Getting ready for the GIMP 2.0

There are vast improvements to the GIMP in all areas of the application, too many to cover in any one article. In this article we'll look only briefly at the features with the biggest impact on day-to-day work.

The User Interface

Integrating the latest in GTK+ 2.4 enhancements, the GIMP 2.0 now provides improved cross-platform support for both Windows and Mac OS X. This will impact the GIMP developers more than users. It will bring in far more users with less technical background, these new users may not be as easy to support as the typical Linux user. But it may also bring in fresh development talent, and that is always a good thing.

GTK+ 2.4 provides the GIMP with dockable dialogs, allowing users to customize their desktop for the best use of space. Users can drag and drop dialog titles into a dock, and the dialog will then be added as a new tab in that dock. Some dialogs serve multiple purposes, such as the Tool Options dialog which changes when the user selects a different Toolbox tool. When docked, this dialog's tab will have the same icon as its Toolbox icon, making it easy to determine what tool is currently active.

Another big improvement is the menu layout. Menus now adorn Canvas windows by default, and the menu contents have been modified to be more consistent with their use. Color tools like Curves and Levels, for example, are now in the Layers menu, since they work on the current layer. Menus can still be accessed with the old right-mouse-click in a Canvas menu, or by using the Menu arrow in the upper left side of the Canvas window. Better yet - you can hide the menu bar on a Canvas-by-Canvas basis. This is true even for the new full screen mode, where the menu can be enabled or disabled from view, separate from all other Canvas windows.

Selection tools now offer modal operation, allowing the user to specifically set the mode of operation for the current selection. This means that a button can now be pressed where previously you had to understand the nuances of Shift-Ctrl-Alt-Mouse-click combinations. For old timers, the old method still works.

All paint tools now offer independent brush and gradient options, which means you can configure a different brush for each of the paint tools. An interesting addition to this is that the brush and gradients can be selected using a mouse wheel from within the Tool Options dialog.

Text Management

The 1.2 version of GIMP offered multiple text management tools, a confusing and not always editable solution. The GIMP 2.0 integrates most of the features of the old text management tools into a single interface, and adds font previews as well. Text editing is performed in a small preview window, and changes are reflected immediately in the Canvas window. Editing is done by selecting the Text layer - which is now more easily identifiable by a Text icon in the Layers dialog. Multi-line text is possible, including the proper handling of newlines.

The downside here is that font previews can consume memory resources, especially if you have hundreds or thousands of fonts. The previews can definitely slow your system down, especially when the GIMP is first started. Unfortunately there is no configuration option to turn off the previews, so every time you work with the font selection window, things can slow down considerably.

Also, features such as kerning are not yet supported. The FreeType plugin from the 1.2 version is not part of the core distribution, and not all of its features - including slant and rotation options for text - are supported.

Scripting changes

The default scripting language remains Script-FU, a derivative of the Scheme language. While powerful because of its integrated nature, Script-FU is far from a friendly language.

In the GIMP 1.2 many users turned to the GIMP Perl extension which allowed Perl scripts to be written for the application. GIMP Perl is not distributed directly with the GIMP 2.0 however, and it has been replaced with Python. That said, GIMP Perl will be available as a add-on feature in a separate package (probably to be released sometime after the 2.0 core).

Along with GIMP Perl, the GAP animation tools are also being distributed in their own package. This isn't something new for the GIMP - remember that GTK+ found its own way after the GIMP, and so has the very powerful GIMP Print tool set.

What's Missing

Color management, plain and simple. The goal to integrate GEGL, a low level library that would add deep paint (i.e. multi-byte channels) to the GIMP, wasn't met with this release, primarily because of the need to clean up the core software first. This will help with integration with GEGL as well as many other feature enhancements down the road.

While deep paint and color management is lacking, help is definitely on its way. Financial support is being made to the GEGL developers by South African venture capitalist Mark Shuttleworth as a way to bootstrap important open source projects. Talk on the GIMP developers' list indicates that GEGL will be moving forward quickly this year. GEGL may see final integration by early fall, though that depends on pending GIMP development as much as GEGL development.

Side stepping this issue one last time (we hope), there is little left that is missing from the GIMP. With a recent pre-release of the GIMP Perl extension, users can expect to make use of their Perl scripts again, though some modifications may be required. The developers also removed the requirement that images should be manually flattened or merged prior to saving to a non-layered format, and now manage that task directly, only prompting the user for final approval. This minor step can end up saving a lot of time and frustration, not to mention saving a few undo levels.

Summary

There is much to be gained from the 2.0 release by users, and there is little reason to not consider upgrading. Most distributions are likely to integrate this version of the GIMP into their next public release, but this could take months, depending on release cycles for the distributions. So, consider pulling the source and building it yourself if you can, or perhaps check the apt and RPM repositories periodically to see if the application has been packaged for you. Any way you get it, the GIMP 2.0 is definitely worth the effort.