GIMP - GIMP 2.10.32 Released (2024)

GIMP continues strengthening its bases as this new version 2.10.32 isquite heavy on bug fixes and improves our support for many image fileformats.

This news lists the most notable and visible changes. In particular, wedo not list here the bug fixes.To get a more complete list of changes, you should refer to theNEWSfile or look at the commithistory.

File Formats¶

TIFF and BigTIFF¶

GIMP now supports 8 and 16-bit CMYK(A) TIFF files on import. This isone of the first consequences (already!) of the GSoCprojectby NikcDC under mentorship ofJehan.

Moreover the BigTIFF format is now supported, both for import andexport. BigTIFF is an evolution of the original TIFF format allowingfiles bigger than 4GiB by using 64-bit internaloffsets.

The TIFF export dialog exposes a checkbox to enable this formatvariant.

Moreover, if you try to export as a TIFF file and if it fails because ofthe maximum file size being exceeded, it will propose you to retryeither as BigTIFF or with another compressionalgorithm.

Finally additional special cases in TIFF format are now taken intoaccount, making loading TIFF files morerobust.

JPEG XL¶

JPEG XL file format has been supported in development code ever sinceGIMP2.99.8.

Daniel Novomeský backported the import code to the stablebranch.

We remind that a third-partyplug-inalready exists, by developers of the libjxl library. It is a differentcodebase and should still work with GIMP 2.10.32. The main advantage ofthe third-party plug-in is that it has also export capabilities (whichour stable plug-in doesn’t have yet), though with some unsolved issuescausing some images to fail to load or exportcorrectly.

You are welcome to continue using the third-party plug-in if you prefer.For instance the MSYS2 project now has it built-in within the libjxlpackage. If you install it, it will take precedence over our new coreplug-in.

DDS¶

Some game engines require DDS images to be flipped vertically. Untilnow, asset creators had to flip the image in GIMP, export, then undo,which was not a very practicalworkflow.

This is why NikcDC added a new “Flip the image vertically on export”option allowing you to flip your image at exporttime.

Similarly, there is now a “Visible layers” option (additionally to“Selected layer“, “As cube map“…) allowing you to export the wholeimage render, not a single layer. So depending on your work usage, youwon’t have to flatten your image (to later undo this action) anymorebeforeexport.

Metadata handling (PSD…)¶

Several metadata handling improvements were made. One of the mostimportant changes is that GIMP will start droppingXmp.photoshop.DocumentAncestors tags if more than a thousand of themarefound.

This case is very likely due to a bug in some versions of Photoshop orother software creating PSD files as we encountered over 100,000 suchtags in some files (it probably makes no sense that a document couldhave that many ancestor documents), which was seriously slowing downGIMP to the point it lookedfrozen.

XCF¶

XCF import code also received various improvements, making the softwaremore robust to invalid files. In some cases, it allows to salvage moredata from corrupted XCF files, hence protecting yourwork.

Other formats¶

More format handling wereimproved:

BMP

A new PDB procedure file-bmp-save2 was added for plug-in developers. It supports all the options availableinteractively.

DICOM

Fixed endian conversion for photometric interpretation MONOCHROME1.

EPS

Loading transparent EPS files is nowsupported.

RAW

“RGB Save Type” confusing dialog label renamed to “Palette Type” as on the main devbranch.

TGA

Improved support of indexed images with alpha channel (both import andexport).

WebP

Export has a new IPTC checkbox (saved through XMP) as well as a thumbnail checkbox. (backported from dev branch, since2.99.8)

Text tool: localized glyph variants¶

The Text tool now supports localized glyphs (locl) depending on thevalue of the “Language” tooloption.

It is useful if you write in languages with regional variant forms (e.g.Serbian or Ukrainian use the same Cyrillic alphabet yet with 5 lettershaving regionalvariants).

If your chosen font supports several variants, you can nowtell the internal formatting system through the “Language” settingswhich one needs to beused.

Usability: themes and icons¶

• All official themes now have on-hover indicator around the eye 👁️ and link 🔗 toggles in Layer/Channel/Path Dialogtree-views.

• In the Dark theme, a new on-hover effect on radio menu items was added to improvereadability.

• In the Color icon theme, thin contrast borders were added to the ‘close’ and ‘detach’ icons to improve their readability against dark backgrounds onmouse-hover.

• In the Color icon theme, horizontal and vertical chain ⛓️ icons are more distinguishable between their broken and not-brokenvariants.

All these changes are works by StanislavGrinkov.

Improved Screenshot on Windows¶

The Screenshot plug-in was missing the “Include mouse pointer” optiononWindows.

This long missing feature, which was available on other platforms (suchas Linux X11/Wayland, *BSD or macOS) is now implemented on Windows aswell!

GEGL, babl¶

GIMP 2.10.32 is the first stable release with the nice optimizationsbrought since babl 0.1.90 and GEGL0.4.36,now that they have been battle-tested and debugged within thedevelopment release GIMP 2.99.10.As a consequence, babl 0.1.92 has been released, fixing in particularSIMD discovery ability, which was misbehaving onWindows.

These improvements are important enough that we felt their 2.99.10description deserved to be copied on the stable news to make clear thisapplies to GIMP 2.10.32now.

Automatic LUT creation for conversions in babl¶

Citing Øyvind in a recent report:

babl works as a universal pixel encoding translator by having - a notnecessarily fast reference conversion able to deal with everything - anda collection of conversions that can be chained together into what bablcalls fishes. The fishes are raced against each other to find the bestconversion babl is able tocreate.

In some situations, a LUT (Look-UpTable)will perform better, we now know what the performance will be of using aLUT for various combinations of input and output bits per pixel; andmark fishes that are better as LUTs on creation time. If such a fish isused more than a minimum, LUT population istriggered.

Right now one drawback is that it might actually slow down slightly thefirst conversion happening in a given input > output conversion couple.The solution which might come later would be to create the LUTs in thebackground in a thread and continue doing non-LUT conversions until itisready.

Note that the created LUTs are also garbage-collected after a fewminutes of non-usage, to avoid filling memory with single useLUTs.

SIMD builds for x86_64 and ARM neon (ctx, babl and GEGL)¶

All of babl, GEGL and ctx have gotten similar SIMD build and dispatch changesapplied.

Image processing code written to be portable and performant caters well to theauto-vectorization support for SIMD in modern compilers. The way it is done ismostly by changes to the build system. For now the code remains the same forall targets but the approach can be extended with conditionalintrinsics.

To see the impact this can have, here is a test of filling a circle with ctxand its different pixel encoding targets, on a Raspberry Pi with defaultcompiler flags (without neon support). Note that the cairo referencecomparison is the BGRA8 format (the only other format proposed by Cairo isA8):

And the same test, with the compiler allowed to use Neoninstructions:

Note well that both the optimized and non-optimized cases are built-in,and availability of relevant instructions determined by runtime tests.This makes these optimizations very portable, despite being based onrecent architectureinstructions.

ℹ️ Note that these changes (both the automatic LUT generation and the SIMDdispatch) will apply to GIMP 2.10 versions later. For now they areavailable in 2.99 as a form of beta test. We welcome feedbacks if youencounter anymisbehavior.

Other improvements¶

babl now also comes with pre-defined CIE Lab u8 and CIE Lab u16formats.

Team news¶

lukaso was already considered co-maintainer of the macOS buildrepository of GIMP (gimp-macos-build) since they have done most heavylifting on GIMP for macOS for many months. This has been made officialby changing their account to maintainer on this buildrepository.

Lloyd Konneker has been given developer git access to the main GIMPrepository, in particular for their nice work so far on script-fu (whichwas in a state where dropping script-fu for GIMP 3.0 would have beenconsideredotherwise).

Kevin Cozens, a long term GIMP contributor and script-fu maintainer gotback recently and was given git access again to the repository. He willhelp co-maintain script-fu withLloyd.

Ondřej Míchal has been given “Reporter” rights on the main GIMPrepository (allowing to triage reports: labelling, closing,reopening, and movingreports…).

After being given “Reporter” rights initially, NikcDC has eventuallybeen given developer git access in order to facilitate the work onfeature branches for their GSoCproject.

Release stats¶

10 people contributed changes or fixes to GIMP 2.10.32codebase:

• 3 people contributed several code changes or fixes: Jacob Boerema, Jehan andNikc.
• 1 person contributed several theme and icon improvements: StanislavGrinkov.
• 6 people contributed single commits: Sabri Ünal, Daniel Novomeský, Lukas Oberhuber, Rafał Mikrut, smlu and ØyvindKolås.

About translations of GIMPitself:

• 24 translators contributed: Anders Jonsson, Sveinn í Felli, Alan Mortensen, Aleksandr Melman, Yuri Chornoivan, Hugo Carvalho, Luming Zh, Rodrigo Lledó, Jordi Mas, Martin, Piotr Drąg, Balázs Úr, Jiri Grönroos, Zurab Kargareteli, Boyuan Yang, Marco Ciampa, Matej Urbančič, Milo Ivir, Sabri Ünal, Tim Sabsch , Balázs Meskó, Charles Monzat, Fran Dieguez, HannieDumoleyn.
• 20 translations were updated: Catalan, Chinese (China), Croatian, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Georgian, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish,Ukrainian.
• GIMP 2.10.32 includes a new Georgian translation, incrementing the number of available languages for the stable version to83.
• GIMP was already localized in Galician, but not the Windows installer… until thisversion!

Contributions on other repositories in theGIMPverse:

• 1 contributor to babl 0.1.92: ØyvindKolås.
• 5 contributors to babl 0.1.90: Øyvind Kolås, Mingye Wang, Jehan, Tomasz Golinski and AndrzejHunt.
• 6 contributors to GEGL 0.4.36: Øyvind Kolås, Anders Jonsson, Jehan, Alan Mortensen, Caleb Xu andzamfofex.
• ctx contributors in the same timeframe: Øyvind Kolås, andJehan.
• 2 contributors to gimp-macos-build (macOS build scripts): Lukas Oberhuber andJehan.
• 4 contributors to org.gimp.GIMP (stable flatpak): Hubert Figuière, Ondřej Míchal, Jehan and RebeccaWallander.
• 1 Windows packager: JernejSimončič.
• Contributors to gimp-help (GIMP manual) since last stats:
  • 2 technical contributors (build scripts, continuous integrations…): Jacob Boerema andJehan.
  • 5 documenters (original English text): Jacob Boerema, Anders Jonsson, Andre Klapper, Jehan and MarcoCiampa.
  • 20 translators: Rodrigo Lledó, Jordi Mas, Nathan Follens, Yuri Chornoivan, Anders Jonsson, Hugo Carvalho, Marco Ciampa, Tim Sabsch, Balázs Úr, dimspingos, Alan Mortensen, Aleksandr Melman, Charles Monzat, Claude Paroz, Kjartan Maraas, Luming Zh, Martin, Matheus Barbosa, Milo Ivir, Ulf-D.Ehlert.
• 6 contributors to gimp-web (website) since last stats: Jehan, Alexandre Prokoudine, Anders Jonsson, Tom Gooding, Alberto Garcia Briz, BabsKeeley.

Then let’s not forget to thank all the people who help us triaging inGitlab, report bugs and discuss evolutions with us.And of course, our community is deeply thankful to the internet warriorswho manage our various discussionchannels or social network accountssuch as Ville Pätsi, Alexandre Prokoudine, Liam Quin, Michael SchumacherandSevenix!

Note: considering the number of parts in GIMP and around, and how weget statistics through git scripting, errors may slip inside thesestats. Feel free to tell us if we missed or mis-categorized somecontributors orcontributions.

Around GIMP¶

Mirror news¶

Ever since our new official mirrorprocedure,the following mirrors have been added to our rotationscripts:

• Get Hosted Online (Rothwell, UnitedKingdom)
• Aceldama Systems (Montreal,Canada)
• Open Computing Facility (Berkeley, CA, UnitedStates)
• Freedif(Singapore)

One mirror from the previous list had to be removed because ofperformance issues, and a mirror acceptance is still on-hold because ofthe conflict and unstability in EastEurope.

As a fun note, GIMP is now back to Berkeley through the Open ComputingFacility (student organization for all University of California,Berkeley students, faculty, and staff). For anyone wondering why it’sfun, you may read with interest the birthstory of the GNUImage ManipulationProgram.

TLDR; GIMP was originallyborn in the University of California. I guess it’s good to be home,right?

Book news¶

Our books page was in a badly maintainedstate. 4 books in Spanish were added to the listrecently:

• Blanco y Negro con GIMP (2 ed.), by Alberto Garcia Briz(2022)
• Niveles y Curvas con GIMP (2 ed.), by Alberto Garcia Briz(2013)
• Domine GIMP. Manual práctico, by Laura Raya González and José Luis Raya Cabrera(2013)
• Aprende GIMP, by Jan Smith and Roman Joost(2012)

We took the opportunity to restructure the page with per-languagesection.

This is also a good time to remind that it is up to everyone to help uskeep this page updated. We know many more books have been publishedabout GIMP across the years so the list is very incomplete. Therefore ifyou wrote or know of a book absent from the page, please feel free toreport the same information as other books on thepage sothat we can add them.Thanks!

Downloading GIMP 2.10.32¶

As usual, GIMP 2.10.32 is available on GIMP official website(gimp.org) in 3 packageformats:

• Linux developmentflatpak
• Windowsinstaller
• macOS DMGpackage

Other packages made by third-party are obviously expected to follow(Linux or *BSD distributions’ packages,etc.).

What’s next¶

You may notice that stable releases are slowing down (GIMP2.10.30happened 6 months ago) as we are reaching a good stability overall onthis branch, despite being held back by our very old toolkit.Nowadays most of our focus is on the development branch. Yet we willcontinue to provide updates and bug fixes to the 2.10 branch until GIMP3.0 isout.

Don’t forget you can donate to the project and personally fund severalGIMP developers, as a way to give backand accelerate the development of GIMP. As you know, the maintainers ofGEGL and GIMP are crowdfunding to be able to work full-time on freesoftware.🥳