Gimp Changelog

What's new in Gimp 2.10.36

Nov 14, 2023

Core:
Disable Arbitrary Rotation menus (under both Image and Layer menus) if no image is active, for consistency.
New gradient available: FG to Transparent (Hardedge) gradient.
A change in linuxwacom made some graphics tablet crash GIMP. Though the issue is in the driver (downgrading it "fixes" the issue), it was bad enough that a workaround was also added in GIMP code so that we don't crash with the newer driver. A fix was also merged on linuxwacom itself: https://github.com/linuxwacom/xf86-input-wacom/issues/307 https://github.com/linuxwacom/xf86-input-wacom/pull/309
Generated Brush previews are now rotated clockwise with the brush angle, which goes against the documentation. Nevertheless this is how angles were used on canvas in the 2.10 branch until now, so to avoid breaking existing workflows while having consistent preview, we chose to follow actual on-canvas usage over documentation. It may be re-evaluated for GIMP 3.
New palette import supports:
Adobe Swatch Exchange (ASE)
Adobe Color Book (ACB)
Tool:
Text tool:
When replacing a selection, take and apply markup (if any) from the first character of the selection for the entered text. This fixes the case when you no longer can change the global layer text properties after replacing the text.
Set the blank font name for the standard font instead of 'Standard' to fix the issue when 'Standard' can be actual font from the list or a font which starts with (e.g. Standard Symbols PS).
User Interface:
Add Table of Contents to User Manual submenu (in Help menu).
Item tree view lock boxes:
now separately themable with gtkrc;
showing a white frame when hovering over lock buttons;
showing a small padlock next the lock icon when it's active.
Plug-ins:
JPEG-XL: support libjxl v0.9 decoding API.
Metadata editor: more DigitalSourceType values.
PDF are now loaded at 300PPI by default.
Various more file format fixes (at least GIF, PDF import, HEIF/AVIF, JPEG XL, XWD, DDS) and various fixes in non-file format related plug-ins too.
Image Map: HTTPS scheme now accepted in the URL field.
Fixed vulnerabilities:
DDS: ZDI-CAN-22093
PSD: ZDI-CAN-22094
PSP: ZDI-CAN-22096 and ZDI-CAN-22097
GIF:
Added support of non-square aspect ratio by setting different vertical and horizontal resolution when a loaded file has the PixelAspectRatio metadata set.
Libgimpbase:
Do not save Photoshop specific EXIF metadata when exporting images because they can contain sensitive data and we cannot update them.
We now update Exif.Photo.PixelX/YDimension Exif tags when resizing and exporting (but only if they were already present, as they are non-essential).
Translation:
20 translations were updated: Belarusian, Catalan, Chinese (China), Danish, Dutch, Georgian, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian.
Build:
Added code in the Windows installer script for the ARM 64-bit build, bundled into the same universal installer (though the first experimental installer with Aarch64 support was for GIMP 2.10.34 revision 2).

New in Gimp 2.10.34-3 (Nov 8, 2023)

New in Gimp 2.10.34 (Feb 28, 2023)

Core:
Check for updates now works on macOS (backported from 2.99.14).
Update help IDs for better integration with the documentation website.
Symmetry dockable contents is now shown, yet deactivated, when no images are opened, improving discoverability (backported from 2.99.14).
DBus fully disabled on macOS (in some case, it could even freeze GIMP process when dbus is present yet not responding). Open With feature (e.g. from file browsers) still work fine as it uses a different code path on macOS. Other features using dbus (opening files or running batch commands from a separate GIMP process) won't work, but they probably never did on macOS anyway.
"Canvas Size" dialog took too much vertical space and now better uses the horizontal space by moving the preview and offset fiels to the right side, and the "Center" button just below (backported from 2.99.8).
Template selector (backported from 2.99.6) in resize dialog.
Color scale preferences (0..255/0..100 and LCh/HSV settings in Colors selection dialogs) are now remembered across sessions.
Eye icon header added to the item tree views to make it more obvious where to click for item visibility and links (backported from 2.99.10)
Revert color proofing behavior changed in 2.10.32 which resulted in inconsistent past workflows.
"Lock path strokes" tooltip for the dockable icon was renamed "Lock path".
Plug-ins:
DDS: make GUI translatable.
file-raw: added high bit depth precision export (partial backport from 2.99.12).
TIFF:
Various bug fixes;
better check for invalid resolutions on import;
do not generated warnings for incorrect RichTIFFIPTC tags produced by Adobe products (only output a message to stderr, for not completely ignoring these);
Loading "reduced" image or not is now an option. We use a heuristic for the default value of said option (trying to guess if it's a thumbnail by using common usage), but final decision is now up to one knowing the image you load (backported from 2.99.14);
Default TIFF export format is "normal" TIFF, not BigTIFF (making it default was definitely an error in 2.10.32).
PSD:
Various bug fixes;
Useless physical unit conversion removed;
Backported improvement (2.99.10) for importing layers with clipping set (leading to color bleeding);
Backported improvements (2.99.10) for importing clipping layers;
Paths are now exported (backported from 2.99.14).
WebP: more informative error messages in some cases.
Flame: various bug fixes.
JPEG-XL:
metadata import backported from 2.99.14 - (requires libjxl 0.7.0)
Partial backport (2.99.8) of JPEG-XL export; export is always in 8bit lossless.
HEIF: various bug fixes.
Dicom: various bug fixes.
help:
macOS: https support now working fine for help files (bypassing lack of support in GIO for macOS platform).
animation-play: fixed on macOS.
PDF:
Import: new option "Fill transparent areas with white" to fill the background in white (ON by default as most office PDF writers seem to rely on readers filling the background with white), allowing importing transparent PDF files.
Export: new option "Fill transparent areas with background color" allowing to decide whether to export a PDF with transparent background.
TGA:
Added a workaround to load wrongful TGA files exported by Krita (which they fixed on their side too now, see Krita bug 464484).
ICO and CUR:
Magics detection for these formats has been removed (now using only using filename extension) because it was interfering with the detection of certain types of TGA images (which are likely more common than ICO and CUR files, and extension for these should be reliable enough).
Libgimpbase:
GimpMetadata API (in particular the gimp_metadata_set_from_*() functions) are now much less memory-hungry (backported from the main dev branch) when using GExiv 0.12.2 or over. With some huge metadata, it could cause long freeze or even crashes of plug-ins.
Libgimpwidgets:
Color-picking with X11 is now the default when compiled with X11, even if a color-picking portal also exists, because it is always right, whereas portals return color in display space without the space information itself (i.e. without profiles).
New dedicated GimpPickButton implementation for Windows (backported from 2.99.14).
Libgimp:
New wrapper functions around GEGL ops, which also map to items in our Color menu:
gimp_drawable_shadows_highlights()
gimp_drawable_extract_component()
Build:
Bumping minimum GEGL to version 0.4.38.
Bumping minimum libjxl to version 0.7.0.
New GIMP_RELEASE macro to tell if code is a release or in-between release (different from GIMP_UNSTABLE which was telling if we are in a stable or development branch).
Our stable CI now uses Debian stable where Python2 is still present.

New in Gimp 2.10.32 (Jun 15, 2022)

Core:
Adding support for localized glyphs ('locl') in Text tool depending on the value of the "Language" field in Text tool options.
XCF import nows drop Xmp.photoshop.DocumentAncestors tags after 1000 of them, similarly to what libgimpbase now does. This could happen in XCF files which were created e.g. from a PSD import before we handled the issue in libgimpbase.
XCF import:
Made more robust by ignoring (with a warning) invalid parasites and continuing to load the rest of the file (which might be valid). This way, we are able to salvage more cases of
partially corrupted XCF files.
Additional safety checks to detect broken XCF files.
- Version check can be globally disabled through a value in the `gimp-release` file. This would allow to use the same build on repositories with an update channels (where we don't want update check notifications) and on standalone (where we want them).
User Interface:
Removed titlebar/borders from Windows Splash Screen.
All official themes now have on-hover indicator around eye and link toggles in Layer/Channel/Path Dialog tree-views.
Dark theme:
Hover-on effect on radio menu items to improve readability.
Color icon theme:
Thin contrast border for 'close' and 'detach' to improve their readability against dark backgrounds on mouse-hover.
Plug-ins:
TGA: improving indexed images with alpha channel support (both import and export).
DICOM: Fix endian conversion for photometric interpretation "MONOCHROME1".
File-raw: "RGB Save Type" confusing dialog label renamed to "Palette Type" as on the main dev branch.
Screenshot: option to capture cursor in now available on Windows.
Pygimp: new optional parameter `run_mode_param` (defaulting to True) to register() function of the Python binding, which allows to make the "run-mode" parameter optional when creating a new PDB procedure. This is already used to fix "file-openraster-load-thumb" without changing its signature.
BMP: new PDB procedure "file-bmp-save2" which supports all options available interactively.
BigTIFF: our TIFF plug-in now officially supports BigTIFF import and export.
Import was actually already working transparently if you had a recent enough libtiff. Now the recent libtiff is enforced by dependency requirements.
Export support was added with a checkbox in the interactive dialog and a new "bigtiff" argument in the "file-tiff-save" PDB procedure.
When an interactive export of ClassicTIFF fails for the explicit reason of "Maximum TIFF file size exceeded", the export dialog is raised again with a message proposing to try again as BigTIFF or trying another compression algorithm. This allows because discoverability and understandibility of the issue, while not forcing BigTIFF export (since it might not be supported everywhere).
Unlike the same change on the main dev branch, this backport comes without a dependency requirement bump, which means this will only work if GIMP is built with recent enough libtiff.
Raw: more robust load able to load as much as possible from the file, then fill the rest with white, when offset and dimensions are bigger than actual file size.
Improved support of a few plug-in code for building under UCRT Windows environment (more modern C runtime library than MINGW).
EPS: loading transparent EPS files now supported.
JPEG XL: import backported from the `master` (2.99) branch.
WebP: export has a new IPTC checkbox (saved through XMP) as well as a thumbnail checkbox. (backported from dev branch, since 2.99.8)
DDS: export has a new flip option (useful for some game engine) as well as a new savetype option to export all visible layers (not only the active one).
TIFF:
Import support for 8 and 16 bit CMYK(A) TIFF files.
* 1, 2 and 4-bit B/W images are now converted to indexed rather than grayscale as it seems that there is more of a use case for these images to be handled as indexed, even tough technically they can be considered grayscale. In the future we could add an option at loading time where the user can choose whether they prefer it to be loaded as indexed or grayscale.
Fix loading images generated by MATLAB's blockproc function.
More robust loading for 8 bps grayscale MINISWHITE TIFF.
Libgimp:
New gimp_plug_in_error_quark() as a generic GQuark/GError domain for plug-ins (backported from 2.99.6).
Gimp_drawable_brightness_contrast() now works in the [-1.0, 1.0] range (it's more of a fix than a change because it's what it should have been from the start).
Better management of modification time in metadata: IPTC tag
Iptc.Application2.DateCreated is not overridden anymore as it is the original creation date of the image. Instead we set the XMP tag Xmp.xmp.ModifyDate for file modification time and Xmp.xmp.MetadataDate for metadata modification time.
Format of Xmp.tiff.DateTime is now properly set with timezone as a consequence of the previous improvement.
Libgimpbase:
Limit to 1000 ancestors when importing images with incredible amount of `Xmp.photoshop.DocumentAncestors` tags, which is most likely due to a bug in some versions of phoshop (in some PSDs, we encountered over 100,000 such tags; it probably makes no sense that a document could have that many ancestor documents). GIMP will now stops at 1000 such tags before dropping the rest and continue loading the file.
Icons:
Chain icons for the Color icon theme reworked from the Symbolic versions (with contrast borders to work on any background color) so that the "broken" and full variants are easily distinguishable.
Translations:
New Galician and Georgian translations for the Windows installer.
- 20 translations were updated: Catalan, Chinese (China), Croatian, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Georgian, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian.
Build:
Bumping minimum GEGL to version 0.4.36.
The Windows installer now has an option /DISABLECHECKUPDATE=true to install the same build but editing the `gimp-release` file to disable update check as newly implemented (see above in Core section).

New in Gimp 2.10.30 (Dec 21, 2021)

Core:
Do not follow subpixel font rendering choice from system settings for text layer rendering. These systems are useful for GUI rendering on a screen of a specific type and pixel order. Yet when rendering an image which can be zoomed in or out, showed on various screens or even printed, subpixel font rendering doesn't make sense.
Rewrite the core selection drawing logics so that it works on macOS Big Sur and over. This is a backport (adapted to GTK+2) of the fix brought in GIMP 2.99.8 for Wayland and macOS.
Ignore MakerNote metadata tag at export and only store the tags that go in it, hence avoiding partial invalid metadata.
Color picking from Colors dockable can now use the Freedesktop portal.
On Windows, move from GetICMProfile() to WcsGetDefaultColorProfile() because the former is broken in Windows 11.
Plug-ins:
metadata-viewer: improve how XMP tags with multiple values are handled and shown (now each value on a separate line for better readability).
metadata-editor:
XMP array tags of type BAG and SEQ are now on separate lines.
Comparing XMP tags with equivalent IPTC tags with multiple values, each value is compared individually, instead of comparing the list as a whole.
Many robustness improvements and other fixes to the metadata plug-ins.
AVIF: prefer AOM encoder for export.
PSD:
Skip sanity check for mask of rendered layers as some layer mask have invalid dimensions in such cases. They will now be loaded correctly.
Fixed loading of CMYK PSD files without alpha.
Fixed loading of CMYK images without layers.
Fixed loading of merged image of a 16 bit per channel RGBA PSD file with the alpha channel opaque.
PBM: large file export now always works and does not depend anymore on the platform's long int size.
Screenshot:
GNOME shell implementation dropped because the D-Bus API has been restricted to core components for security reasons, thus our plug-in was failing.
KDE portal moved as last fallback after the X implementation (when running on X) and Freedesktop portal, because KDE is also starting to block API calls for security reasons.
Installer:
Extension .avif now associated to GIMP.
Drop codepage conversion, use UTF-8 for language files.
Build:
macOS support officially bumped to macOS 10.12 (Sierra). We would usually try to avoid doing this within a stable release but the conditions (lack of contributors) is such that it is hard to avoid.

New in Gimp 2.10.28 (Dec 20, 2021)

New in Gimp 2.10.26 (Dec 20, 2021)

Core:
Dashboard now has memory support in OpenBSD.
Default shortcuts Shift+[ and ] for tool size changed to { and }.
Performance improvements for GIMP on macOS Big Sur: these improvements were actually already applied in our macOS packages since GIMP 2.10.22, but were applied upstream directly only now.
User Interface:
Dark theme: improve accessibility of GtkRadioButton by adding a white border on mouse-hover.
Gray theme: set light background for selected text in Layers and Paths dockable dialogs to make text visible.
Dark, Gray and Light themes: remove 3D shadow box around eye and link toggles in Layers, Channels, and Paths dockable dialog tree views.
Plug-ins:
Improved DDS support and fix some red/blue bit swap for RGB10A2 DDS. The plug-in version is incremented so that it is able to catch and correct previously incorrect RGB10A2 images exported by older versions of our plug-in.
DDS files with "L16" - a 16 bit luminance channel - are now loaded in 16-bit.
DICOM images:
Support for planar configuration.
Support for deprecated big endian transfer.
TIFF images:
Thumbnail storing now done by storing the thumbnail as the second page in the file (through Exiv2) and setting metadata "Exif.Thumbnail.NewSubfileType" to 1 (reduced resolution image) instead of storing the thumbnail as a subifd. This was done because of a Windows bug locking TIFF files with thumbnail stored as subfid.
Symmetrically, loading will ignore pages marked as "reduced resolution image" (i.e. it will consider them as thumbnails), as well as try to guess if a page (without subfile type) is a thumbnail when it meets following criteria: second page with YCbCr PhotometricInterpretation, old style jpeg compression while the first page has a different PhotometricInterpretation or compression.
Script-fu:
New (dir-make "/dir/name" mode) function to create a directory.
Translations:
New translations for the Windows installer: Vietnamese, Lithuanian.
13 translations were updated: Catalan, Chinese (China), Croatian, Dutch, German, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.
Build:
On Windows, *.rs file extension is not associated with SUN Raster images anymore. The reason is that this file extension is mostly used for Rust code files nowadays. If Windows could detect file formats with "magic numbers" (i.e. byte identifiers), it would not be a problem, but since it relies apparently only the extension, it's better to remove this association.
Oppositely on Linux and other Unix-like systems using desktop files, add the image/x-sun-raster MimeType which was forgotten (there, detection should be fine and not depend on file extension).
gimp30-tips.mo is not installed anymore (only used during the build to generate gimp-tips.xml with multiple language support).
--enable-check-update now has an "auto" value, which is the new default. It is equivalent to "yes" for Windows and macOS and "no" in all other cases.
New unit test to check that localizations listed in the installer script match available po files in po-windows-installer/.
"msys*" host value now detected as Windows builds.
Bumping minimum GEGL to version 0.4.32.

New in Gimp 2.10.24 (Jul 28, 2021)

New in Gimp 2.10.22 (Dec 28, 2020)

Core:
Verbose version information (`gimp-2.10 -v` on command line, or debug output) now displays Flatpak related information when available. This is especially useful for debugging (such as the exact Flatpak build hash, the runtime version, the installed Flatpak extensions, permissions, etc.).
OpenCL settings has now been moved to the Playground tab in Preferences.
On stable builds, "Playground" tab is now visible in Preferences if any of the experimental features has been enabled, even without the CLI option `--show-playground`.
Tools:
"gegl:matting-levin" now the default engine of Foreground Select tool (when present, as it is an optional feature) as it performs a lot better.
GEGL operations now display a "Sample merged" checkbox in Tool Options. This will be used when the operation allows to pick a color (hence one can pick from the edited layer or from visible data).
"Sample merged" now defaults to being activated in Color Picker and GEGL tools as it seems the less confusing for beginners who don't know of the option yet (according to a small poll we ran).
User interface:
In GimpSpinButton, don't propagate Enter key-press events if updating the spin-button's value in response changes the entered text. This prevents confirming dialogs when hitting Enter after entering a math expression in size entries, updating their value instead.
Likewise, don't propagate Escape key-press events if a new value was entered, and restore the original value instead.
GimpMemSizeEntry improved to show appropriate binary prefixes (kibibyte, mebibyte and gibibyte) instead of decimal ones, to round properly when using higher units, and to not lose accuracy when possible when displaying in higher units.
Several of the biggest pages of the Preferences dialog are now scrollable, allowing the dialog to fit on smaller displays.
Plug-ins:
Add a new GIMP_EXPORT_NEEDS_CROP export capability, which causes gimp_export_image() to crop the exported image content to the image bounds; this is useful for formats that support layers, but have no concept of global image bounds, hence cropping is the only way to enforce the image bounds.
When showing the export dialog, give an option to either crop the layers to the image bounds, or to resize the image to fit the layers.
Content type `image/webp` is now recognized (and not only `image/x-webp` as both seem to be in used and this format is unfortunately not yet listed in IANA media types (so various content types are in use, no clear standard apparently).
DDS import is now a bit more permissive, allowing to load some files with invalid header flags regarding compression, while we are able to know the right compression from other flags. This allows to recover invalid DDS files exported by other software.
JPEG detection improved to be more generic and reliable.
HEIF support improvements:
AVIF importing and exporting added (requires libheif 1.8.0+)
10/12-bit importing and exporting now available for HEIC/AVIF
NCLX color profile import (link with LittleCMS)
Metadata support when importing
"Lossless" option is now called "Nearly lossless (YUV420 format)" because this is actually what it is, hence previous naming was misleading.
TIFF support improvements:
Add an option to crop the layers to the image bounds when exporting individual layers (using GIMP_EXPORT_NEEDS_CROP), since TIFF has no concept of global image bounds otherwise. Cropping is enabled by default.
TIFF export will not override "DocumentName" metadata tag anymore.
Stop writing file paths into TIFF DocumentNames as file paths can contain confidential information such as usernames and directory structures, making the previous behaviour a potential privacy and security risk.
Fix a file descriptor leak case which may have prevented a file from being opened on Windows.
Multiple improvements in the PSP import plug-in:
support reading raster layers of PSP version > 6,
support reading 16-bit integer PSP files,
support reading grayscale and indexed PSP files,
support PSP images with zero-length layer names,
fix wrong layer offset of layers,
fix reading layer names with high bit ASCII characters,
fix incorrect loading of PSP images with uncompressed channel data,
fix reading of creator block data of PSP images,
better error messages describing yet unsupported features,
improve reader stability by always using the block/chunk length.
Spyrogimp now works on Grayscale images and clutters less the undo history.
"Orientation" metadata is now reset whether you accepted to rotate the image or not when importing an image.
XPM does not export a "None" (transparent) color when unused.
BMP always include color masks when exporting BMP with color space info, as mandated by BITMAPV5HEADER specification.
Debugging:
Add progressive performance logs: progressive logs contain complete information after each recorded sample, by writing partial address maps at each sample, containing all new addresses introduced by the sample.
This allows recording complete logs even in cases where they can't be properly terminated, such as when GIMP crashes or freezes in the middle of the log.
Progressive logs are disabled by default, since they potentially increase the sampling cost. They can be enabled through a toggle in the log file-dialog, or through GIMP_PERFORMANCE_LOG_PROGRESSIVE environment variable.
Performance log viewer can now process progressive performance logs too.
Allow controlling performance-log parameters through the UI.
Build:
new `distcheck` step in Continuous Integration.
Bug fixes:
#2275, #2668, #2874, #3481, #3868, #4061, #4155, #4328, #4505, #4536, #4560, #4816, #5043, #5069, #5208, #5219, #5226, #5232, #5274, #5275, #5357, #5358, #5472, #5530, #5584, #5592, #5623, #5630, #5651
Translation updates:
Basque, Catalan, Chinese (China), Croatian, Danish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian
Developers/contributors:
Daniel a Simona Novomeská, David A. Russo, Elad Shahar, Ell, Jacob Boerema, Jehan Pages, Liam Quin, lillolollo, luz.paz, Michael Natterer, Michael Schumacher, Øyvind Kolås, Peter Oliver, Simon McVittie
Translators:
Alan01, Alexandre Prokoudine, Anders Jonsson, Asier Sarasua Garmendia, Baurzhan Muftakhidinov, Boyuan Yang, Christian Kirbach, Daniel Mustieles García, Jordi Mas, Julien Hardelin, Marco Ciampa, milotype, Rodrigo Lledó Milanca, Piotr Drąg, Sabri Ünal, sicklylife, Stephan Woidowski, Tim Sabsch, Yuri Chornoivan

New in Gimp 2.10.20 (Dec 28, 2020)

Tools:
Crop tool now has a "Delete cropped pixels" option active only in image crop mode, allowing to choose whether to crop layers or only the canvas (cropped pixels will be made invisible as out-of-canvas but would still be present). The option is unchecked by default, as it is the non-destructive behavior, which also means the default behavior is changed.
Crop tool in image crop mode will not crop layers with "Lock pixels" on, anymore, even if "Delete cropped pixels" is checked.
Painting tools can now restore opacity and blend mode from presets.
User interface:
Image / Precision renamed to Image > Encoding
Tool groups can now display their tool list on hover rather than on click. This can be set in Preferences, in the Toolbox tab.
Improved update notification GUI in About dialog, and now also showing an update comment when one was set in gimp_versions.json.
Palette Editor dockable: the color index in the current palette is now shown in front of the color name.
Plugins:
In file-psd, make the data_start and data_len fields of the PSDimageres and PSDlayerres structs unsigned, to avoid potential overflow/sign-extension
file-raw: Canon CR3 files are now properly recognized by GIMP and sent to your raw developer software of choice.
PNG and TIFF export: "Save color values from transparent pixels" defaults now to not saving color values (i.e. channels set to 0) when alpha channel is present and 0 itself.
PDF import: multi-pages are now imported in bottom-first order, similar to animated formats, and also similar to defaults for PDF export. This brings consistency but break existing behavior, hence needs to be noted.
Added support for exporting 16-bit PSDs, read and write channels from/to PSd in the right order
Filters:
The 'Vignette' filter now has on-canvas controls
New 'Filters -> Blur -> Focus Blur' filter with on-canvas controls to emulate out-of-focus blurring
New 'Filters -> Blur -> Variable Blur' filter that uses an aux mask input to blur an image with variable intensity
New 'Filters -> Light and Shadow -> Bloom' filter
Updated translations:
British English, Catalan, Chinese (Taiwan), Dutch, Finnish, German, Greek, Italian, Korean, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian
Icons:
Replace fileicon.ico with version contain 24x24, 64x64, 128x128, and 256x256 sizes for Windows icon
Replace wilber.ico with version containing 128x128 size of Windows icon
Bug fixes:
#189, #354, #872, #1439, #3405, #3533, #3558, #3777, #3841, #4094, #4328, #4363, #4487, #4618, #4641, #4663, #4696, #4734, #4745, ##4793, 4827, #4846, #4858, #4871, #4895, #4904, #4919, #4967, ##4968, #4992, 4996, #5009, #5010, #5033
Developers:
Ell, Jehan, lillolollo, Marco Ciampa, Michael Natterer, Øyvind Kolås, pesder, Salamandar, Sergio Jiménez Herena, Simon Budig, T Collins, woob
Contributors:
Nikc, Sabri Ünal, Michael Schumacher, Jernej Simončič, luz.paz
Translators:
Alexandre Prokoudine, Anders Jonsson, Bruce Cowan, Cristian Secară, Daniel Korostil, Daniel Șerbănescu, Dimitris Spingos, Jiri Grönroos, Jordi Mas, Nathan Follens, Piotr Drąg, Rodrigo Lledó Milanca, Sabri Ünal, Seong-ho Cho, Tim Sabsch, Yuri Chornoivan, Георгий Тимофеевский

New in Gimp 2.10.18 (Dec 28, 2020)

New in Gimp 2.10.16 (Dec 28, 2020)

Core:
In gimp_gegl_apply_cached_operation(), use gint64 for storing the total and processed pixel counts used for reporting progress, to avoid overflowing when applying an operation to a large image.
In GimpFilterTool and gimp_drawable_apply_operation(), use gimp_drawable_filter_set_add_alpha() to add an alpha channel when applying an operation that specifies "needs-alpha" to a drawable that can have alpha.
In GimpFilterTool, move all the drawable-filter option setup to a new gimp_filter_tool_update_filter() function, and call it whenever the drawable-filter's options need to be updated. This avoids duplicating logic in various places.
Improve the efficiency of decoding RLE data when loading ABR brushes, by reading entire scanlines into a buffer all-at-once, instead of reading the stream byte-by-byte.
GIMP now optionally phones home to find out if there's a new version available and then tells the user if there is one indeed. It also keeps track of the installer revision and then warns if there's a newer installer available. This can be disabled in Preferences. In that case, users still have the option to manually check for an update via the About dialog. The feature can be disabled entirely with the '--disable-check-update' configure switch.
Tools:
New 3D Transform tool where you can set vanishing point, camera's focal length, and the move and rotate layer, selection, path, or image in 2.5 space. With the "Unified interaction" option enabled, all three interaction modes of the grid (camera, move, and rotate) are available simultaneously. In this mode, the inner and outer regions of the item are used for moving and rotation, respectively, and the vanishing point is controlled through through a handle.
Transform tools now respect the Clip option and update the canvas preview accordingly.
New "Composited preview" option allows respecting layer's blending mode and position in the layer stack rather than rendering it as an overlay on top of the overall layer stack. This simplifies creating complex layer compositions greatly. The option requires mipmaps to be used and thus is disabled by default. It also comes with an experimental "Synchronous preview" suboption to render the composited preview synchronously. This reduces the lag for painting the preview, but can harm responsiveness for bigger images, where rendering the preview is slow.
Add a new "Preview linked items" option to the transform-grid tools. When this option is enabled, together with composited previews, the transform preview includes all linked layers and channels when transforming a layer/channel. Paths are currently unsupported.
New widget called GimpPivotSelector, a 3x3 grid of toggle buttons, is now used for selecting a natural pivot position (e.g. for a transform) relative to an item: its center, its corners, and the midpoints of its edges. Currently used in Rotate and 3D Transform tools.
Add "Show all" support to the Bucket Fill tool in line-art mode
Color picker and sample points now support displaying values in Yu'v' (CIE 1976 UCS) color space.
The Symmetry Painting dock now has an "Enable reflection" option that allows painting patterns resembling a kaleidoscope.
Transform clipping is temporarily disabled for layer groups. No preview other than 'Adjust' works anyway. This will be fixed later on.
Construct a box-filtered mipmap hierarchy for the original brush on-demand, and the closest mipmap is used as the resampling source for downscaled brushes, significantly improving the output quality.
Now that painting is done in a separate thread, the display update rate has a far smaller impact on it. Increase the GimpDisplay update rate, which handles image updates, to 60 FPS, and the GimpDrawTool update rate to 120 FPS. In particular, the latter change makes the brush outline motion much smoother.
In the Airbrush tool, increase the maximal stamp FPS from 15 to 60, and change the corresponding maximal Rate value from 150 to 100. This technically affects tool presets, but we'll live.
Add a new "Snap brush outline to stroke" toggle to the "Image Windows" preferences page. When enabled, the brush outline in paint tools snaps to the individual dabs while painting, which is how it worked before version 2.10.16. Disable the option by default. This seems to be what most other programs are doing, and it does give paitning a smoother feel.
The Warp Transform tool now respects settings for painting tools: showing the brush outline, snapping to dabs, and showing the paint tool cursor.
UI:
Tools are now logically grouped in the toolbox by default. Users can customize the groups to their liking or disable this feature altogether in the Preferences dialog (Interface / Toolbox page).
New opt-out compact style for sliders with revamped interaction. The widget uses a narrower layout, and the different upper/lower-half behavior is gone. Instead, the behavior depends on the mouse button and modifier used:
left-click is used for absolute adjustment,
Shift + left-click + drag changes value in small increments,
Ctrl + left-click + drag changes value in large increments,
middle-click enables numeric input mode;
right-click enables numeric input mode and selects the value.
The "You can drop dockable dialogs here" message is gone from the toolbox for good. Instead, highlight dockable areas when a user starts dragging a dockable dialog, and intensify the highlight as the dialog goes over a dockable area.
Consolidate UI for merging down and anchoring layers: As they are both mutually exclusive and serve an almost identical purpose, the "Merge down" and "Anchor Layer" are given mutually exclusive visibility in menus, and the anchor button is replaced with a merge down button in the Layers dockable whenever there is no active floating selection. Modifier keys are available:
Shift: merge layer group
Ctrl: merge visible layers
Ctrl + Shift: merge visible layers from last used values
Plugins:
In plug_in_compat.pdb, when wrapping an op node inside a graph, set the op node as the graph node's underlying operation. This allows gimp_gegl_apply_operation() to perform certain optimizations.
The Spyrogimp plugin now features a Visual tab where the inner mechanics of a spirograph is abstracted away, and you operate on amount of petals etc. The plugin now also allows saving a pattern as a path rather than rendering it to a layer as a bitmap.
Improve the loading speed for PSD files, mostly by eliminating excessive copies.
Filters:
Don't disable gegl:color-to-alpha (which has "needs-alpha") when the drawable doesn't have an alpha channel, if one can be added.
Don't disable color-to-alpha for grayscale drawable, since the operation is applicable to grayscale images (in particular, it doesn't add color where there was none), and since GIMP no longer distinguishes between layers and channels according to the drawable format when updating the filters actions.
Windows:
Installer: unofficial languages, ghostscript 9.50.
Installer: skip .debug files when they don't exist.
Installer: properly remove old icons on 32-bit installs and per-user installs.
macOS:
Set required variables if it is running from Apple application bundle.
The macOS build now ships with the dashboard dock for displaying performance graphs.
Updated translations:
British English, Catalan, Danish, French, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian.
Bugfixes:
#4172, #4194, #4205, #4218, #2543, #4185, #4246, #2794, #4209, #4278, #4372, #4187, #4392, #2674, #4338, #2862, #4203, #4204, #4354, #1266, #4584, #4174, #4285, #4366, #1975, #4605
Developers:
Alex Samorukov, Cyril Richard, Elad Shahar, Ell, Elle Stone, Jehan, Jernej Simončič, lillolollo, Massimo Valentini, Michael Natterer, Pascal Terjan, woob.
Translators:
Alan Mortensen, Alexandre Prokoudine, Anders Jonsson, Balázs Meskó, Balázs Úr, Bruce Cowan, Daniel Korostil, Jordi Mas, Julien Hardelin, Marco Ciampa, Piotr Drąg, Rodrigo Lledó Milanca, Ryuta Fujii, Sabri Ünal, sicklylife, Sveinn í Felli, Tim Sabsch, Zander Brown.

New in Gimp 2.10.14 (Dec 28, 2020)

Here are release highlights:
Basic out-of-canvas pixels viewing and editing
Optional editing of layers with disabled visibility
Foreground Select tool: new Grayscale Preview Mode
Newly added Normal Map filter
27 old filters ported to use GEGL buffers
HEIF, TIFF, and PDF support improvements
Better loading of corrupted XCF files
Grayscale workflows order of magnitude faster
macOS Catalina compatibility
45 bugfixes, 22 translation updates
Out-of-canvas viewing and editing:
Not being able to view and edit data outside the canvas boundary used to be a deal breaker in quite a few use cases. So this is going to be a bit of a breakthrough moment for quite a few users.
This is what has changed:
There is now a new Show All mode accessible via the View menu that reveals all pixels outside the canvas boundary.
This mode uses alpha checkerboard for canvas padding, but you can configure GIMP to temporarily or permanently use the usual padding color instead.
You can also enable canvas boundary cue display (dotted red line).
Color- and patch-picking, bucket-filling, and transforming now works outside the canvas. Which means you can crop past the canvas boundary or pick a source patch from outside the canvas area to heal an area inside the canvas.
New Image mode in transform tools:
This new feature is closely related to out-of-canvas viewing and editing and was also contributed by Ell.
Now when you e.g. rotate a single-layer image, you can use this transform type to automatically expand the canvas to include all of rotated pixels when using the default Adjust clipping mode. The switch is right next to layer/path/selection toggle at the top of any transform tool’s settings.
It’s complemented by a new Image > Transform > Arbitrary Rotation… menu entry, which activates the rotate tool in the Image mode.
Filters can now extend beyond layer boundary:
The result of some filters can be larger than the original layer. A very common example is Drop Shadow, which adds a shadow at an offset to the layer. Such filters are no longer clipped to the layer boundary by default. Instead, the layer is automatically resized as necessary when the filter is applied.
This behavior can be toggled through the new Clipping option in the filter dialog.
Invisible layers can now be edited:
There is now a global toggle to enable the editing of layers with disabled visibility (the eye icon in the layers docker). There was some demand for it from users, and it was easy to do, so a new contributor, woob, added this feature.
Free Select tool update:
The Free Select tool received further usability improvements. It now supports using Alt+drag to quickly move, cut, and copy the selection, without having to commit the selection first, similarly to the rest of the selection tools.
Foreground Select tool update:
Thomas Manni contributed a new Grayscale preview mode to the Foreground Select tool, which allows seeing the resulting mask in black and white. The usual preview mode is now called Color and choosing the color and opacity for the mask instead of imposing only 4 colors (red, green, blue, grey).
Feather Selection update:
The Feather Selection dialog has a new Selected areas continue outside the image toggle, working similarly to the corresponding option in the Shrink Selection and Border Selection dialogs. This option affects the border behavior of the operation: when toggled, selected areas along the image border are assumed to continue past the image bounds, and are therefore not affected by the feather.
New filters:
Thanks to Ell, GIMP is now shipping with a simple Normal Map filter (Filters > Generic) that generates normal maps from height maps. This is early initial work, a lot more is expected to be done.
GIMP now provides direct access to more GEGL filters
Bayer Matrix (for ordered dithering) and Linear Sinusoid (useful for halftoning), also both created by Ell, are in the Filters > Render > Pattern menu.
Newsprint (Filters > Distorts), by Øyvind Kolås, is a GEGL version of the old GIMP filter for halftoning, plus quite a few extras.
Mean Curvature Blur, by Thomas Manni, can be helpful to do edge-preserving blurring.
Also, more GEGL-based filters with on-canvas preview have replaced old GIMP counterparts: Neon (Filters > Edge-Detect), Stretch Contrast (Colors > Auto), and Oilify (Filters > Artistic).
Moreover, Michael Natterer did a simple 8-bit per channel port of 27 older filters to use GEGL buffers (they are still GIMP filters, not GEGL operations). Another filter, Van Gogh, got higher bit depth support (up to 32bpc float).
HEIF, TIFF, and PDF support improvements:
GIMP now supports ICC profiles in HEIF images at both loading and exporting time when built with libheif v1.4.0 and newer. The exporting dialog also features a new “Save color profile” checkbox.
The TIFF importer now asks how to process unspecified TIFF channels: use as non-premultiplied alpha (used to be the default), as premultiplied alpha, or just import as a generic channel. This fixes a known bug with 4-channel (RGBA) TIFF files as demonstrated here.
Finally, the PDF exporter was fixed by Lionel to export text layers inside layer groups as text correctly.
Better loading of corrupted XCF files:
XCF loading is now a bit more resilient to corruption: it doesn’t stop any more at the first layer or channel error; instead it tries to load more layers/channels to salvage as much data as possible from a corrupted XCF file.
Improvements for the macOS version:
Alex Samorukov introduced various improvements to the macOS build of GIMP.
First and foremost, GIMP is now compatible with macOS Catalina and doesn’t have the file permission issue that the 2.10.12 build had.
Secondly, the DMG will now open a window with an Applications shortcut that explains how to install it. He also added some fixes for command line users.
Finally, Alex built the new version with updated 3rd party components. Among other things, this means support for color profiles in HEIF/HEIC files.

New in Gimp 2.10.12 (Jun 17, 2019)

Core:
Add an "Incremental" option to the Dodge/Burn tool, which, similarly to the Paintbrush, Pencil, and Eraser tools, applies the effect incrementally as the pointer moves.
Curves now have a concept of smooth vs corner points: smooth points produce a smooth curve, while corner points produce a sharp curve (previously, all points were smooth).
Search the user font directory path on Windows (since Windows 10, non-admin users have the ability to install fonts). This is only a temporary hack until fontconfig adds proper upstream support: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/fontconfig/fontconfig/issues/144
In gimp_brush_core_get_paint_buffer(), when allocating a new paint buffer, clear the old buffer *before* allocating the new one, to reduce the amount of simultaneously allocated memory.
In GimpPaintbrush, avoid refilling the paint buffer at each dab if the paint color/pixmap hasn't changed, hence allowing faster painting in some specific cases.
Add hygon cpu detection and enable MMX/SSE support.
Add a GimpSymmetry::get_transform() virtual function and a corresponding gimp_symmetry_get_transform() function which return the brush transform corresponding to a given symmetry stroke in terms of the rotation angle and reflection flag (in contrast to gimp_symmetry_get_operation() which returns the same transforation in terms of a GeglNode). This allows us to simplify, fix (artifact bugs, etc.), and improve the painting-code performance for several symmetry painting cases.
New gimp-brush-pipe-spacing parasite set by core code to preserve GIH brush's spacing across reloads.
Add a new Offset filter tool, as a front-end to gimp:offset. The tool replaces, and provides the same interface as the drawable-offset dialog while also providing live preview and on-canvas interaction.
Plug-ins:
Exported profile and data format strategy updated in several file plug-ins.
When not saving a profile, we always export as sRGB data, as most viewers would not display the image properly otherwise.
When saving a profile:
If a profile was manually assigned, we always export to the assigned format, hence pixel data is converted accordingly, whatever the work format.
If no profile was assigned:
If the export format support high-bit depth, we export the work format as-is.
If the export format is 8-bit max, we convert the work format to sRGB, except if the work format is 8-bit linear.
The following plug-ins were updated: JPEG, PNG, TIFF and WebP.
TIFF plug-in now supports layer export.
Add accelerator on "Save color _profile" item in JPEG export so that all items in the dialog have keyboard accelerators.
Add a "Save color profile" checkbox in WebP export and remove the "Advanced Options" expander (all metadata and profile writing options are now directly visible).
Process cases of non-conformant TIFF file with extra channels while ExtraSamples is not set by assuming the first extra channel is a non-premultiplied alpha channel and outputting a warning. In the future, this should be updated further by a dialog asking what to do with the non-defined dialog (consider as premultiplied or non-premultiplied alpha channel, or just save as extra channels).
Tools:
Add input/output spin-buttons to the Curves tool, which allow setting the selected point's coordinates numerically. When the image precision is greater than 8-bpc, use a 0.00-100.00 range for the point-coordinate spin-buttons instead of a 0-255 range.
In the Curves tool, allow changing the curve's point types (cf. new curve corner points in Core section). Corner points are displayed with a diamond shape instead of a circle.
Free Select tool now creates a selection as soon as the polygon is closed. This selection is updated when the polygon, or the relevant tool-options, change, similarly to GimpRectangleSelectTool.
Derive GimpEraser from GimpPaintbrush, instead of directly from GimpBrushCore. This allows GimpEraser to reuse the paint-buffer content across dabs, improving performance.
Allow moving an intersecting pair of guides with the Move tool.
User interface:
In GimpCurveView, when dragging an existing curve point, don't immediately move the point to the cursor position upon button press, but rather move it relative to its current position as the cursor moves. This allows selecting a point without moving it, and adjusting its position more easily.
when the cursor hovers above a point in GimpCurveView, or when dragging a point, have the coordinate indicator show the point's position, rather than the cursor's.
In GimpCurveView, when holding down Ctrl while adding/dragging a point, snap the y-coordinate to the original curve (at the start of the drag). This is particularly useful for adding points along the curve.
In GimpDashboard, don't show legend for groups with no meter.
Add a tile-alloc-total variable to the dashboard's memory and misc groups, showing the total amount of memory used by the tile allocator.
Add a "Save Keyboard Shortcuts Now" button to the Configure Keyboard Shortcuts dialog.
Translations:
12 translations were updated: Catalan, Chinese, French, German, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

New in Gimp 2.10.10 (Apr 9, 2019)

Core:
Add gimp-scratch allocator, a fast memory allocator (on the order of magnitude of alloca()), suitable for small (up to a few megabytes), short-lived (usually, bound to the current stack-frame) allocations. Unlike alloca(), gimp-scratch doesn't use the stack, and is therefore safer, and will also serve bigger requests, by falling-back to malloc().
In gimp_drawable_transform_buffer_affine(), avoid modifying the clipping mode when transforming layer masks, since this function is used (among other things) to transform layer masks together with their layer, in which case they should use the same clipping mode as the layer. This fixes a regression introduced by commit 2ae823ba, causing layer masks to be transformed with a mismatched clipping mode during layer transforms, leading to discrepencies between the transformed layer and the transformed mask.
Moved swap/cache and temporary files out the GIMP user config dir and added new config file substitutions ${gimp_cache_dir} and ${gimp_temp_dir}.
Pass the GEGL tile-cache size, swap path, and thread-count to plug-ins as part of their config, and have libgimp set the plug-in's GeglConfig accordingly upon initialization.
Layer groups are now rendered in bigger chunks rather than tile-by-tile (which used to pretty much eliminate multithreading for groups), which improves the rendering speed.
Make saving/exporting files more robust to errors. In particular if an error occurs during the process (be it a bug, a memory error, or anything else), GIMP won't overwrite anymore any existing file with incomplete contents, so that you won't end up with no valid files at all.
Fix a regression on support of various graphics tablet.
Remove the "Edit -> Fade..." feature: it makes GIMP use two buffers instead of one (east into system resources), it's broken in 2.10, and we can make the UX better for filters.
New generic canvas modifier 'Alt + middle click' allowing to pick layers by clicking on pixels. The available layers will be looped through (starting from the upper one) while Alt key is hold and the picked layer name will be temporarily displayed in the status bar.
When clearing a channel, do nothing if the channel is already empty; otherwise, align the cleared rectangle to the channel buffer's tile grid, so that all affected tiles are dropped, rather than zeroed. Furthermore, only update the affected region of the channel.
Brush and pattern saving logics has been moved to core code (instead of plug-in).
Clipboard brushes and pattern can now be duplicated.
Parametric brushes are now 32-bit float to avoid posterization on large brushes.
Note: raster brushes are still 8-bit and plug-ins only have access to 8-bit versions of high-precision brushes/patterns. New API will be required to handle high-precision data.
On-canvas preview while editing a color in the colormap of an indexed image.
User interface:
Enabled HiDPI/Retina support for the GTK2/OSX build, fixes blurry icons.
Add a tooltip to the "better compression" checkbox in save dialog to make it clearer it does not mean that the file size is necessarily smaller in every cases. In particular some best/worst case are possible when an algorithm less efficient in general may end up better on a particular image.
Add basic support for cursors with a scale factor of 2 for HiDPI (artwork to be updated).
Foreground and background color icons, as well as color history will now display out-of-gamut warning on indexed images for colors outside of the palette, as well as on grayscale images, for non-gray colors.
Pack color picker and hexadecimal entry on same line in Color dock.
Add an "Open as Image" button to the brushes dialog.
Usability:
Attempting to transform locked layers or paint on them now results in blinking around the status bar (where the warning message is displayed) and around the toolbar where lock toggles are. The same applies to attempting to move a selection where there is none — GIMP will blink around the toolbar where the moving target (layer, selection, path) is chosen.
GIMP now allows selecting default export file type for new projects. The choice is limited to PNG, JPEG, WebP, PSD, ORA, TIFF, BMP.
GimpSpinScale widget now has an optional feature to constrain the value to integer when dragging with a pointer (even if the scale allows for fractional numbers), set with new function gimp_spin_scale_set_constrain_drag(). This is useful for settings where fractional numbers are technically possible, yet most common use case are with integers (such as pixel sizes, angles in degrees, etc.) so you want the easy interface to be constrained. Fractional numbers are still settable, for instance by keyboard edit; and arrow incrementation won't drop fraction parts. This is currently only activated for brush options in paint tools.
Tools:
In scale tool, scale around center even when using numeric input.
New algorithm in the Bucket Fill tool when selecting the affected area "Fill by line art detection", based off the G'Mic algorithm for "smart colorization": https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01891876
In a few words, it identifies painted pixels (either based on grayscale or opacity values) and tries to close line arts to allow filling even with not perfectly closed zones; the second step of the algorithm will flood the colors under line art pixels to prevent "holes" in the filling. It is possible to control a max size (in pixels) for the flooding, as well as max length of closing segments and splines.
The Bucket Fill tool got new interaction allowing to hold the click and move the mouse to fill based on several seed zones (for "Fill by line art detection" as well as "Fill similar colors"). You can now cancel the fill in progress with right click as in other tools.
The Bucket Fill tool now allows color picking with ctrl-click, same as every painting tool. It will pick either the foreground or background color depending on the selected Fill Type. The ctrl-alt modifier combination is also possible to pick the non-Fill Type color.
In the Bucket Fill tool, the Alt modifier will now switch to "FG color fill" when "Pattern fill" was set (instead of doing nothing).
In the Unified Transform tool, default to preserving aspect ratio when scaling up or down.
In the Healing tool, "Sample merged" now also work for the target pixels, allowing to draw in empty layers.
Selection by color is now parallelized, hence improving speed of the Select by Color tool (and any other processing which may share this piece of code now or in the future).
Add "Constrain handles" and "Around center" options to the perspective-transform tool's GUI, which are similar to the corresponding options of the unified-transform tool.
Improve color picking on indexed image to always select an indexed color corresponding to the picked pixel in the colormap.
Plug-ins:
file-pdf-save GUI now clearly indicates the order the layers will be used to make multi-page PDFs.
Add DDS loading/exporting plug-in originally developed by Shawn Kirst and Arne Reuter.
Rename the Guillotine plug-in to Slice Using Guides.
Add a new option saving a color profile when exporting PNG, JPEG, TIFF. Always save it when exporting to PSD.
Remove the "Advanced" expanders from the PNG and TIFF export dialogs.
Full rewrite of the Spyrogimp plug-in with much more options and better interaction.
Indexed TIFF with alpha channel now supported.
Filters:
Add on-canvas GUI (simple lines) for circular, linear, and zoom motion blur.
Help:
Link to the bugtracker directly from the Help menu, also link to the wiki and the roadmap. Remove the link to currently disabled registry.gimp.org.
Translations:
Czech, Danish, French, Italian, Japanese, Marathi, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian.
Build:
Bumping GTK+ dependency to the micro update GTK+ 2.24.32 to handle several bugs on Windows (broken shortcuts on non-latin layouts and broken vector icons).

New in Gimp 2.10.8 (Nov 9, 2018)

Core:
Use adaptive chunk size in GimpProjection when rendering the projection asynchronously, rather than using a fixed chunk size. This provides a better trade-off between throughput and responsiveness dynamically, based on how fast the processing is.
Tools:
In all selection tools, show error on attempt to subtract-from/intersect-with empty selection.
Fix text along path not working with vertical text.
Fix Text tool's frame position when undoing a move operation.
Streamline Text tool's drawing blocking/unblocking logic.
When moving a text layer using the text tool (through alt+drag), don't change the layer's box mode to "fixed", which is unnecessary, since the layer's size isn't affected.
Transform and deformation operations now maintain color for fully transparent pixels, making unerase and curves manipulation of alpha channel more reliable.
All transform tools now apply changes when you save or export/overwrite an image without pressing Enter first to confirm changes.
Heal, Dodge/Burn, Smudge, and Convolve tools now adjust the processed buffer and mask_buffer regions according to the changes made to the application region, as calculated by intersecting it with the drawable and mask extents. This fixes wrong application position when painting on a drawable whose origin is above/to the left of the image's origin, and there's a selection active.
Plug-ins:
Port all plug-ins to the new iterator API in GEGL.
Improve automatic detection of HEIC/HEIF files.
Improve RawTherapee discovery by looking up registry key (should become useful with RawTherapee 5.5 and more).
Usability:
Compatibility information in the Save dialog is now more understandable. The minimum GIMP version for the XCF file is always written down when it is GIMP 2.8 or over. The list of features warranting the minimum version is now listed in an expander container rather than as tooltip, which makes it more discoverable. The warning on compression is now displayed as its own text under the checkbox and not as additional text to the minimum GIMP version label.
CLI:
New self-explanatory --enable-win32-debug-console CLI option
Debugging:
New GimpBacktrace API provides an interface for creating and traversing multi-threaded backtraces, as well as querying symbol information. Backends are available for Linux and Windows.
Performance log recording now available in the Dashboard dock. The log contains a series of samples of the dashboard variables, as well as the full program backtrace, when available. As such, it essentially acts as a built-in profiler, which allows us to correlate program execution with the information available through the Dashboard.
New performance-log-expand.py tool decodes a delta-encoded performance log by expanding the deltas, producing a log where each sample (and other relevant elements) contain complete information. The structure of expanded logs is identical to that of delta-encoded logs, the expanded log simply has no deltas.
New performance-log-resolve.py tool resolves symbol information in backtraces. The logs produced by GIMP only specify the program counter at each stack frame, providing an address-map to map program-counter addresses to actual symbols separately. This tool looks up each program-counter address in the address map, incorporating the relevant symbol information directly into the backtrace.
New performance-log-deduce.py tool that statistically deduces the correct thread states based on backtrace address frequency, fixing local inaccuracies.
New performance-log-viewer.py tool that is a viewer for GIMP performance logs, with a sample-selection area at the top and an information area at the bottom. The sample-selection area visualizes the sampled variables and markers using a simultaneous set of plots, and displays the currently selected samples. The information area shows global information stored in the log, as well as information specific to the currently selected samples, including variable listing and statistics, full backtrace, and profile/call-graph information.
Translations:
Updated translations: Danish, Dutch, Finnish, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian.

New in Gimp 2.10.6 (Sep 13, 2018)

New in Gimp 2.10.4 (Jul 7, 2018)

Core:
Remove gimp_display_shell_draw_background() and all clipping hacks for drawing the canvas background. This optimizes away one entire step of drawing of image size, for each expose.
Font loading does not block startup anymore. Only consequence is that the Text tool may not be usable immediately if fonts are not fully loaded yet (and will output an appropriate error if you do so). All non-text related activities can be performed right away.
Change of the URL from bugzilla to gitlab where appropriate.
New tool option manager to better keep track of user context and paint options in a consistent manner.
User Interface:
The Dashboard dockable dialog now has a 'Memory' group that shows memory-usage information: the currently used memory size, the available physical memory size, and the total physical memory size. It can also show the tile-cache size, for comparison against the other memory stats. Note that the upper-bound of the meter is the physical memory size, so the memory usage may be over 100% when GIMP uses the swap.
The Dashboard dockable dialog now has "read" and "written" fields in the dashboard swap group, which report the total amount of data read-from/written-to the tile swap, respetively. Additionally, the swap busy indicator (used as the meter's LED) has been improved, so that it's active whenever data has been read-from/written-to the swap during the last sampling interval, rather than at the point of sampling.
Fonts can now be tagged. The user interface is the same as for brushes, patterns etc.
Some icons fixed: larger spacing between broken chains and gimp-tool-ellipse-select made symmetrical.
Usability:
When a plug-in cannot be applied to an image because of mismatch in image types (e.g. layer has no alpha or image is greyscale), GIMP now displays a message listing supported image types for this plug-in.
Tools:
The Measurement tool now has an "Auto straighten" option allowing to rotate the active drawable (layer, channel…) so that the measurement line is used as horizon. As other transform tools, the feature will work on linked drawables as well.
The Smudge tool now paints correctly on images with a color profile other than the GIMP's built-in one.
Build:
Installer: set compatibility options to run Python plugins in HiDPI-aware mode.
Put back compatibility DLLs for really old plugins.
Install binary tool `gimp-test-clipboard` on the system to allow people to help us debug clipboard bugs.
--enable-bundled-mypaint-brushes renamed --enable-relocatable-bundle and also make WMF fonts looked up on the runtime prefix of GIMP (instead of the build-time path) when this build option was set.
Plug-ins:
gimptool-2.0 binary now accepts source files with non-standard extensions if it can try to guess appropriate language from the compiler being used. It will also properly quote arguments for shell usage.
Run explicitly Python 2 as Python plug-in interpreter to prevent breakage on systems where Python 3 is the default.
raw_input()'s argument in Python console is now optional, and input() support has been added.
File Formats:
The PSD loader now provides an option to load "merged", pre-composited version of the images that becomes available when a PSD file was saved with "Maximize Compatibility" option enabled in Photoshop. This is useful when loading PSD files that use features that GIMP doesn't currently support, and therefore can't render correctly, such as adjustment layers. When loading the merged image version, we avoid loading certain additional data from the file, such as channels, paths, and guides, while still loading metadata. This option is currently exposed as an additional file type ("Photoshop image (merged)"), which has to be explicitly selected from the file-type list when opening the image.
Embedding GIMP's built-in sRGB color profile to exported files is now optional. The default choice can be set in the Preferences dialog.
Translations:
Updated translations: Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian.

New in Gimp 2.10.2 Alpha 2 (Jun 21, 2018)

Core:
Discard fonts which fail to load and popup an info dialog to allow people debug their fonts.
New API to suppress updates in UI until plug-ins are done introducing changes.
New API to calculate histograms in separate threads, with possible further extension to handle similar cases elsewhere in GIMP.
Tool options are now properly saved and reloaded per-device at startup.
Plug-ins:
New plug-in for importing and exporting HEIF images.
Enable visibility of rasterized vector layer from PSD.
Single-window screenshots in Windows fixed to correctly snap a window even when it is partly off-screen or covered by another window or when display scaling is not set to 100%.
Filters:
New Spherize filter to wrap an image around a spherical cap
New Recursive Transform filter to create Droste effect.
Usability:
Warn users, when alpha-only painting has no effect. E.g. when target drawable doesn't have an alpha channel, or the alpha channel is locked.
Make the splash texts dynamic, so they are larger on larger splashes.
Mention pressing Enter to complete Foreground selection in the status bar.
Make sure that clicking outside any selection prevents Rectangle Select and Ellipse Select tools from creating empty selections.
Improve mouse wheel zooming behavior to keep the same point centered under the pointer even if the image is completely visible in the canvas.
Add "View -> Center Image in Window" (Shift+J) as a quick way to center the image at any zoom level.
Translations:
Updated translations: Catalan, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Latvian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian.
New translation of Windows installer: Chinese (Taiwan)
Build:
Add a --with-bug-report-url configure option allowing packagers to set the address of their own bug tracker. This address will be the one opened by the debug dialog for reporting bugs.
Add a flatpak manifest for the gtk3-port branch.
Remove the possibility to disable script-fu.
Add a --with-icc-directory configure option to customize the color profile directory. By default, it is set to the common path /usr/share/color/icc.
Documentation:
Updating the description of the XCF format "devel-docs/xcf.txt", for third-party readers wishing to support GIMP 2.10 XCF files.
Add documentation skeletons for all enums in libgimpbase/, there is much room for improvement.

New in Gimp 2.8.22 (May 12, 2017)

New in Gimp 2.8.20 (Feb 6, 2017)

Core:
Avoid D-Bus error message when built without D-Bus support
fix OS X min required conditional in gimpimagewindow.c
Saving to existing .xcf.bz and .xcf.gz files didn't truncate them and could lead to unnecessarily large files
Text layer created by gimp-text-fontname doesn't respect border when resized
avoid seeking when saving XCF files to prevent corruption with file network shares (fixed since 2014, but not mentioned in NEWS yet)
GUI:
Flow on Paint Dynamics editor dialog: the 'y' axis is indicating 'Rate' instead 'Flow'
Vertical ruler shows artifacts if the status bar isn't showing
Tablet stylus misbehaves when crossing the edge of a dock in multi-window-mode
Disable the new "automatic window tabbing" feature introduced on macOS Sierra
Improve the visibility of slider handles with dark themes
Make it harder to switch to renaming if selecting already selected items in resource lists
Tools:
make toggling to color picker mode of paint tools more robust
Libgimp:
call gimp_file_entry_set_filename() with filename encoding
macOS DMG:
Ship the Tango icon theme with the DMG for a complete set of icons
fix the way mime data is copied into the bundle
no longer copy Pango modules into the bundle
prevent a crash caused by drag&drop on OSX by patching the included GTK+
ship a patch for gettext to make sure the preferred UI language will be used
Plug-ins:
Prevent the Python console from closing by the Escape key
Help browser does not launch on OS X
Filter 'Edge Detect/Difference of Gaussians' returns empty image
only use -xobjective-c for compile commands
mkgen.pl: fix calls to write_file() routine to write to current directory
When printing, the images are composed onto a white background to prevent printing a black box instead of a transparent image
Fix color vision deficiency display filters to apply gamma correction directly
Updated Translations:
Catalan
Czech
Danish
Finnish
French
German
Greek
Hungarian
Icelandic
Italian
Polish
Portuguese
Slovak
Slovenian
Scottish Gaelic
Spanish
Swedish
General:
Bug fixes

New in Gimp 2.8.18 (Jul 20, 2016)

New in Gimp 2.8.16 (Dec 19, 2015)

New in Gimp 2.8.14p1 (Sep 15, 2014)

New in Gimp 2.8.12 (Sep 15, 2014)

New in Gimp 2.8.10p1 (Dec 3, 2013)

New in Gimp 2.8.10 (Dec 2, 2013)

New in Gimp 2.8.8 (Nov 5, 2013)

New in Gimp 2.8.6 (Jul 1, 2013)

New in Gimp 2.8.4 (Feb 11, 2013)

New in Gimp 2.8.2 (Aug 29, 2012)

New in Gimp 2.8.0 (Jul 31, 2012)

New in Gimp 2.8.0p1 (May 14, 2012)

New in Gimp 2.8.0 (May 10, 2012)

USER INTERFACE:
Single-Window Mode
Multi-Column Dock Windows
More Screen Real Estate For Dockable Dialogs
Save And Export
Layer Groups
Tools Drawn With Cairo
On-Canvas Text Editing
Keyboard Shortcut Changes
Simple Math In Size Entries
Minor Changes:
Added 'Windows→Hide docks' menu item that does what 'Tab' does and also displays its state, which is now persistent across sessions, too.
Added infrastructure allowing to embed user interface elements on the canvas. This is currently used for text styles in the text tool, and (experimentally) when a color correction tool is invoked while the canvas is in full-screen mode.
To make dock window titles manageable, only show the active dockable in the dock window title.
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 make the composite lighter are in one group, layer modes that make the composite darker in another group, and so forth.
You can now Alt+Click on layers in the Layers dialog to create a selection from it. Add, subtract and intersect modifiers Ctrl, Shift and Ctrl+Shift keys work too. This makes it easy to compose contents of a layer based on the contents of other layers, without detours.
New docks are created at the pointer position.
Removed Toolbox from list of Recently Closed Docks, handle that directly in the Windows menu.
Allow closing the toolbox without closing the whole application.
Default to non-fixed-aspect in Canvas Size dialog.
In the Preferences dialog, only have one setting for the window hint for both the toolbox and the docks.
Support arbitrary affine transforms of brushes.
Got rid of the Tools dockable and move toolbox configuration to Preferences.
A question that often arises is how to change the UI language in GIMP, which has traditionally been a bit cumbersome. Not any longer, it is now possible to change the language in Preferences.
Added 'Lock content' button to the layers, channels and paths dialogs, made the lock buttons more compact.
Allow renaming list items with F2.
Allow binding arbitrary actions to extra mouse buttons.
TOOLS & PLUG-INS:
Brush System Improvements
Tool Preset Improvements
Cage Transform Tool
File Plug-Ins
Resource Tagging
Minor Changes:
Allow specifying the written language in the Text Tool. This helps with choosing an appropriate font, or appropriate glyphs for the selected language.
Moved 'Text along path' from tool options to the text context menu.
Add diagonal guides to the Crop Tool.
Support rotating brushes.
The Smooth Stroke feature from GIMP Painter was ported to GIMP.
Added 'Rule of fifths' crop guide overlay.
Added an icon for the Desaturate tool.
Support loading 16bit (RGB565) raw data.
Added palette exporter for CSS, PHP, Python, txt and Java, accessed through the palette context menu.
Support printing crop marks for images.
Made the Pointer dockable show information about selection position and size.
Replaced the brush scale control in tool options by a brush size one that works in pixels, and does the right thing when the brush changes.
Improved the Free Select Tool on-canvas feedback.
Made it possible to use GEGL for scaling images.
MISCELLANEOUS:
Plug-in Development
API Changes
License: The GIMP license has been changed to (L)GPLv3+.
GEGL: The projection code which composes a single image from layers has been ported to GEGL.

New in Gimp 2.8 (May 4, 2012)

USER INTERFACE:
Single-Window Mode
Multi-Column Dock Windows
More Screen Real Estate For Dockable Dialogs
Save And Export
Layer Groups
Tools Drawn With Cairo
On-Canvas Text Editing
Keyboard Shortcut Changes
Simple Math In Size Entries
Minor Changes:
Added 'Windows→Hide docks' menu item that does what 'Tab' does and also displays its state, which is now persistent across sessions, too.
Added infrastructure allowing to embed user interface elements on the canvas. This is currently used for text styles in the text tool, and (experimentally) when a color correction tool is invoked while the canvas is in full-screen mode.
To make dock window titles manageable, only show the active dockable in the dock window title.
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 make the composite lighter are in one group, layer modes that make the composite darker in another group, and so forth.
You can now Alt+Click on layers in the Layers dialog to create a selection from it. Add, subtract and intersect modifiers Ctrl, Shift and Ctrl+Shift keys work too. This makes it easy to compose contents of a layer based on the contents of other layers, without detours.
New docks are created at the pointer position.
Removed Toolbox from list of Recently Closed Docks, handle that directly in the Windows menu.
Allow closing the toolbox without closing the whole application.
Default to non-fixed-aspect in Canvas Size dialog.
In the Preferences dialog, only have one setting for the window hint for both the toolbox and the docks.
Support arbitrary affine transforms of brushes.
Got rid of the Tools dockable and move toolbox configuration to Preferences.
A question that often arises is how to change the UI language in GIMP, which has traditionally been a bit cumbersome. Not any longer, it is now possible to change the language in Preferences.
Added 'Lock content' button to the layers, channels and paths dialogs, made the lock buttons more compact.
Allow renaming list items with F2.
Allow binding arbitrary actions to extra mouse buttons.
TOOLS & PLUG-INS:
Brush System Improvements
Tool Preset Improvements
Cage Transform Tool
File Plug-Ins
Resource Tagging
Minor Changes:
Allow specifying the written language in the Text Tool. This helps with choosing an appropriate font, or appropriate glyphs for the selected language.
Moved 'Text along path' from tool options to the text context menu.
Add diagonal guides to the Crop Tool.
Support rotating brushes.
The Smooth Stroke feature from GIMP Painter was ported to GIMP.
Added 'Rule of fifths' crop guide overlay.
Added an icon for the Desaturate tool.
Support loading 16bit (RGB565) raw data.
Added palette exporter for CSS, PHP, Python, txt and Java, accessed through the palette context menu.
Support printing crop marks for images.
Made the Pointer dockable show information about selection position and size.
Replaced the brush scale control in tool options by a brush size one that works in pixels, and does the right thing when the brush changes.
Improved the Free Select Tool on-canvas feedback.
Made it possible to use GEGL for scaling images.
MISCELLANEOUS:
Plug-in Development
API Changes
License: The GIMP license has been changed to (L)GPLv3+.
GEGL: The projection code which composes a single image from layers has been ported to GEGL.

New in Gimp 2.8.0 RC 1 (Apr 10, 2012)

New in Gimp 2.7.5 Dev (Mar 14, 2012)

New in Gimp 2.6.12 (Feb 6, 2012)

New in Gimp 2.7.4 Dev (Dec 14, 2011)

New in Gimp 2.7.0 (Aug 17, 2009)

UI:
Change the Text Tool to perform text editing on-canvas (GSoC 2008)
Add support for tagging GIMP resources such as brushes and allow filtering based on these tags (GSoC 2008)
Separate the activies of saving an image and exporting it, there is now an 'File->Export...' for example
Port file plug-ins to new export API which gets rid of many annoying export dialogs
Add a simple parser to size entry widgets, images can be scaled to e.g. "50%" or "2 * 37px + 10in"
Arrange layer modes into more logical and useful groups
Added support for rotation of brushes
Make the Pointer dockable show information about selection position and size
Get rid of the Tools dockable and move toolbox configuration to Preferences
Add status bar feedback for keyboard changes to brush paramaters
Add diagonal guides to the Crop Tool
New docks are created at the pointer position
Add support for printing crop marks for images
Move 'Text along path' from tool options to text context menu
Change default shortcuts for "Shrink Wrap" and "Fit in Window" to Ctrl+R and Ctrl+Shift+R respectively since the previous shortcuts are now used for the save+export feature.
Make Alt+Click on layers in Layers dockable create a selection from the layer
Allow to specify written language in the Text Tool
Plug-ins:
Map the 'Linear Dodge' layer mode in PSD files to the 'Addition' layer mode in GIMP
Add JPEG2000 load plug-in
Add X11 mouse cursor plug-in
Add support for loading 16bit (RGB565) raw data
Add palette exporter for CSS, PHP, Python, txt and Java, accessed through palette context menu
Add plug-in API for getting image URI, for manipulating size of text layers, for getting and setting text layer hint, and for unified export dialog appearance
Data:
Add large variants of round brushes and remove duplicate and useless brushes
Add "FG to BG (Hardedge)" gradient
GEGL:
Port the projection code, the code that composes a single image from a stack of layers, to GEGL
Port layer modes to GEGL
Port the floating selection code to GEGL
Refactor the layer stack code to prepare for layer groups later
Prepare better and more intuitive handling of the floating selection
Add File->Debug->Show Image Graph that show the GEGL graph of an image
Allow to benchmark projection performance with File->Debug->Benchmark Projection
When using GEGL for the projection, use CIELCH instead of HSV/HSL for color based layer modes
Core:
Make painting strokes Catmull-Rom Spline interpolated
Add support for arbitrary affine transforms of brushes
Add support for brush dynamics to depend on tilt
Add aspect ratio to brush dynamics
Add infrastructure to soon support vector layers (GSoC 2006)
Rearrange legacy layer mode code to increase maintainability
Drop support for the obsolete GnomeVFS file-uri backend
Allow to dump keyboard shortucts ith File->Debug->Dump Keyboard Shortcuts
Prepare data structures for layer groups
Remove gimprc setting "menu-mnemonics", "GtkSettings:gtk-enable-mnemonics" shall be used instead
Remove "transient-docks" gimprc setting, the 'Utility window' hint and a sane window manager does a better job
Remove "web-browser" gimprc setting and use gtk_show_uri() instead
General:
Changed licence to (L)GPLv3+
Use the automake 1.11 feature 'silent build rules' by default
Lots of bug fixes and cleanup

Gimp Changelog

What's new in Gimp 2.10.36

New in Gimp 2.10.34-3 (Nov 8, 2023)

New in Gimp 2.10.34 (Feb 28, 2023)

New in Gimp 2.10.32 (Jun 15, 2022)

New in Gimp 2.10.30 (Dec 21, 2021)

New in Gimp 2.10.28 (Dec 20, 2021)

New in Gimp 2.10.26 (Dec 20, 2021)

New in Gimp 2.10.24 (Jul 28, 2021)

New in Gimp 2.10.22 (Dec 28, 2020)

New in Gimp 2.10.20 (Dec 28, 2020)

New in Gimp 2.10.18 (Dec 28, 2020)

New in Gimp 2.10.16 (Dec 28, 2020)

New in Gimp 2.10.14 (Dec 28, 2020)

New in Gimp 2.10.12 (Jun 17, 2019)

New in Gimp 2.10.10 (Apr 9, 2019)

New in Gimp 2.10.8 (Nov 9, 2018)

New in Gimp 2.10.6 (Sep 13, 2018)

New in Gimp 2.10.4 (Jul 7, 2018)

New in Gimp 2.10.2 Alpha 2 (Jun 21, 2018)

New in Gimp 2.8.22 (May 12, 2017)

New in Gimp 2.8.20 (Feb 6, 2017)

New in Gimp 2.8.18 (Jul 20, 2016)

New in Gimp 2.8.16 (Dec 19, 2015)

New in Gimp 2.8.14p1 (Sep 15, 2014)

New in Gimp 2.8.12 (Sep 15, 2014)

New in Gimp 2.8.10p1 (Dec 3, 2013)

New in Gimp 2.8.10 (Dec 2, 2013)

New in Gimp 2.8.8 (Nov 5, 2013)

New in Gimp 2.8.6 (Jul 1, 2013)

New in Gimp 2.8.4 (Feb 11, 2013)

New in Gimp 2.8.2 (Aug 29, 2012)

New in Gimp 2.8.0 (Jul 31, 2012)

New in Gimp 2.8.0p1 (May 14, 2012)

New in Gimp 2.8.0 (May 10, 2012)

New in Gimp 2.8 (May 4, 2012)

New in Gimp 2.8.0 RC 1 (Apr 10, 2012)

New in Gimp 2.7.5 Dev (Mar 14, 2012)

New in Gimp 2.6.12 (Feb 6, 2012)

New in Gimp 2.7.4 Dev (Dec 14, 2011)

New in Gimp 2.7.0 (Aug 17, 2009)

New in Gimp 2.6.7 (Aug 16, 2009)

New in Gimp 2.6.6 P1 (Jul 22, 2009)

New in Gimp 2.6.6 (Mar 22, 2009)

New in Gimp 2.6.5 (Feb 18, 2009)

New in Gimp 2.6.4 (Jan 3, 2009)

New in Gimp 2.6.3 (Nov 24, 2008)

New in Gimp 2.6.2 (Nov 3, 2008)

New in Gimp 2.6.1 (Oct 14, 2008)

New in Gimp 2.6.0 (Oct 2, 2008)

New in Gimp 2.4.7 (Aug 25, 2008)

New in Gimp 2.4.6 (Jun 2, 2008)

New in Gimp 2.4.5 (Mar 2, 2008)

New in Gimp 2.4.4 (Feb 11, 2008)