GIMP
News
Docs
Tutorials
More
The GIMP developers are proud to release version 2.2 of the GNU Image Manipulation Program. About nine months after version 2.0 hit the road, we have completed another development cycle and can bring a new stable GIMP to our users’ desktops.
The GNU Image Manipulation Program is ideal for amateur photographers, web designers, and many other people who want to create and edit digital images. It is a very powerful application, with features including: channels, layers and masks; colour operations such as levels, curves and threshhold; advanced selection operations using intelligent scissors and selection channels; and much more.
GIMP is free software, which means it can be freely distributed and modified. This makes it well suited to be included on cover disks of magazines dedicated to digital photography or image editing, or to be included with digital cameras, scanners, printers etc. As free software, its capabilities are ultimately limited only by the collective imagination of the community of free software contributors. More information about GIMP is available at www.gimp.org.
GIMP can be downloaded as source code from ftp.gimp.org or from one of the mirrors listed in the Downloads section. We expect that binary packages for the different supported platforms and distributions will show up soon. Unless you are experienced with building software from source, you should wait until binary packages become available.
Version 2.2 is an update on GIMP 2.0. GIMP 2.2 is fully backward compatible to GIMP 2.0. Plug-ins and scripts written for GIMP 2.0 will continue to work and don’t need to be changed nor recompiled to be used with GIMP 2.2. We do however hope that plug-in authors will update their plug-ins for GIMP 2.2 and adapt the GUI changes we did with this version.
GIMP 2.2 replaces GIMP 2.0. It is advised that you uninstall GIMP 2.0 before installing GIMP 2.2. If you want to keep GIMP 2.0 installed in parallel to GIMP 2.2, you have to choose a separate prefix which is not in your default library search path.
The GIMP user manual has been improved a lot over the last couple of months. We stronly suggest that you install the latest version of the gimp-help-2 package together with GIMP 2.2. You will then have context-sensitive help in almost all dialogs by hitting the F1 key or by pressing the Help button which has been added to most dialogs.
gimp-help-2 is available from ftp.gimp.org. The manual can also be accessed online at docs.gimp.org.
Thanks to the pre-releases we did over the last month, this code has already seen quite some testing but a lot has changed since version GIMP 2.0 and we could very well have introduced new bugs. If you find any , make sure you report them at bugzilla.gnome.org (after checking that it isn’t reported already).
Here is a brief summary of some of the most important new features introduced in GIMP 2.2. There are many other smaller changes that long-time users will notice and appreciate (or complain about!). There are also important changes at the level of plug-in programming and Script-Fu creating that are not covered here.
For a detailed list of changes, please have a look at the NEWS file, which is contained in the tarball and available online.
You can now edit your shortcuts in a dedicated dialog, as well as continue to use the little-known dynamic shortcuts feature (which has been there since 1.2).
We have provided a standard preview widget for plug-in authors which greatly reduces the amount of code required to support previews. David Odin has integrated this widget into all the current filters, so that now many more filters in the GIMP include a preview which updates in real time, and the various previews behave much more consistently.
The transform tools (shear, scale, perspective and rotate) can now show a real-time preview of the result of the operation when the tool is in Traditional mode. Previously, only a transforming grid was shown.
A lot of work has been done on making the GIMP’s interface simpler and more usable for newcomers. Most dialogs now follow the GNOME HIG to the best of our knowledge. In addition, dialogs have separated out or removed many Advanced options, and replaced them with sane defaults or hidden them in an expander.
Using the GFig plug-in, the GIMP now supports the basic functionality of vector layers. The GFig plug-in supports a number of vector graphics features such as gradient fills, Bezier curves and curve stroking. It is also the easiest way to create regular or irregular polygons in the GIMP. In the GIMP 2.2, you can create GFig layers, and re-edit these layers in GFig afterwards. This level of vector support is still quite primitive, however, in comparison to dedicated vector-graphics programs such as Inkscape.
You can expect updated versions of gimp-gap, gimp-freetype, gimp-plugin-template and hopefully also gimp-perl to appear over the next weeks. The GIMP source tree will soon be branched so that development can continue towards GIMP 2.4. We haven’t yet made up a detailed roadmap, but we will try to publish one soon.
Lots of people have helped to make this release happen. Thanks to all the contributors who wrote code, sent patches, worked on the docs, translated the user interface, reported bugs or just made helpful suggestions. GIMP 2.2 wouldn’t exist without your help. Keep it coming!
Happy GIMPing, The GIMP developers