For years now, GIMP has been one of the best free alternatives for commercial image editing suites like Photoshop. It is a bitmap/pixel-based image manipulation program for photo editing and retouching and creating images and animations.
There’s still some time to go before seeing the long-awaited GIMP 3.0 release for this open source image manipulation program but at least out today is GIMP 2.10.30 for bettering the current stable series. Let’s see what’s new!
GIMP 2.10.30 Highlights
GIMP supports many of the industry-standard image formats, such as JPEG and PNG. The program uses a proprietary file extension (XCF) but opens and exports to many different graphics files, one of which is PSD. And with GIMP 2.10.30, PSD support received various types of improvements.
As you know, PSD is an image file format native to Adobe’s popular Photoshop application. Now GIMP is able to load more sub-cases of PSD such as layer masks tagged with invalid dimensions, CMYK without alpha, and CMYK without layers.
AVIF export now favors AOM (Alliance for Open Media) encoder. It’s important to note that now the .avif extension will be associated to GIMP during the installation of the application itself.
On Linux and other OSes which might use a portal frontend service for Flatpak and possibly other desktop containment frameworks, GIMP 2.10.30 implemented color picking on display with the Freedesktop API when available, keeping old implementations as fallbacks.
On top of that, screenshot plug-in now also uses in priority the Freedesktop API rather than specific KDE or GNOME API.
We can’t fail to mention that now the GIMP’s 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.
Last but not least, among the 82 languages for which GIMP is available, 14 translations were updated.
To get a more complete list of changes, you could refer to the official announcement or read the NEWS file.
Download
You can download the latest version from the official GIMP website:
Linux users can also install the latest GIMP version from Flathub. This is the project’s officially recommended way to get the latest version of the app on most distros.
sudo flatpak install https://flathub.org/repo/appstream/org.gimp.GIMP.flatpakref
flatpak run org.gimp.GIMP//stableCode language: JavaScript (javascript)
