Intro.

GIMP 2.10 is the result of six years of work that originally focused on porting the program to a new image processing engine, GEGL. However the new version ships with far more new features, including new and improved tools, better file formats support, various usability improvements, revamped color management support, a plethora of improvements targeted at digital painters and photographers, metadata editing, and much, much more.

user interface and initial HiDPI support

One thing immediately noticeable about GIMP 2.10 is the new dark theme and symbolic icons enabled by default. This is meant to somewhat dim the environment and shift the focus towards content.

There are now 4 user interface themes available in GIMP: Dark (default), Gray, Light, and System. Icons are now separate from themes, and we maintain both color and symbolic icons, so you can configure GIMP to have System theme with color icons if you prefer the old look.

Moreover, icons are available in four sizes now, so that GIMP would look better on HiDPI displays. GIMP will do its best to detect which size to use, but you can manually override that selection in Edit > Preferences > Interface > Icon Themes.

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Contributors: Benoit Touchette, Ville Pätsi, Aryeom Han, Jehan Pagès, Alexandre Prokoudine…

GEGL port, high bit depth support, multi-threading, and more

The ultimate goal for v2.10 was completing the port to GEGL image processing library, started with v2.6 when we introduced optional use of GEGL for color tools and an experimental GEGL tool, and continued with v2.8 where we added GEGL-based projection of layers.

Now GIMP uses GEGL for all tile management and builds an acyclic graph for every project. This is a prerequisite for adding non-destructive editing planned for v3.2.

There are many benefits from using GEGL, and some of them you can already enjoy in GIMP 2.10.

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High bit depth support allows processing images with up to 32-bit per color channel precision and open/export PSD, TIFF, PNG, EXR, and RGBE files in their native fidelity. Additionally, FITS images can be opened with up to 64-bit per channel precision.

Multi-threading allows making use of multiple cores for processing. Not all features in GIMP make use of that, it’s something we intend to work on further. A point of interest is that multi-threading happens through GEGL processing, but also in core GIMP itself, for instance to separate painting from display code.

GPU-side processing is still optional, but available for systems with stable OpenCL drivers.

You can find configuration options for multi-threading and hardware acceleration in Edit > Preferences > System Resources.

Contributors: Michael Natterer, Øyvind Kolås, Ell, Jehan Pagès…

Linear color space workflow

Another benefit of using GEGL is being able to work on images in a linear RGB color space as opposed to gamma-corrected (perceptual) RGB color space.

Here is what it boils down to:

• You now have both linear and perceptual versions of most blending modes.
• There is now a linear version of the Color Invert command.
• You can freely switch between the two at any time via Image > Precision submenu.
• You can choose which mode is displayed in the Histogram docker.
• You can apply Levels and Curves filters in either perceptual or linear mode
• When higher than 8-bit per channel precision is used, all channels data is linear.
• You can choose whether the gradient tool should work in perceptual RGB, linear RGB, or CIE LAB color space

Contributors: Michael Natterer, Øyvind Kolås, Ell…

Color management revamped

Color management is now a core feature of GIMP rather than a plug-in. This made it possible, in particular, to introduce color management to all custom widgets we could think of: image previews, color and pattern previews etc.

GIMP now uses LittleCMS v2, which allows it to use ICC v4 color profiles. It also partially relies on the babl library for handling color transforms, since babl is simply up to 10 times faster than LCMS2 for the cases we tested both of them on. Eventually babl could replace LittleCMS in GIMP.

Contributors: Michael Natterer, Øyvind Kolås…

Layers and masks

GIMP now ships with two groups of blending modes: legacy (perceptual, mostly to make old XCF files look exactly as before) and default (mostly linear).

New blend modes are:

• LCH layer modes: Hue, Chroma, Color, and Lightness
• Pass-Through mode for layer groups
• Linear Burn, Vivid Light, Linear Light, Pin Light, Hard Mix, Exclusion, Merge, and Split

Layers, paths, and channels can also be tagged with color labels to improve project organization. This will be even more useful once we add multi-layer selection later on.

Compositing options for layers are exposed to users now, and all layer-related settings are finally available in the Layer Attributes dialog.

Moreover, if you always need alpha in your layers, you can enable automatic generation of the alpha channel in imported images upon opening them. See Edit > Preferences > Image Import & Export page for this and more policies.

Layer groups can finally have masks on:

More use for CIE LAB and CIE LCH

With GIMP 2.10, we introduced a number of features that make use of CIE LAB and CIE LCH color spaces:

• Color dialogs now have an LCH color selector you can use instead of HSV. The LCH selector also displays out-of-gamut warning.
• A new Hue-Chroma filter in the Colors menu works much like Hue-Saturation, but operates in CIE LCH color space.
• The Fuzzy Select and the Bucket Fill tools can now select colors by their values in CIE L, C, and H channels.
• Both the Color Picker and the Sample Points dialog now display pixel values in CIE LAB and CIE LCH at your preference.

Contributors: Michael Natterer, Elle Stone, Ell…

Warnings and information

• Supported OS: Windows 7 , 8, 10 or newer
• These links download the official GIMP installer for Windows (~250 MB). The installer contains both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of GIMP, and will automatically use the appropriate one.
• BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing system. It works by downloading GIMP from a distributed network of BitTorrent users, and may improve download speed dramatically. Choosing this option will download the torrent file for the GIMP installer.