Download Gimp 2.6.0

The Gimp Team today released the final release of the open source photo editing program Gimp 2.6.0. The name Gimp is an abbreviation for ‘GNU Image Manipulation Program’. The software is available for various operating systems, including Freebsd, Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris. Although it is not officially supported by The Gimp Team, one Jernej Simoncic is working on a installer that can be used under Windows. In version 2.6.0, the user interface in particular has been overhauled, which was often criticized by opening the many screens. Furthermore, the first tentative steps have also been taken with regard to the integration of GGL, which should offer higher color depth and improved editing capabilities in the future. The full release notes for version 2.6.0 can be found below:

GIMP 2.6 Release Notes

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. User Interface

• Toolbox Menubar Removed
• Toolbox and Docks are Utility windows
• Ability to Pan Beyond Image Border

Minor Changes

• Renamed Dialogs menu to Windows.
• Keep a list of recently closed Docks and allow reopening them.
• Make opening images in already running GIMP instances work better on Windows.
• You can now enter the image zoom ratio directly in the status bar.
• Added support for using online help instead of a locally installed GIMP Help package.
• Make it possible to lock tabs in docks to prevent accidental moving.

Tools, Filters & Plugins

• Improved Free Select Tool
• Brush Dynamics

Minor Changes

• Added a bounding box for the Text Tool that supports automatic wrapping of text within that bounding box.
• Move handles for rectangle based tools like Crop and Rectangle Select to the outside of the rectangle when the rectangle is narrow.
• Added motion constraints to the Move Tool.
• Improved event smoothing for paint tools.
• Mark the center of rectangles while they are moved, and snap the center to grid and rulers.
• Enable brush scaling for the Smudge tool.
• Added ability to save presets in all color tools for color adjustments you use frequently.
• Allow to transfer settings from Brightness-Contrast to Levels, and from Levels to Curves.
• Allow changing opacity on transform tool previews.
• The Screenshot plug-in has been given the ability to capture the mouse cursor (using Xfixes).
• Display aspect ratio of the Crop and Rectangle Select Tool rectangles in the status bar.
• Desaturate has been given an on-canvas preview.
• The Flame plug-in has been extended with 22 new variations.
• Data file folders like brush folders are searched recursively for files.
• Replaced the PSD import plug-in with a rewritten version that does what the old version did plus some other things, for example reading of ICC color profiles.

Under the Hood

Important progress towards high bit-depth and non-destructive editing in GIMP has been made. Most color operations in GIMP are now ported to the powerful graph based image processing framework GEGL, meaning that the interal processing is being done in 32bit floating point linear light RGBA. By default the legacy 8bit code paths are still used, but a curious user can turn on the use of GEGL for the color operations with Colors / Use GEGL.
In addition to porting color operations to GEGL, an experimental GEGL Operation tool has been added, found in the Tools menu. It enables applying GEGL operations to an image and it gives on-canvas previews of the results. The screenshot to the right shows this for a Gaussian Blur.

Minor Changes

• Ported many widgets to use the 2D graphics library cairo for drawing.

miscellaneous

• Plugin Development
  There are new things for a plugin developer to enjoy as well. For example, procedures can now give a detailed error description in case of an error, and the error can be propagated to the user.
  GIMP 2.6 also further enhances its scripting abilities. In particular there is now a much richer API for the creation and manipulation of text layers. Here is a list of new symbols in GIMP 2.6.
• Backwards Compatibility
  Script-Fu has undergone some clean up and includes several bug fixes. One important bug fix, for bug #508020, prevents a possible crash of Script-Fu. A side effect of the fix will break any script which does not provide an initial value for a variable in the binding portion of a let, let*, or letrec block.
  An initial value for a variable is required as stated in the R5RS Scheme standard document. The initial value can be provided as a simple constant, or as the result of a function call. The following examples will illustrate the problem and show a simple change that will fix a broken script.

Known Problems

• The Utility window hint is currently only known to work well in the GNOME desktop environment.
• Using the Text Tool is currently not an optimal experience. Making it work better is a goal for GIMP 2.8.
• If you build GIMP yourself and don’t have GVfs support on your platform you need to explicitly pass –without-gvfs to configure, otherwise opening remote files will not work properly.

What’s Planned

For the interested, here is roughly what is planned for GIMP 2.8, the next stable release:

• Merging Google Summer of Code 2008 projects to trunk, namely on-canvas text editing, tagging of GIMP resources and Python scripting enhancements.
• Continuous integration of GEGL.
• And of course many other improvements…

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GIMP 2.6.0 screenshot, click on the image for a larger version.