The Gimp 2.7.0

GIMP is a multi-platform photo manipulation tool. GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. The GIMP is suitable for a variety of image manipulation tasks, including photo retouching, image composition, and image construction.

GIMP has many 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, etc.

GIMP is 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.

 The following list is a short overview of some of the features and capabilities which GIMP offers you:

• A full suite of painting tools including brushes, a pencil, an airbrush, cloning, etc.
• Tile-based memory management, so image size is limited only by available disk space
• Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high-quality anti-aliasing
• Full Alpha channel support for working with transparency
• Layers and channels
• A procedural database for calling internal GIMP functions from external programs, such as Script-Fu
• Advanced scripting capabilities
• Multiple undo/redo (limited only by disk space)
• Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip
• Support for a wide range of file formats, including GIF, JPEG, PNG, XPM, TIFF, TGA, MPEG, PS, PDF, PCX, BMP and many others
• Selection tools, including rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy, bezier and intelligent scissors
• Plug-ins that allow for the easy addition of new file formats and new effect filters.

UI:

 - Change the Text Tool to perform text editing on-canvas (GSoC 2008)
 - Add support for tagging GIMP resources such as brushes and allow
   filtering based on these tags (GSoC 2008)
 - Separate the activies of saving an image and exporting it, there is
   now an 'File->Export...' for example
 - Port file plug-ins to new export API which gets rid of many
   annoying export dialogs
 - Add a simple parser to size entry widgets, images can be scaled
   to e.g. "50%" or "2 * 37px + 10in"
 - Arrange layer modes into more logical and useful groups
 - Added support for rotation of brushes
 - Make the Pointer dockable show information about selection position
   and size
 - Get rid of the Tools dockable and move toolbox configuration to
   Preferences
 - Allow closing the toolbox without closing the whole application
 - Add status bar feedback for keyboard changes to brush paramaters
 - Add diagonal guides to the Crop Tool
 - New docks are created at the pointer position
 - Add support for printing crop marks for images
 - Move 'Text along path' from tool options to text context menu
 - Change default shortcuts for "Shrink Wrap" and "Fit in Window" to
   Ctrl+R and Ctrl+Shift+R respectively since the previous shortcuts
   are now used for the save+export feature
 - Make Alt+Click on layers in Layers dockable create a selection from
   the layer
 - Allow to specify written language in the Text Tool


Plug-ins:

 - Map the 'Linear Dodge' layer mode in PSD files to the 'Addition'
   layer mode in GIMP
 - Add JPEG2000 load plug-in
 - Add X11 mouse cursor plug-in
 - Add support for loading 16bit (RGB565) raw data
 - Add palette exporter for CSS, PHP, Python, txt and Java, accessed
   through palette context menu
 - Add plug-in API for getting image URI, for manipulating size of
   text layers, for getting and setting text layer hint, and for
   unified export dialog appearance


Data:

 - Add large variants of round brushes and remove duplicate and
   useless brushes
 - Add "FG to BG (Hardedge)" gradient


GEGL:

 - Port the projection code, the code that composes a single image
   from a stack of layers, to GEGL
 - Port layer modes to GEGL
 - Port the floating selection code to GEGL
 - Refactor the layer stack code to prepare for layer groups later
 - Prepare better and more intuitive handling of the floating
   selection
 - Add File->Debug->Show Image Graph that show the GEGL graph of an
   image
 - Allow to benchmark projection performance with
   File->Debug->Benchmark Projection
 - When using GEGL for the projection, use CIELCH instead of HSV/HSL
   for color based layer modes


Core:

 - Make painting strokes Catmull-Rom Spline interpolated
 - Add support for arbitrary affine transforms of brushes
 - Add support for brush dynamics to depend on tilt
 - Add aspect ratio to brush dynamics
 - Add infrastructure to soon support vector layers (GSoC 2006)
 - Rearrange legacy layer mode code to increase maintainability
 - Drop support for the obsolete GnomeVFS file-uri backend
 - Allow to dump keyboard shortucts ith File->Debug->Dump Keyboard
   Shortcuts
 - Prepare data structures for layer groups
 - Remove gimprc setting "menu-mnemonics",
   "GtkSettings:gtk-enable-mnemonics" shall be used instead
 - Remove "transient-docks" gimprc setting, the 'Utility window' hint
   and a sane window manager does a better job
 - Remove "web-browser" gimprc setting and use gtk_show_uri() instead


General:

 - Changed licence to (L)GPLv3+
 - Use the automake 1.11 feature 'silent build rules' by default
 - Lots of bug fixes and cleanup