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First, a statistic: the GIMP code base contains about 230,000 lines of C code, and most of these lines were rewritten in the evolution from 1.2 to 2.0. From the user’s point of view, however, GIMP 2 is fundamentally similar to GIMP 1; the features are similar enough that GIMP 1 users won’t be lost. As part of the restructuring work, the developers cleaned up the code greatly, an investment that, while not directly visible to the user, will ease maintenance and make future additions less painful. Thus, the GIMP 2 code base is significantly better organized and more maintainable than was the case for GIMP 1.2.
The basic tools in GIMP 2 are not very different from their predecessors in GIMP 1. The Select Regions by Color tool is now shown in the GIMP toolbox, but was already included in GIMP 1 as a menu option in the Select menu. The Transform tool has been divided into several specialized tools: Rotation, Scale, Shearing and Perspective. Color operations are now associated with layers in the menu Layer > Colors, but this is merely a cleanup: they were already present in the Image menu (illogically, since they are layer operations). Thus no completely new tools appear in this release, but two of the tools have been totally revamped compared to the older versions: the Text tool and the Path tool. More on this below.
The user interface for tools has also changed significantly. The Tool Options dialog box was modified to not resize itself when a new tool is chosen. Most users felt that the window changing size when a new tool was selected was annoying. Now, by default the Tool Options dialog is constantly open and docked under the toolbox, where it can easily be found.
The Tool Options for many tools have new possibilities that weren’t available in GIMP 1. Without being exhaustive, here are the most noticeable improvements.
All selection tools now have mode buttons: Replace, Add,
Subtract and Intersect. In GIMP 1 the
only way to change the
selection mode was to use the
Ctrl or Shift
buttons, which
could get very confusing because those buttons also had
other functions. For example, pressing and holding the
Shift
key while using the Rectangle selection tool forces the
rectangle to be a square. Thus, to add a square selection
you would first press Shift, then click
the mouse, then release Shift, then press
Shift again, then sweep out the
selection with the mouse, then release Shift.
It can now be done more easily.
For transformation tools, buttons now control which object (layer, selection or path) is affected by the transformation. You can for example transform a rectangular selection to various quadrilateral shapes. Path transformation in particular is now easier than it was before.
Fade out and Paint Using Gradient are now available for all drawing tools. In fact, all drawing tools now have their own individual brush, gradient and pattern settings, in contrast to GIMP 1 where there was a single global setting that applied to all drawing tools. Now you can select different brushes for the Pencil and the Paint Brush, or different patterns for the Clone and Fill tools. You can change these setting by using your mouse wheel over the relevant resource button (this is most useful for quickly and easily choosing a brush).
The most visible changes in GIMP 2 concern the user interface. GIMP now uses the GTK2+ graphical toolkit in place of GTK+. One of the nice features brought by the new libraries is dockable dialogs, and tab navigation between dialogs docked in the same window — a feature present in several popular web browsers. GIMP 1 was famous for opening dialogs anywhere on your screen; GIMP 2 can be told to use fixed boxes. Dialogs now include a little tab-customization menu, which provides maximum flexibility in organizing your workspace.
The Image window has some interesting new features. These
are not necessarily activated by default, but they can be
checked as options in the
Preferences > Interface > Image Windows
menu. Show Brush Outline, for example,
allows you
to see the outline of the brush when using drawing tools. In
the Appearance sub-section, you can toggle
whether a menu
bar is present at the top of image windows. You can set an
option to work with the new fullscreen mode. Viewing options
are also available from all image windows using right click
to bring up the menu, then selecting View.
The so-called image menu is also available
by clicking on a little
triangle in the top left corner of the drawing space. The
setting you choose in the Preferences
dialog is used as
the default value, and options you set from an image are
used only for that image. (You can also toggle fullscreen
mode by using the F11 key; the
Esc key also exits fullscreen mode).
GIMP
2 features keyboard accelerators to ease menu access. If you
find that navigating through menus using your mouse is
onerous, the solution may be to use the keyboard. For
example, if the menu bar is present, to create a new image
just hit
Alt+F+N. Without the menu bar, hit
Shift+F10
to open the top-left menu, and use direction keys or
F then N
to create the new image. Keyboard accelerators are different
from shortcuts: accelerators are useful to navigate through
menus, whereas shortcuts call a specific menu item directly.
For example,
Ctrl+N
is a shortcut, and the quickest way to open a new image.
To ease access to your most commonly used menu items, the GIMP has provided dynamic shortcuts for many years. When a menu is open, you can hover over the desired menu item and hold down your shortcut combination. This feature is still present, but is deactivated by default in the GIMP 2.0, to avoid accidental re-assigning of existing shortcuts.
The GIMP also ships with a number of
sets of key-bindings
for its menus. If you would like to replace the default
GIMP
keybindings by Photoshop bindings, for example, you can move
the file menurc in your user data
directory to oldmenurc, rename
ps-menurc to
menurc and restart
GIMP.
The GIMP 2.0 introduces a system of tabbed dialogs to allow you to make your workspace look the way you want it to be. Almost all dialogs can be dragged to another dialog window and dropped to make a tabbed dialog set.
Furthermore, at the bottom of each dialog, there is a dockable area: drag and drop tabs here to attach dialogs beneath the bottom tab group.
Python-fu is now the standard external scripting interface for GIMP 2. This means that you can now use GIMP functions in Python scripts, or conversely use Python to write GIMP plug-ins. Python is relatively easy to understand even for a beginner, especially in comparison to the Lisp-like Scheme language used for Script-Fu in GIMP 1. The Python bindings are augmented by a set of classes for common operations, so you are not forced to search through the complete GIMP Procedural Database in order to carry out basic operations. Moreover, Python has integrated development environments and a gigantic library, and runs not only on Linux but also on Microsoft Windows and Apples Mac OS X. The biggest drawback, for GIMP 2.0, is that the standard user interface offered in Python-fu does not use the complete power of the Python language. The interface is currently designed to support simple scripts, but a more sophisticated version is a goal of future development.
GIMP-Perl is no longer distributed with the standard GIMP 2 distribution, but is available as a separate package. Currently, GIMP-Perl is supported only on Unix-like operating systems. It includes both a simple scripting language, and the ability to code more polished interfaces using the Gtk2 perl module. Direct pixel manipulation is available through the use of PDL.
Script-Fu, based on Scheme, has the same drawbacks as before: not intuitive, hard to use and lacking a real development environment. It does, however, have one major advantage compared to Python-fu: Script-Fu scripts are directly interpreted by GIMP and do not require any additional software installation. Python-fu requires that you install a package for the Python language.
The second generation Path tool has a completely new interface. The first major difference you notice is that paths are no longer required to be closed. A path can be made up of a number of disjoint curve segments. The next major difference is that now the path tool has three different modes, Design, Edit and Move.
In Design mode, you can create a path, add nodes to an existing path and modify the shape of a curve either by dragging edges of the curve or dragging the handles of a node.
In Edit mode, you can add nodes in the middle of curve edges, and remove nodes or edges, as well as change the shape of the curve. You can also connect two path components.
The third mode, Move, is, as you might expect, used to move
path components. If your path has several components, you
can move each path component separately. To move all
components at once, use the Shift key.
Two other path-related features are new in the GIMP 2.0. The GIMP can not only import an SVG image as a raster image, but can also keep SVG paths intact as GIMP paths. This means that the GIMP is now more able than ever to complement your favorite vector drawing tool. The other feature which has made the path tool much better is the introduction of vector-based stroking. In previous versions, stroking paths and selections was a matter of drawing a brush-stroke along the path. This mode is still available, but it is now possible to stroke a curve accurately, using the vector library libart.
Some other improvements in brief: