Hi,
We originally wanted to get this done on GIMP's 20th
birthday last week, but...
Anyway, here is the first development release in the
GIMP 2.9.x series leading to GIMP 2.10.
This is an unstable development preview and might crash
or do whatever. If you try it for work, please save your
images more often.
GIMP 2.9's major new feature is GEGL (www.gegl.org), a graph
based image processing framework. The entire old pixel
manipulation core of GIMP has been removed and replaced
by GEGL. Most internal processing is now done at floating
point precision, and images can be kept around at 16-bit
and 32-bit integer and floating point precisions. Many
plug-ins have already been replaced by GEGL operations
and can be previewed live on the canvas.
For a complete list of changes since 2.8.0 please see the
"Changes" section below. We will also post more detailed
news about GIMP 2.9 on www.gimp.org soon, stay tuned.
Happy GIMPing,
--Mitch
Download
GIMP 2.9.2 is available from:
http://download.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.9/
and from the mirrors listed at:
http://www.gimp.org/downloads/#mirrors
Please use the torrent, it distributes
the download bandwidth across all mirrors:
http://download.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.9/gimp-2.9.2.tar.bz2.torrent
The checksum of the tarball is:
aa8a846a497e3328c5b7d2fd33f5cf63 gimp-2.9.2.tar.bz2
Overview of Changes from GIMP 2.8.0 to GIMP 2.9.2
=
Core:
The core got completely ported to GEGL, listing all changes involved
would be too much, therefore we summarize the changes in app/ per
source subdirectory:
base
composite
paint-funcs:
- Remove these directories, they contained the old pixel
manipulation functions
config:
- Remove GimpBaseConfig, add GimpGeglConfig
- Add config options for new features
core:
- Add some things that used to live in base/, like the temp-buf,
boundary and histogram code
- Port all functions to GEGL and higher bit depths
- Keep the image around as GEGL graph, all other compositing is gone
- Add non-destructive drawable filters, but use them only for
previews
- Implement the floating selection as drawable filter
- Implement GimpImageMap using drawable filters
- Move batch processing to gimp-batch.[ch]
- Run batch commands in an already running GIMP instance
- Ported almost everything from filenames/FILE/fd to GFile/GIO
- Be smarter about migrating old user config files
- Move many object struct members to private structs
file:
- Support GIO-ported file load/save procs, handle remote files
generically
- Add content locking to items to prevent them from being edited
- Add position locking to items to prevent them from being translated
- Implement all color management in the core
- Add an automatic palette of recently used colors
- Implement metadata handling in the core
gegl:
- Now contains utility functions and abstractions to work with
GEGL more easily
- Move all operations to the new operations/ directory
operations:
- New directory containing all GIMP-internal GEGL operations
and their config objects (if any)
- Add a correct version of the overlay layer mode
- Add LCH layer modes
paint:
- Port all paint cores to Gegl
- Add MyPaint brush paint core
pdb:
- Add compat procedures that work like the removed plug-ins
- Use the new GimpValueArray, GValueArray got deprecated
plug-in:
- Allow plug-ins to access image data at full bit depth
- Add a compat mode so unported plug-ins always get 8-bit data
text:
- Port text rendering to GEGL
- Use HarfBuzz to inspect fonts for creating an example string
xcf:
- Add zlib compression to XCF loading/saving
GUI:
- Add GUI to handle the new high bit depths and conversion between
them
- Add new action group "filters" which can run arbitrary GEGL ops
- Add lots of actions invoking GEGL ops that replace removed plug-ins
- Preview all GEGL ops live on the canvas, using drawable filters
- Mostly switch from using stock-ids to icon-names
- Turn all stock icons into named icons and add an icon theme
- Allow selecting colors from an image's colormap
- Add "Show in file manager" to everything that has a filename
- Add an action search dialog to find actions by keyword and execute
them
- Split the save dialog into subclasses for load, save and export
- Implement various color management dialogs that were in the lcms
plug-in
- Make sure windows appear on the correct monitor
- Simplify and reduce the actions that modify paint tool behavior
- Add canvas rotation and flipping
- Allow zooming to the selection
- Make the image tab position configurable in single window mode
- Add separate snapping settings for fullscreen mode
- Remove bitmaps cursors and only support RGBA cursors
- Color manage drawable and image thumbnails
- Add more format string options for the image titl