The GIMP project releases version 2.4 [LWN.net]

By Forrest Cook
October 24, 2007

The GIMP is a popular desktop application that compares favorably with the commercial Adobe Photoshop product:

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.

Version 2.4 of The GIMP was announced this week, the informative project history page shows that this is the first major release in a long time. Version 2.2 was announced in December, 2004. The initial release of the software dates back to 1995.

The GIMP version 2.4 release notes list some of the new capabilities, here is a summary of the main changes:

The menus have been changed to improve the user experience.
The on screen status information has been improved.
Image window status bars add hints for learning shortcuts and features.
The GIMP now features a new default icon theme which supports the Tango Icon Theme Guidelines.
A new top-level color menu has been added.
The Selection Tools have been rewritten for easier learnability, resizing is now possible.
A new assisted Foreground Select Tool has been added.
A new Align Tool allows a list of layers, paths or guides to be aligned or distributed.
The Crop Tool has been enhanced to behave more like other GIMP tools, it no longer performs move operations.
A new Perspective Clone Tool allows cloning of image sections onto a perspective plane.
A new brush size slider allows parametric and bitmap brush sizes to be scaled.
The color picker can now sample colors outside of the GIMP windows.
Improvements to the zooming system fix problems with the display of thin lines.
The fullscreen editing mode now allows all of the tools to be hidden.
A new Color Management system is in place for improving color consistency between the screen and printer output.
The Printing system uses new gtk+ printing API improvements for better user control.
A print preview image is now available.
A new auto-magic filter has been added for easier red eye removal.
A new Scheme interpreter has been added.
A new preview widget for plug-ins has been added.
The performance of various plug-ins have been improved.
It is now possible for plug-ins to add top level menu entries.
There is now support for the Photoshop ABR brush file format.
Support for JPEG EXIF metadata has been improved.
JPEG quality has been improved by normalizing compression parameters.

To sum it all up, version 2.4 of the GIMP adds a lot of usability improvements, simplifies common digital photography editing tasks and improves a lot of power-user capabilities. For further reading, Red Hat Magazine has published a review of a beta release of GIMP 2.4 with lots of screenshots.

The GIMP tutorials have a lot of useful information for learning the software. Source code and packages are available for download here.

(Log in to post comments)

gimp 2.4 for Fedora 7

Posted Oct 26, 2007 1:14 UTC (Fri) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link]

Well, there's always the option of downloading the source (from ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.4/) and compiling yourself. Just a suggestion...

gimp 2.4 for Fedora 7

Posted Oct 28, 2007 10:30 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (guest, #21946) [Link]


Try 

http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=22342

gimp 2.4 for Fedora 7

Posted Oct 29, 2007 12:05 UTC (Mon) by mmarkov (subscriber, #4978) [Link]

Thank you!

The GIMP project releases version 2.4

Posted Oct 27, 2007 20:31 UTC (Sat) by Zenith (subscriber, #24899) [Link]

For such a job, Inkscape would be a much better tool. GIMP is for image *manipulation*, not for making drawings and such.

The GIMP project releases version 2.4

Posted Oct 27, 2007 20:36 UTC (Sat) by rwmj (guest, #5474) [Link]

Um yeah, Inkscape is great but sometimes I'm editing a photo and I just want to draw a box / circle / think bubble or whatever in it. I don't want to fire up a whole new application.

Rich.

The GIMP project releases version 2.4

Posted Oct 28, 2007 14:17 UTC (Sun) by grouch (subscriber, #27289) [Link]

I'm still using Gimp 2.2, but the same procedure should work with later versions. Here's how I do it (not an artist but it works for my needs):

Make a new layer (make sure it's selected). Bucketfill the new layer. Use one of the selection tools such as rounded rectangle to mark out your 'thought bubble'. Invert the selection. Cut. Put your text in the rounded rectangle.