[gimp-web/testing] First shot at 2.9.6 release notes

[Alexandre Prokoudine <aprokoudine src gnome org>]

commit 3334f112c9518956f5b9a3d173a2f6f89b6766f5
Author: Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre prokoudine gmail com>
Date:   Tue Aug 22 00:41:02 2017 +0300

    First shot at 2.9.6 release notes

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+Title: GIMP 2.9.6 Released
+Date: 2017-08-22
+Category: News
+Authors: Alexandre Prokoudine
+Slug: gimp-2-9-6-released
+Status: draft
+Summary: After more than a year of hard work we are excited to release GIMP 2.9.6
+featuring many improvements and bug fixes.
+
+After more than a year of hard work we are excited to release GIMP 2.9.6
+featuring many improvements and bug fixes.
+
+As usual, for a complete list of changes please see 
+[NEWS](https://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/tree/NEWS). Here we'd like to focus
+on the most important changes.
+
+## Performance
+
+GIMP now has support for experimental multi-threading in GEGL and will try to
+use as many cores as are available on your computer.
+
+We know GIMP can explode when using more than one core, but we keep it that way
+so that we get as many bug reports as possible for this officially unstable
+development version. This is because we really, really want to ship GIMP 2.10
+with usable parallel processing.
+
+On the other hand, you can always set the amount of cores to 1 if you couldn't
+be bothered to report bugs. For that, please tweak the amount of threads on the
+*System Resources* page of the *Preferences* dialog.
+
+## GUI and usability
+
+  - Easily add or remove layer masks by clicking either the layer
+    preview or a new button in the Layers dialog.
+  - Enhance the Layer Attributes dialog to provide the single UI for
+    setting layer's name, blending mode, opacity, and offset,
+    toggling visibility, link status, various locks, color tags.
+  - Add a Save As button to the “Quit GIMP” dialog and raise images
+    on click for easy checks.
+  - Allow to choose fill color when resizing layers and images.
+  - Quick Mask and Channel Attributes dialogs use the new spinscale
+    widget for the  mask opacity slider.
+  - Enable grid views of dynamics and tool presets.
+  - Allow to zoom with middle mouse button + control + drag up/down.
+  - For all paint tools, when switching to the color picker mode,
+    don't rely on the exact modifier being pressed or released. Instead,
+    check if only the right modifier is pressed after *each* modifier
+    change, and switch to color picking if it is.
+  - On startup, GIMP checks for duplicate accelerators in menus, and
+    removes duplicates.
+  - Standard (Freedesktop) and GTK+ icons can now be set by the icon
+    theme for a fully consistent style.
+  - Many new icons.
+  - Toolbox buttons do not grab focus anymore, which used to break
+    usage of the Tab key and other canvas-related shortcuts after
+    changing tools with a pointing device click.
+  - Delete Layer/Channel/Path are consistently the last option in
+    respective dialogs now.
+  - Extend the text along the tangent of the last path stroke, when
+    the length of the path is shorter than the width of the text to be
+    warped.
+  - Allow to toggle the histogram dialog between gamma and linear.
+  - New 'Colors -> Linear Invert' command to provide radiometrically
+    correct color inversion.
+  - Quit dialog now exits when all the images in the list have been
+    saved.
+  - The built-in error dialog now displays errors outputted by GEGL.
+
+## On-canvas interaction changes
+
+Michael Natterer did a huge under-the-hood work that is likely to affect user
+interaction with GIMP bigly. Simply put, he moved a lot of on-canvas code
+from tools like Rectangle Select, Measure and Paths into reusable code.
+
+The effect of that is multifold:
+
+* New tools can reuse on-canvas elements of other tools (adding shape drawing
+tools should be easier now, although we are not planning that for 2.10,
+unless someone sends a clean patch).
+* GEGL-based filters can be interacted with directly on the canvas
+(Spiral and Supernova so far as test case).
+
+[video from https://streamable.com/7zvs4]
+
+So far one still needs to write C code to make a GEGL-based filter use
+on-canvas interaction. We expect to spend some time figuring out a way to
+simplify this, possibly using the GUM language (see below).
+
+## Layers, linear and perceptual workflows
+
+Since we want to make workflows in linear color spaces more prominent in GIMP,
+it was time to update the blend modes code. You can now switch between two
+sets of layer modes: legacy (perceptual) and default (linear). The user
+interface for switching was a quick design, we'd like to come up with something
+better, so we are interested in your input.
+
+Moreover, we made both compositing of layers and blending color space
+configurable, should you have the need to use that for advanced image
+manipulation.
+
+We also added a new 'Colors -> Linear Invert' command to provide
+radiometrically correct color inversion.
+
+Thanks to Øyvind Kolås and his Patreon supporters GIMP now also has a simple
+'blendfun' framework that greatly simplifies implementing new color modes. Ell
+made use of that by adding Linear Burn, Vivid Light, Linear Light, Pin Light,
+Hard Mix, Exclusion, Merge, Split, and Luminance (RGB) blending modes (most of
+them now also supported in the PSD plug-in).
+
+Newly added color tags simplify managing large projects with a lot of layers
+and layer groups. To make more use of that, we need someone to step up and
+implement multiple layers selection. For an initial research, see
+[this wiki page](https://gui.gimp.org/index.php?title=Multi-layer_selection_workgroup).
+
+For full access to all the new features, we updated the Layer Attributes
+dialog to provide the single UI for setting layer's name, blending mode,
+opacity, and offset, toggling visibility, link status, various locks,
+color tags.
+
+## CIE LCH and CIE LAB
+
+Under the influence of Elle Stone (and with her code contributions), CIE LCH
+and CIE LAB color spaces are finding more use in GIMP now.
+
+Color dialogs now have an LCH color selector that, in due time, will most
+likely replace outdated HSV selector for reasons outlined in
+[this article](http://ninedegreesbelow.com/photography/determine-image-tonality-and-palette-part-1.html).
+The LCH selector also supports gamut checking.
+
+A new *Hue-Chroma* filter in the Colors menu works much like *Hue-Saturation*,
+but operates in CIE LCH color space. Moreover, the *Fuzzy Select* and the
+*Bucket Fill* tool now can select colors by CIE L, C, and H.
+
+Finally, both the *Color Picker* and the *Sample Points* dialog now display
+pixel values in CIE LAB and CIE LCH.
+
+## Tools
+
+New *Handle Transform* tool contributed        by Johannes Matschke in 2015 has
+been finally cleaned up by Michael Natterer and available by default. It's
+a little tricky to get used to, but we hear reports that once you get the
+hang of it, you love it.
+
+Thanks to Ell, the *Warp Transform* tool is now a lot faster, partially thanks
+to a switch that toggles high-quality preview that isn't always necessary.
+
+All transformation tools don't display grid by default anymore, and during
+an interactive transformation the original layer gets hidden now. The latter
+greatly simplifies transforming upper layer in relation to a lower layer.
+Before that, the original layer used to block the view.
+
+Free Select tool now waits for Enter being pressed to confirm selection, which
+enables you to tweak positions of polygonal selection.
+
+## Painting
+
+An important new feature that is somewhat easy to overlook is being able to
+paint on transparent layers with modes other than normal.
+
+Thanks to shark0r, the Smudge tool now has a Flow control that allows mixing
+in both constant and gradient color while smudging. There's another new option
+to never decrease alpha of existing pixels while smudging in the tools options
+now as well. For more on this, please read
+[this forum thread](https://www.gimp-forum.net/Thread-Customized-smudge-tool-Smudge-with-painting).
+
+Canvas rotation has been improved: it got snappier in certain cases, and
+rulers, scrollbars, as well as the Navigation dialog follow the rotation now.
+
+Alexia introduced some improvements to the brush engine. For bitmap brushes,
+GIMP now caches hardness and disables dynamic change of hardness to improve
+painting performance. Bitmap brushes also don't get clipped anymore, when
+hardness is less than 100. Plus there's a specialized convolution algorithm
+for the hardness blur to make it faster now.
+
+## Processing raw images
+
+Since 2.9.4, GIMP is capable of opening raw (digital camera) images via
+[darktable](http://www.darktable.org), and the plan was to open it up to more
+plug-in developers, because nothing sparks a thoughtful, civil conversation
+like a raw processor of choice.
+
+This is now possible: 2.9.6 ships with a RawTherapee plug-in (v5.2 or newer
+should be installed) and a new file-raw-placeholder plug-in that registers
+itself for loading all raw formats, but does nothing except returning an error
+message pointing to darktable and RawTherapee, if neither is installed.
+
+Moreover, you can now choose preferred raw plug-in, when multiple options are
+available on your computer. For this, open the *Preferences* dialog and go to
+the *Image Import* page, then click on the plug-in you prefer and click OK to
+confirm your choice. You will need to restart GIMP.
+
+## Better PSD support
+
+The PSD plug-in now supports a wider range of blending modes for layers,
+at both importing and exporting: linear burn, linear light, vivid light,
+pin light, and hard mix layer modes. It also finally supports exporting
+layer groups and reads/writes pass-through mode in those. Additionally,
+GIMP now imports and exports color tags from/to PSD files.
+
+## Metadata editing
+
+Thanks to Benoit Touchette, GIMP now ships a new metadata viewer that
+uses Exiv2 to display Exif, XMP, IPTC, and DICOM metadata (the latter
+is displayed on the XMP tab).
+
+[screenshot]
+
+Moreover, Benoit implemented a much anticipated metadata editor that
+supports adding/editing writing XMP, IPTC, DICOM, and GPS/Exif metadata,
+as well as loading/exporting metadata from/to XMP files.
+
+[screenshot]
+
+## Filters
+
+Thanks to contributions from Thomas Manni and Ell, GIMP now has 9 more
+GEGL-based filters, including much anticipated Wavelet Decompose, as well
+as an Extract Component plug-in that simplifies fetching e.g. CMYK's K
+channel or LAB's L* channel from an image.
+
+Another new feature that we expect to develop further is GUM—a simple
+metadata language that helps automatically building more sensible UI for
+GEGL filters. Here's a quick video:
+
+[video from https://streamable.com/ajbi4]
+
+## Resources and presets
+
+To make GIMP more useful by default we now ship it with some basic presets
+for the Crop tool: 2×3, 3×4, 16:10, 16:9, and Square.
+
+Documents templates have been updated and now feature popular, contemporary
+document presets for both print and digital media.
+
+## What's Next
+
+We still have a bunch of bugs to fix before we can release 2.10 and we
+appreciate all the huge and tiny useful patches contributors send us to that
+effect.
+
+GIMP 2.9.8 is expected to ship with more bug fixes and an updated Blend
+(Gradient Fill) tool that works completely on canvas, including adding and
+removing color stops and assigning colors.
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