GIMP 2.9.8 Released

A new version of GIMP has been released. The update brings on-canvas gradient editing and various enhancements. What is more, v2.9.8 deals with different bugs and improves stability.  

On-Canvas Gradient Editing

First of all, it pretty much eliminates the need for the old Gradient Editor dialog, as all of the dialog’s features are now available directly on the canvas. You can create and delete color stops, select and shift them, assign colors to color stops, change blending and coloring for segments between color stops, create new color stops from midpoints.

Secondly, default gradients are now “editable”. As you probably know, the reason most resources such as brushes, painting dynamics, and gradients are not direclty editable is that they are typically installed into a system directory where non-privileged user can’t make any changes.

Now when you try to change an existing gradient from a system folder, GIMP will create a copy of it, call it a Custom Gradient and preserve it across sessions. Unless, of course, you edit another ‘system’ gradient, in which case it will become the new custom gradient.

Clip Warning

The new Clip Warning display filter targets that use case and fills underexposed and overexposed areas with user-configurable colors. For now, it’s mostly geared towards images where colors are stored with floating point precision. You will mostly benefit from this, if you work on 16/32 bit per channel float images such as EXR and TIFF.

Implementing this feature as a display filter has certain disadvantages such as having to go through the whole routine of adding a display filter for every image. We are thinking of better ways to do this.

Color Management

GIMP now uses the babl library for doing conversion of images between color spaces when matrix-based ICC profiles are used. This leads to completing transforms ca. 5 times faster in comparison to LittleCMS v2 on a few test images we tried this on. We expect to make further use of babl for doing color transforms once the library supports ICC profiles based on lookup tables. 

Improved Wavelet Decompose Filter

The much demanded Wavelet Decompose filter got a small round of updates and gained a couple of new options: placing decomposition stack into its own layer group and adding a layer mask to each scales layers. It also produces more expected results now.

File Formats

The PSD plug-in was fixed to properly handle Photoshop files with deeply nested layer groups and preserve expanded state of groups for both importing and exporting. Additional changes fix mask position and improve layer opacity for importing/exporting.

The PDF plug-in now supports loading password-protected files by promting the user for password.

HGT files can now be imported. HGT is the format for Digital Elevation Model data by the NASA and other space agencies. GIMP now supports both the SRTM-1 and SRTM-3 types (as far as we know, the only two variants) which will be imported as grayscale RGB images.

GIMP 

You can find the full list of changes here.