GIMP is a digital photo manipulation tool for Windows (and many other platforms) that’s considered to be the open source (free) answer to Adobe Photoshop. Like Photoshop, GIMP is suitable for a variety of image manipulation tasks, including photo retouching, image composition, image construction, and has many other capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, and so much more.
GIMP is amazingly expandable and extensible – it is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.
One of GIMP"s strengths is its free availability from many sources for many operating systems. So, if you don’t want to pay the price for Photoshop, GIMP is definitely the app for you!
GIMP features:
- Full suite of painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, Clone, and more – including the support of custom brushes & patterns
- Extremely powerful gradient editor and blend tool
- Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear, flip, and more
- Supports a variety of selection tools such as rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy, and more
- Supports many file formats – including bmp, gif, jpeg, mng, pcx, pdf, png, ps, psd, svg, tiff, tga, xpm, and more
- Advanced path tool doing bezier and polygonal selections
- Supports a virtually unlimited number of images open at one time
- Load, display, convert, and save to many different file formats
GIMP 2.10.30 release notes:
GIMP 2.10.30 is once again mostly a bugfix release, with many fixes and incremental improvements, not so much on the “new feature” side.
Improved file formats support
Several file format supports were updated with fixes or improvements: AVIF, HEIF, PSD, DDS, RGBE and PBM.
Let’s highlight in particular:
- PSD support received various types of improvements allowing it to load more sub-cases of PSD (layer masks tagged with invalid dimensions, CMYK without alpha, CMYK without layers, merged image of a 16 bit per channel RGBA which had opaque alpha channel…).
- AVIF export now favors AOM encoder.
OS evolutions
Some backends got reworked to follow OS evolutions:
- Backport of selection outline drawing reimplementation from GIMP 2.99.8 for macOS Big Sur and over (already discussed patch, itself exceptionnaly backported to the 2.10.28 DMG package so that macOS users enjoyed visible selections earlier).
- On Windows, we moved from GetICMProfile() to the WcsGetDefaultColorProfile() API because the former is broken in Windows 11. Thus we were failing to get monitor profiles.
- On Linux and other OSes which might use Freedesktop portals, we implemented color picking on display (Colors dockable) with the Freedesktop API when available, keeping old implementations as fallbacks. Screenshot plug-in now also uses in priority the Freedesktop API rather than specific KDE or GNOME API (which are getting restricted for security reasons since KDE Plasma 5.20 and GNOME Shell 41).
Other improvements
- Various improvements were made on metadata support, be it on core code as well as in the metadata plug-ins (viewer and editor).
- A noteworthy fix is that the text tool won’t follow anymore the subpixel font rendering choice from system settings. Subpixel rendering is for GUI on a screen of a specific type and pixel order and is not suitable for image contents which can be zoomed in or out, showed on various screens or even printed. This change also depends on a patch we contributed to Cairo which will be available in their next release (we include the patched version in our flatpak).
Download: GIMP 2.10.30 | 245.0 MB (Open Source)
View: GIMP Website | Screenshot | Release Notes
