GIMP 2.10.28 Released

2021-09-18
by Wilber

GIMP 2.10.28 is now released. This is a bugfix release, because we are giving most of our time and efforts to the development version (2.99.x).

Note: you may have noticed we skipped GIMP 2.10.26. A build bug has been discovered just after tagging the release. GIMP 2.10.28 is the same without the bug. We recommend against building and using GIMP 2.10.26.

Highlights

  • Bug fixes for GIMP on Windows; see below for details.
  • The Dashboard dockable now has memory support in OpenBSD.
  • Performance improvements for GIMP on macOS Big Sur were applied in our macOS packages since GIMP 2.10.22 as experiments. We felt confident enough to move the code to our main codebase.
  • The following plug-ins received fixes: C-source, DICOM, GIF, PS, Sunras, BMP, DDS, PSD, TIFF, Gimpressionist, metadata viewer and several script-fu scripts as well as the script-fu interpreter itself.
  • Some accessibility issues in themes were fixed, such as mouse-hover feedback or problematic colors.
  • A new Script-Fu function (dir-make) enables to create directories from scripts.

To get a more complete list of changes, you should refer to the NEWS file or look at the commit history.

Code contributors: bootchk, Des McGuinness, Ian Martins, Jacob Boerema, Jehan, Lloyd Konneker, Luca Bacci, Marc Espie, Massimo Valentini, Michael Bazzinotti, Michael McLaughlin, Øyvind Kolås, saul, Simon McVittie and Stanislav Grinkov.

Theme contributors: Kevin Payne and Stanislav Grinkov.

Build contributors: Marco Spiess and Mario Daniel Ruiz Saavedra.

Team news

Jacob Boerema got appointed a new co-maintainer of the manual repository (gimp-help) after porting its scripts to Python 3 and improving them.

Stanislav Grinkov is now a new core developer.

Des McGuinness and Lloyd Konneker were given “reporter” access which allows them to help triaging on the bugtracker: labelling, closing, reopening, and moving reports…

nmat was given “reporter” access on the website project (gimp-web), for his tremendous help with website maintenance.

Translators

Among the 82 languages for which GIMP is available, 14 translations were updated: Catalan, Chinese (China), Croatian, Dutch, German, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.

The Windows installer now contains Vietnamese and Lithuanian translations, making it available in 34 languages.

Translators on GIMP 2.10.26/28: Alexandre Prokoudine, Anders Jonsson, Aurimas Černius, Boyuan Yang, Daniel Mustieles, Hannie Dumoleyn, Jordi Mas, Luna Jernberg, Marco Ciampa, Milo Ivir, Ngọc Quân Trần, Matej Urbančič, Philipp Kiemle, Piotr Drąg, Rodrigo Lledó, Tim Sabsch and Yuri Chornoivan.

Windows is getting some love 💕

More work than ever is happening around Windows lately, both within GIMP and the libraries it depends on. Which is how several long-standing issues with GIMP on Windows finally got fixed:

  • Very slow file dialogs: it used to happen when network devices were slow or unavailable, or pluggable devices disconnected, or even because of fake floppy drives configured in the BIOS. GLib was using an inappropriate Windows API to get some information about drives. This has been fixed! (#913, glib!2020)
  • Opening files in specific third-party software was crashing GIMP: apparently, these applications were editing the file-handling registry field while GLib had a buggy watcher on the registry. (#6780, glib!2205, glib!2210)
  • GTK was outputting the wrong character on some keyboard input using Input Engines (e.g. alphanumeric characters were interpreted as half-width katakana when using the Japanese IME). (#1603, gtk!3741)
  • TIFF exporting used to lock the TIFF files because of a bug in the Windows thumbnailer (Explorer.exe would acquire a lock on the file and never release it). Since Microsoft doesn’t seem to want to fix this long-standing bug, we decided to switch to another way of creating thumbnails by adding a “reduced-resolution image” as the second page of the TIFF, as proposed in the TIFF specification, instead of adding a subifd thumbnail. This takes care of the lock issue in a nice way, bypassing Explorer‘s bug. Of course, it means that programs that can’t reads tags properly might try opening thumbnails as additional pages, even though it is explicitly annotated as “reduced-resolution image“. If you ever run into this very issue, please report it to developers of such programs. What they need to check is the SubFile type of the pages their software opens (as per TIFF specification). (#3740)
  • GIMP used to prevent some applications to open, when these programs needed to watch some specific directory, because GLib was reading directory with inappropriate access rights. Actually, this fix has been available since GIMP 2.10.24. (#4594, glib!1976)
  • Windows software with invisible windows (e.g. gesture shortcuts, screen capture and the like) used to interfere with GTK software and break some mouse interactions. We have had a patch for this, by Ell, since 2017, which we used for all GIMP 2.10.x releases. Unfortunately, with GTK2 maintenance stopped, our patch was only available in the bugtracker and in our binaries, while it was beneficial to other GTK software, even in GTK3 or newer. It has only recently been reworked and improved by Luca Bacci so that this problem is now officially fixed in GTK3 too! (#1082, gtk!2767)

In particular, we would like to thank Luca Bacci, Jacob Boerema, LRN, Ell, and all the contributors who stayed on top of Windows issues for this progress to happen, sometimes taking years of patience.

What about macOS?

On macOS side, the activity is still slow, if not non-existent.

We remind that GIMP is made by you. Yes, you 👆 reading this right now. Windows developers used to be very few too. As you can see, this is clearly changing. Therefore, if anyone cares about GIMP for macOS, please step forward.

You may have noticed that GIMP 2.10.24’s macOS DMG was released months late. Even this only happened because Jehan spent days to fix the build on the remote build server, bit by bit, without any local access to a macOS machine, nor any ways to run and test himself. If the packagers are still unavailable, we may try to do the same for this release, though we can’t set a deadline.

It is obviously not a sustainable release model. It is even worse for the development versions: we haven’t had a single build for GIMP 2.99.x on macOS yet.

So if you want this to change, please join us! 🤗

GEGL and babl

As usual, this release is supplemented with the releases of babl 0.1.88, early July, and GEGL 0.4.32 the same day as GIMP 2.10.26.

In GEGL in particular, the following operations were improved:

  • distance-transform: new edge_handling parameter allows users to choose whether areas outside the input are to be treated as above threshold or below threshold (i.e. infinitely white or black respectively) for calculating distance. (by woob)
  • negative-darkroom: contrast boost and illuminant adjustment parameter, reworked emulsion dye model, UI improvements, more black-and-white paper presets and some operation speed-up. (by JonnyRobbie for features and Richard Kreckel for speed-up)
  • fill-path: 32-bit float RGB and CMYK color processing, using ctx as renderer. (by Øyvind Kolås)

The test system got also some nice improvements by John Marshall.

Downloading GIMP 2.10.28

As usual GIMP 2.10.28 is available on GIMP official website (gimp.org):

  • The Linux flatpak has already been published so that anyone who installed it previously should have an update proposed by their software manager (or from terminal: flatpak update org.gimp.GIMP//stable).

  • The Windows installer is already available. Most mirrors have picked it up, but some still haven’t. So if the download fails, just try to click the Download button again.

  • The macOS DMG package will hopefully be published soonish.

What’s next

Though we may likely get again exciting new features in further 2.10.x versions, nowadays most feature development happen in the development version for future GIMP 3. You may have seen some of it, if you follow our work on social networks, or if you test nightlies of GIMP.

Otherwise, you will have more surprises when we will release GIMP 2.99.8 development version!

Don’t forget you can donate to the project and personally fund several GIMP developers, as a way to give back and accelerate the development of GIMP. As you know, the maintainers of GEGL and GIMP are crowdfunding to be able to work full-time on free software. 🥳