it, and adjusting
a point position more easily.
Additionally, when the cursor hovers above a point, or when dragging a
point, the coordinate indicator now show the point’s position, rather
than the cursor’s.
Snap to curve when holding Ctrl
When holding down Ctrl while adding or dragging a point, the
Y-coordinate will snap to the original curve. This is particularly
useful for adding points along the curve.
Likewise, the coordinate indicator shows the snapped coordinates.
Curves tool specific interaction
Additionally, some improvements are specific to the Curves tool:
Numeric input of Curves tool points
Two new spin-buttons labelled “Input” and “Output” are now available
in the Curves tool interface. They allow setting the selected point’s
coordinates numerically and accurately if needed.
Add smooth or corner curve-point types
Control points can now be either smooth or corner points.
Smooth points produce a smooth curve, while corner points result in
sharp angles (previously, all points were smooth and this is still the
default).
Corner points are displayed using a diamond shape, instead of a circle
and the type can be changed in the Curves tool.
TIFF now has layer support!
Thanks to Tobias Ellinghaus, well known as a darktable
developer, TIFF can now export images without merging layers.
Support of user-installed fonts on Windows
Though not fully tested, we now have a temporary support of a new
Windows 10 feature. Windows 10 users indeed now have the ability to
install fonts without admin
permissions
since a recent update.
Therefore we added this non-admin font folder to our search path when
running GIMP. It should be only a temporary workaround since eventually
this should be
supported
by fontconfig, the upstream library used to manage fonts.
Note also that it is not fully tested because of our lack of Windows
developers. Therefore we are mostly hoping it will work as expected, and
this is a good time to make a call again:
Are you a Windows developer? Do you love GIMP? Please contribute!
Seriously, none of our current developers use Windows and bugs are
piling up in our bug tracker for this platform (same can be said on
macOS by the way), whereas GIMP is so enjoyably stable on GNU/Linux. We
are happy to do the occasional good deeds, but there are limits to what
we can do for a platform we don’t use. On the other hands, we happily
welcome patches and new contributors!
Faster painting
GIMP now doesn’t replace the paint buffer on every dab if the paint
color/pixmap hasn’t changed. This results in faster painting on specific
cases.
As a by-product of the change, the color-from-gradient dynamics is now
fixed when the image has a color profile.
Incremental mode in the Dodge/Burn tool
The Dodge/Burn tool got a new “Incremental” option which,
similarly to the Paintbrush, Pencil, and Eraser tools, applies the
effect incrementally as the pointer moves.
Free Select tool creates preliminary selection
One of GIMP 2.10.0 changes which annoyed many people was that the Free
Select tool was not creating a selection immediately when the region
was closed. One was forced to perform an additional confirmation step
(Enter or double-click).
This was done on purpose because we wanted to leave ability to tweak the
polygonal selection that is built into the Free Select tool. Yet it could
obviously be better, proof being the Rectangle Select tool which still
allowed to edit the rectangle even though a selection was pre-created.
The Free Select tool now works the same way: even though a preliminary
selection exists (allowing to directly copy or delete a contents without
additional step), you will still be able to edit this free selection as
long as you don’t start another selection nor change tools.
New Offset tool
New Offset tool shifts pixels and optionally wraps them around the edges
so that you could create repeatable patterns.
There’s a simple on-canvas interaction available: just drag on the canvas
to shift the layer.
You can activate the new filter either via Layer > Transform > Offset menu,
or via Shift+Ctrl+O shortcut.
Moving an intersecting pair of guides
The Move tool can now move together an intersecting pair of guides. by
dragging the guides at their point of intersection. This is useful when
the guides are used to mark a point, rather than a pair of lines (e.g.,
as is the case for the mandala symmetry guides, which mark the
symmetry’s point of origin).
Bug fixing
Many bugs were fixed, some more severe than others (in particular a
few crashes), as well as some code cleaning, factorization, and so on.
The usual deal!
More than the new features, we actually thought these issues were enough
to warrant this new release.
Among most pesky bugs fixed:
- crashes for various reasons, with more crashes to fix yet;
- various color management related bugs;
- unwanted change of foreground and background colors in tools’ presets;
- brush transformation improved and fixed in various places in symmetry
painting mode; - a few localization bugs, and most importantly broken translation
display for several supported languages (so far, we believe it to be a
bug in the Pango dependency); - some brush format bugs;
- …
And more. GIMP 2.10.12 is the result of about 200 commits in 2 months!
We will focus below on two specific bug fixing which deserve mentioning.
Improved symmetry painting support
The symmetry painting backend got some improvements, which resulted in a
few fixes, in particular some artifacts could occur with big brushes or
in the Clone/Heal tool when the brush was cropped to the bounds of a
drawable. These are now fixed.
In the Ink tool as well, the brush shape was not properly transformed.
This has been fixed as well.
Just open the Symmetry Painting dockable dialog, choose a type of
symmetry and paint away!
Color space mixup on exporting images
Several people noticed that exporting some images ended up in washed-up
colors sometimes. This was because in some cases, we were exporting by
error sRGB colors with a linear profile (especially visible in GIMP
2.10.10 since we were exporting profiles by default even when using a
default GIMP profile). We fixed this and took the opportunity to improve
GIMP’s export logics.
Now we are always exporting an explicitly set profile as-is, and pixel
colors are stored according to this profile expectation. If you manually
assigned a profile, GIMP should indeed always follow your request.
On the other hand, if no explicit profile was set, we implemented
various strategies depending on the format:
- If the export format is able to store high-bit depth colors (e.g. PNG
up to 16-bit and TIFF up to 64-bit), we follow the work format. - If the export format is 8-bit only (such as JPEG), we transform the
data to sRGB in order to avoid posterization and shadow artifacts
(except if your work format is 8-bit linear, then we leave it as
8-bit linear for minimal loss).
Note that there are still edge cases which we may not find optimal yet
regarding how profiles are handled. These should all be greatly improved
when we will merge the “Space Invasion” code (an ongoing mid-term
project, as we were already talking about it when releasing GIMP
2.10.8).
This code merge should hopefully happen soon enough!
Around GIMP
GEGL and babl
During this development span, GEGL 0.4.16 got released (91 commits), as
well as babl 0.1.64 (31 commits) and 0.1.66 (7 commits).
The biggest user-visible change is probably the cubic sampler
coefficient change, which used to produce smooth interpolation, suitable
for some cases, but not as sharp as people would expect in most other
cases. Now in all places where there is choice of interpolation (all
transformation tools, Warp Transform tool, etc.), the result with cubic
has changed and produces sharper results.
Another notable improvement in GEGL is an updated memory management, by
conditionally freeing memory from the heap (thanks to manual calls of
malloc_trim()), hence forcing the underlying libc to release memory
more often. This behavior is especially suitable for long-running
applications whose memory need can greatly vary, such as GIMP.
In practice, it means that GIMP process’ memory size will now shrink
much faster when you will close big images on supporting systems.
What’s next
Though it gets less visibility, work on upcoming GIMP 3 continues and
is going well. We will give more news soon enough. For the time being,
don’t forget you can donate to the project and personally fund several
GIMP developers, as a way to give back
and to accelerate GIMP development.
