GIMP 2.9.6 Released

Software GIMP
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New development version of GIMP is available!

Note: I’m lazy and just copied the markdown from Alex Prokoudine’s post on the site:

Better PSD Support

The PSD plug-in now supports a wider range of blending modes for layers,
at both importing and exporting: Linear Burn, Linear Light, Vivid Light,
Pin Light, and Hard Mix blending modes. It also finally supports exporting
layer groups and reads/writes the Pass Through mode in those. Additionally,
GIMP now imports and exports color tags from/to PSD files.

WebP support

We already shipped GIMP 2.9.2 with initial support for opening and exporting
WebP files, however the plug-in was missing a number of essential features.
Last year, we replaced it with a pre-existing plug-in initially written by
Nathan Osman back in 2011 and maintained
through the years. We now ship it by default as part of GIMP.

The new plug-in received additional contributions from Benoit Touchette and
Pascal Massimino and supports both ICC profiles, metadata loading/exporting,
and animation.

Metadata Viewing and Editing

Thanks to Benoit Touchette, GIMP now ships a new metadata viewer that
uses Exiv2 to display Exif, XMP, IPTC, and DICOM metadata (the latter
is displayed on the XMP tab).

Moreover, Benoit implemented a much anticipated metadata editor that
supports adding/editing writing XMP, IPTC, DICOM, and GPS/Exif metadata,
as well as loading/exporting metadata from/to XMP files.

Filters

Thanks to contributions from Thomas Manni and Ell, GIMP now has 9 more
GEGL-based filters, including much anticipated Wavelet Decompose, as well
as an Extract Component plug-in that simplifies fetching e.g. CMYK’s K
channel or LAB’s L* channel from an image.

Another new feature that we expect to develop further is GUM—a simple
metadata language that helps automatically building more sensible UI for
GEGL filters. Here’s a quick video:

Resources and Presets

To make GIMP more useful by default, we now ship it with some basic presets
for the Crop tool: 2×3, 3×4, 16:10, 16:9, and Square.

Documents templates have been updated and now feature popular, contemporary
presets for both print and digital media.

What’s Next

We still have a bunch of bugs to fix before we can release 2.10 and we
appreciate all the huge and tiny useful patches contributors send us to that
effect.

GIMP 2.9.8 is expected to ship with more bug fixes and an updated Blend
(Gradient Fill) tool that works completely on canvas, including adding and
removing color stops and assigning colors.

15 Likes
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I hope an appimage comes soon, building gimp is nearly impossible for me (thanks to gegl and babl)

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ppa:otto-kesselgulasch/gimp-edge already provides 2.9.7!

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Yep, 20 hours ago at time of writing, just got my 2.9.7 appimage (created from ppa, not clever enough for ‘from scratch’) running.

Just to note the change in name from otto-kesselgulasch to otto-meier

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anyway to get a standalone appimage for non ubuntu user?

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2.9.7 is the work in progress inbetween devlopment releases. 2.9.6 was the latest release and 2.9.8 will be the next (provided that there will be another one and not 2.10 first).

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The PPA was updated only a couple of hours after this announcement, that is what a kind of impressed me, especially in August.

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Help! I’m really stuck with this and could do with some assistance please…
I tried the otto-meier ppa but this gave some errors on “sudo apt update”. So I removed it and tried kesselgulash, which has 2 versions of gimp, 2.9.5 and 2.9.7 (I want 2.9.7). But “apt-get install gimp” gave me 295.
How do I get 297 please?

A bit more info -
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:otto-meier/gimp-edge - seemed fine
sudo apt-get update - gave errors -
Err:8 http://ppa.launchpad.net/otto-meier/gimp-edge/ubuntu yakkety/main i386 Packages
404 Not Found
W: The repository ‘http://ppa.launchpad.net/otto-meier/gimp-edge/ubuntu yakkety Release’ does not have a Release file.
E: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/otto-meier/gimp-edge/ubuntu/dists/yakkety/main/binary-i386/Packages 404 Not Found
E: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.

@Jacal, how did you manage please?

Edit: should have said this is with Ubuntu 16.10

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@RawConvert If you go to the PPA site, it looks like there isn’t a package for Yakkety, only for Xenial, Zesty and Artful. Maybe try contacting the package manager.

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I happen to be on 17.04 with my laptop, so it works fine. “There’ll be no new packages for obsolete Ubuntu versions anymore …” doesn’t sound promising for 16.10 …

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I sometimes wonder about Ubuntu. Long time user of KDE (Mepis for a few years, PClinuxOS for a few years) this last year Kubuntu 16.04

This a portable Gimp 2.9.7 in a Ubuntu 16.10 VM It will co-exist with a Gimp 2.8.22

1359×770 196 KB

Initially good, at least it starts. Closer inspection, no Python. Why? Ubuntu does not install python-gtk by default. It gets pulled in as a dependency for regular Gimp, but that is the sort of thing that can happen. Installed the package, now I have python. I wonder what else is missing?

Anybody willing to waste a few minutes, the file is here: https://my.pcloud.com/publink/show?code=XZGsooZXDbYEnTbH2jd3apdQ4L28XF3d8uX zipped about 90 MB

Unzip, make sure it is executable run it with a dot-slash (or make a .desktop file) The only caveat is - there are no guarantees.

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The Kaleidoscope filter appears to be broken and causing sudden, hard crashes (on Linux Mint Serena):

This is a development version of GIMP.  Debug messages may appear here.

Missing fast-path babl conversion detected, Implementing missing babl fast paths
accelerates GEGL, GIMP and other software using babl, warnings are printed on
first occurance of formats used where a conversion has to be synthesized
programmatically by babl based on format description

*WARNING* missing babl fast path(s): "RGBA float" to "CIE Lab alpha float"
*WARNING* missing babl fast path(s): "R'G'B'A float" to "CIE Lab alpha float"
*WARNING* missing babl fast path(s): "CIE LCH(ab) double" to "R'G'B' double"
[/build/gimp-E17Ntq/gimp-2.9.7~1/plug-ins/file-raw/file-darktable.c] trying to call 'darktable'
[/build/gimp-E17Ntq/gimp-2.9.7~1/plug-ins/file-raw/file-darktable.c] g_spawn_sync failed
[/build/gimp-E17Ntq/gimp-2.9.7~1/plug-ins/file-raw/file-darktable.c] error: Failed to execute child process "darktable" (No such file or directory)
[/build/gimp-E17Ntq/gimp-2.9.7~1/plug-ins/file-raw/file-darktable.c] have_darktable: 0
 mapped '<Toolbox>/Xtns/Misc' to '<Image>/File/Create/Misc'
 mapped '<Toolbox>/Xtns/Photo' to '<Image>/Filters/Extensions/Photo'
using gegl copy
GUI new func match: generic fallback
gimp: fatal error: Segmentation fault
gimp (pid:8616): [E]xit, [H]alt, show [S]tack trace or [P]roceed: s
gimp (pid:8616): [E]xit, [H]alt, show [S]tack trace or [P]roceed: p

(script-fu:8627): LibGimpBase-WARNING **: script-fu: gimp_wire_read(): error
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Go into Edit → Preferences → System Resources and check that Number of threads to use is set to 1

If it is not 1, set it to 1, OK it and restart Gimp to take effect.

854×482 98.9 KB

Same applies to Windows users.

If that does not work, you are sunk.

Some old (ancient) scripts you have there, do they work?

1 Like
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Thanks, that works perfectly! Also those scripts don’t work at all; many of the parameters which they set were renamed.

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I love how GIMP 2.9’s engine is node-based, I just wish GIMP exposed a node-based interface for compositing as it would set GIMP apart from every other classic editor out there including Photoshop - layer-based systems are way too inflexible and forces users to cut-and-paste instead of re-use (within the same document). As an Adobe subscriber I have written to Adobe asking them for years to expose such workflows in their products, but they are too big to care. GIMP now has a chance to pave the way for how image manipulation should be done. I just hope someone listens and does the right thing.

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You should check out some recent versions of Laidout as it exposes GEGL, the backend nodal engine for gimp, in such a way.

1 Like
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Unfortunately “Laidout only runs in variations of Linux.”. Also, Laidout is supposedly a desktop publishing software, not an editor, as such, although, I guess it can be used as one to a certain extent. The other option is Natron, a Nuke-clone, but that takes a more technical approach to image manipulation.

All we need is an alternative node-based view within GIMP while maintaining the layer-based view as the default view for those that find nodes difficult to manage. But, by offering a node-based view, one can perform some really useful operations that the layer-based view cannot offer such as taking the foreground image displayed by one node, transforming it, etc., and using it as a mask for one or more nodes that otherwise would have required the mask to be duplicated multiple times.

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I’m sure the gimp team would be happy to take patches for such a thing. Otherwise writing a well defined feature request is the best way to make this happen.

Right now there are about 6 people contributing code part time to gimp. One of those six works almost full time, and another half time. The others hack after getting home from their job.

There are several features that I personally would consider more important and are on the roadmap already: adjustment layers and GTK3 (or 4) for HiDPI support.

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I’ve contacted the developer of Laidout to see if he’s keen on looking into such a patch. After all, node-based engines save a lot of work for artists and give them a lot of flexibility and can even serve as a powerful alternative to adjustment layers (one can basically wire up nodes to do what an adjustment layer does and more).

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About GIMP feature requests, where do I log these?