The GIMP developers announce GIMP 2.6 release. According to official site, GIMP 2.6 is an important release from a development point of view. It features many changes, improvements and bug fixes.

First you will notice improvement in user interface. The toolbox menubar has been removed and merged with the image window menubar. To be able to do this a window called the empty image window has been introduced. Other changes are:

• Toolbox and Docks now are Utility windows,
• Ability to Pan Beyond Image Border,
• Renamed Dialogs menu to Windows,
• Keep a list of recently closed Docks and allow reopening them,
• Enter the image zoom ratio directly in the status bar,
• Lock tabs in docks to prevent accidental moving,
• Improvements in Free Select Tool,
• Brush dynamics,
• Display aspect ratio of the Crop and Rectangle Select Tool and other minor changes.
• More info here.

The biggest improvement for high bit-depth and non-destructive editing is integration with GEGL. 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. There are also Ported widgets to use the 2D graphics library cairo for drawing. See this comparison for an example of improvement.

More info, download and install instructions here.

Tags | DetectorPro Recommended, Graphic, Linux, Open Source, Windows