After turning 20 years of activity, the GIMP developers have been happy to announce that the development cycle of the upcoming GIMP 2.10 open-source and cross-platform image editor software has started with the immediate availability of GIMP 2.9.2.
A lot of work has been done on the GIMP 2.10 series, and we're more than glad to be one of the first to share with you the new features implemented in the application. One of the most significant changes in GIMP 2.10 will be the much improved GEGL engine. GEGL was introduced in GIMP in 2008, but now it will be used for all tools.
For example, in GIMP 2.9.2, users will be able to do 16/32bit per color channel processing, manipulate OpenEXR images, use OpenCL for hardware-accelerated rendering and processing of images, use on-canvas preview for several filters, as well as do higher-quality downscaling of images.
Moreover, the new GEGL engine upgrades the native support for PSD, TIFF, PNG, and FITS image file formats to read and write 16/32bit per color channel data (see the attached screenshot at the right for details). But the good news, however, is that all the tools included in GIMP will support the 32bit per color channel precision mode.
"We are excited to announce the first development release of GIMP in the 2.9.x series. It is another major milestone towards making GIMP a state-of-the-art image editing application for graphic designers, photographers, illustrators, and scientists," says Alexandre Prokoudine in the announcement.
New GEGL-based tools, color management improvements, and more
GIMP 2.9.2 also introduces some new tools, which, of course, are based on the new GEGL engine. They are Unified Transform for scaling, skewing, adjusting, and rotating perspectives, as well as Warp Transform, a drop-in replacement for the iWarp plugin. Additionally, the Blend, Align, and Foreground Select tools have received new features.
But there are many new other features available in GIMP 2.9.2, such as basic support for manipulating OpenEXR files, support for WebP images, totally rewritten color management plugin, enhancements to the blending modes, as well as initial support for viewing Exif, IPTC, and XMP metadata.
GIMP 2.10 will be the last in the series as the developers will concentrate their efforts on implementing new features for the 3.0 branch of the software. When GIMP 3.0 is out, they will finally be able to work on the highly anticipated non-destructive editing, which might be added in GIMP 3.2 and onwards.
Download GIMP 2.9.2 right now from Softpedia. At the moment, only the sources are available, for GNU/Linux operating systems. Mac OS X and Windows binaries will be released shortly. In the meantime, you can check out the video below to see canvas rotation and flipping in action.
