[Gimp-user] ANNOUNCE: GIMP 2.9.6 released

[Michael Natterer <mitch gimp org>]

Hi,

It took a while, but...

We just released the third development snapshot in the
GIMP 2.9.x series leading to GIMP 2.10.

This is an unstable development preview and might crash
or do whatever. If you try it for work, please save your
images more often.

For a complete list of changes since 2.9.4 please see the
"Changes" section below.

There is also a release announcement on www.gimp.org
with screenshots and some videos:

https://www.gimp.org/news/2017/08/24/gimp-2-9-6-released/

Happy GIMPing,
--Mitch


Download
========

  GIMP 2.9.6 is available from:

  https://download.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.9/

  and from the mirrors listed at:

  https://www.gimp.org/downloads/devel/#mirrors

  Please use the torrent, it distributes
  the download bandwidth across all mirrors:

  https://download.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.9/gimp-2.9.6.tar.bz2.torrent

  The checksum of the tarball is:

  b2d5b5619630288c882a35118e2241e5  gimp-2.9.6.tar.bz2


Overview of Changes from GIMP 2.9.4 to GIMP 2.9.6
=================================================

Core:

  - Make it possible to use multithreading in GEGL and raise max amount
    of threads to 64. Given how unstable this feature is, any value
    above 1 should be currently treated as a step inside an industrial
    microwave oven with the on/off switch on the outside.
  - New clipboard implementation allows copying/pasting layers and
    layer groups.
  - Color tags simplify managing large projects with a lot of layers
    and layer groups.
  - The Mouse Pointer dialog and colors applied to images are now
    color-managed.
  - Gamma and precision selectors for newly created images.
  - Never dither when converting to a higher bit depth, or to anything
    more than 16 bits; don't offer dithering options in these cases.
  - Default to linear TRC when converting to 16-bit float.
  - Pre-initialize some babl-based pixel format conversion routines
    at start-up to decrease the initial lazy intialization cost for
    some interactions.
  - Remove max size limitation of 4GB for XCF files.
  - Support clipboard images in the clipboard brush and pattern.
  - libgimp calls are now thread-safe.

Layers and compositing:

  - Layer modes' code is now refactored to separate gamma-corrected
    variations from the linear light ones, legacy modes have been
    preserved to support older XCF files. UI to switch between the two
    is experimental and should be treated as a temporary design.
  - Blending and compositing of layers are configurable separately for
    more flexibility now, compositing can be linear TRC, perceptual TRC
    or CIE LAB.
  - Layer blending color space and compositing color space are
    configurable now.
  - Layers created from the GUI and from plug-ins now default to
    normal mode (not normal-legacy), unless all the existing layers
    in the image are also in legacy mode.
  - New layer modes: linear burn, vivid light, linear light, pin light,
    hard mix, exclusion, merge, split, luminance (rgb), pass-through
    (for layer groups only).
  - Make erase mode an ordinary layer/paint mode.
  - Better performance of HSV-based layer modes.
  - Rename "Color (HSV)" mode to "Color (HSL)" to indicate the actual
    color space being used.

On-canvas interaction changes:

  - Refactor on-canvas interaction code out of some of the tools and
    make it reusable.
  - Update tools accordingly.
  - Make on-canvas interaction accessible to GEGL-based filters and
    use it in the Spiral and Supernova filters as a test case.

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.
  - Shift-clicking the visibility icon of a layer in a layer group now
    toggles its exclusive visibility within this layer group.

Color selection and management:

  - Add the profile import policy to Preferences -> Import.
  - Color management for GEGL-based filters is expensive, so it's off
    by default for now, and options are hidden by default too.
  - Add LCH color selector, with support for gamut checking.
  - Default to magenta for out-of-gamut color.
  - Make all script-fu color buttons color-managed.

Configurability:

  - Remember settings of many dialogs across sessions.
  - New Interface / Dialog Defaults page in the Preferences dialog to
    control defaults values of various dialogs.
  - Settings on some individual pages of the Preferences dialog can be
    reset separately now.
  - Vertical scrollbar added to keep the height of the Preferences
    dialog fitting small displays.
  - Allow mouse to optionally configure tablet devices
  - Allow creating shortcuts containing the Cmd key + mouse wheel
    events.
  - Default to 300ppi and 1920x1080px for new documents.
  - Default to 62px font size.
  - Do not allow Alt+[0-9] shortcuts, they are typically reserved for
    display switching.
  - Icons size is now a configurable option, not a theme feature.
    The icon size is also auto-guessed from monitor resolution now.
  - It is now possible to have keybindings for previous/next/top/bottom
    vectors.

Tools:

  - Complete the Handle Transform tool and make it available by
    default.
  - Add Hue-Chroma operation/tool that operates in CIE LCH color space.
  - Replace Color Balance, Colorize and Hue-Saturation with GEGL-based
    filters with a custom user interface to ease future transition to
    non-destructive editing planned for v3.2. Remove the "Image -> 
    Tools -> Color Tools" submenu.
  - The Move tool now shows relative coordinates when moving guides
    and sample points.
  - The Measure tool has better digit precision now (before that, at
    4000 PPI, up to 7 pixels would show up as 0 mm, then at 0.1 mm from
    the 8th pixel etc.).
  - All paint tools now display the angle (relatively to the horizontal
    line, centered on previously drawn position) alongside distance in
    status bar when straight line constraining (holding shift when
    painting).
  - Performance of the Fuzzy Select and the Bucket Fill tool has been
    improved.
  - The Fuzzy Select and the Bucket Fill tool now can select colors by
    CIE L, C, and H.
  - Unclutter transform tools: default to "no grid", hide the original
    layer during the interactive transform (except for the Flip tool).
  - Make the Warp Transform tool faster, add more options, use
    the linear sampler to ensure crisp lines after an erase.
  - Select by Color and Color Picker tools work now correctly in color
    spaces other than sRGB.
  - Free Select tool now waits for Enter being pressed to confirm
    selection, which enables you to tweak positions of polygonal
    selection.
  - Color Picker doesn't snap to anything when picking colors anymore,
    always draws the outline of the averaged region (not only while the
    mouse is being pressed), and supports arbitrary range of values
    regardless of the actual image color precision.
  - Color Picker now displays pick position (also visible in the
    Sample Points dialog now), as well as values in CIE LAB and
    CIE LCH.
  - Uncommitted selection by the Intelligent Scissors tool is not
    discarded on tool change anymore.
  - For Intelligent Scissors, GIMP now checks whether the first and the
    last isegments are distinct before closing the curve.
  - Flip tool: add Clipping option to the flip tool. Add support for
    reflecting across guides: when clicking on a guide while using the
    Flip tool, reflect the active item across the guide, rather than
    around its center.

Painting:

  - 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.
  - Rulers, scrollbars, and the Navigation dialog follow canvas
    rotation now.
  - Canvas rotation is now snappier in certain cases.
  - 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.
  - Allow painting on transparent layers with modes other than normal.
  - Add a specialized convolution algorithm for the hardness blur
    to make it faster.
  - Make the Force option insensitive for the Pencil tool.
  - Add new "Pressure Size" dynamics.

File Formats:

  - Make the default raw (DSLR) image importer configurable.
  - Add RawTherapee plug-in to pre-process various raw (DSLR) images,
    RawTherapee v5.2 is the minimum requirement.
  - Add new file-raw-placeholder plug-in that registers itself for
    loading all raw formats from file-raw/file-formats.h, but does
    nothing except returning an error message pointing to darktable
    and RawTherapee.
  - Add native WebP loader/exporter with support for ICC profiles,
    animation, metadata.
  - The TIFF loader will not generate warnings about private tags
    anymore.
  - Handle linear gamma PNG files correctly, provide a combo box for
    specifying PNG bit depth / variant at exporting time.
  - Add support for linear burn, linear light, vivid light, pin light,
    and hard mix layer modes in PSD (importing and exporting).
  - Load PSD files with layers which contain additional information
    with a length that is not divisible by 4.
  - Add support to import/export layer color tags from/to PSD files.
  - Optionally convert all imported (not XCF) images to 32-bit linear
    floating point, and optionally add a little noise in order to
    distribute the colors minimally.
  - Optionally add alpha channel to layers of imported images
    (configurable in Preferences > Import).
  - Support writing PNM files with 16-bit image precision.
  - Improve support for PCX files:
    * saving 1bpp and 4bpp images (according to palette size).
    * loading 2bpp, 2 planes/1bpp, 3 planes/1bpp and 4bpp images.
    * non-Black&White monochrome PCX files (any 2 colors according to
      the palette).
  - Add support for exporting multi-page PDF from image layers, with
    optional reversed order.
  - Add RLE support for RGB565 to in file-csource.

Metadata:

  - Add new metadata viewer that uses Exiv2 to display Exif, XMP, IPTC,
    and DICOM metadata (the latter is displayed on the XMP tab).
  - Add metadata editor that supports adding/editing writing XMP, IPTC,
    DICOM, and GPS/Exif metadata, as well as loading/exporting metadata
    from/to XMP files.

Printing:

  - Print resolution can now be reset to defaults, new values for the
    same image is actually used now without reloading the image.

Plug-ins:

  - The Screenshot plug-in now assigns either monitors profile or
    converts to sRGB.
  - The Screenshot plug-in can now take screenshots of a single window
    and include the mouse pointer in the same time (if the desktop/OS
    allows it).
  - Port smooth-palette to GEGL.
  - Enhance the raw (not the digital negative) files plugin:
    introduce exporting settings and remember them across sessions,
    make the plugin invokable non-interactively, and more.
  - Plug-ins can now be installed into first level directories of a
    plug-ins/ folder. This is in particular to avoid the "DLL hell"
    with shared libraries installed by a plug-in, interfering with 
    other unrelated plug-ins. The entry point file has to be named the
    same as the directory (minus extension).

Filters:

  - Add GEGL-based filters: Neon (Edge detection), Wavelet Decompose,
    Image Gradient, Symmetric Nearest Neighbor, Extract Component,
    RGB Clip, Simple Linear Iterative Clustering, Waterpixels, Spiral.
  - Add rotate/flip buttons to the Convolution Matrix filter's GUI
    to rotate/flip the matrix.
  - For GEGL-based filters, use a new metadata language to dynamically
    control UI attributes based on context (e.g. auto-disable
    unapplicable options).
  - Allow filter actions to have hardcoded default operation settings
    by encoding them directly in the string attached to all filter
    actions.

Color Palettes:

  - Merge Palettes command is available for multiple selected color
    palettes now.

Assets / Resources:

  - Some basic presets are available for the Crop tool now: 2x3,
    3x4, 16:10, 16x9, and square.
  - Documents templates have been updated and now feature popular,
    contemporary document presets for both print and digital media.

PDB:

  - Rename *-paste-as-new to *-paste-as-new-image.
  - Add PDB API for layer blend space, compositing space, and
    compositing mode.

Build:

  - Depend on LCMS2.7+ now, because earlier LCMS2 releases caused
    problems with certain GIMP blend modes.
  - Depend on libpng 1.6.25+ to avoid warnings about known incorrect
    sRGB profiles, also avoid various vulnerabilities.
  - Depend on glib-networking now for HTTPS support.
  - Depend on librsvg 2.40.6 which fixes rendering bugs.
  - Add a flatpak-builder manifest.

OS-specific changes:

  - Help browser launches on macOS now.

Bugs:

  - Overall 204 bugs have been fixed or partially addressed since
    GIMP 2.9.4.

Translations:

  - Updated: Catalan, Chinese (Taiwan), Croatian, Czech, Danish,
    Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian,
    Kazakh, Occitan, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Scottish Gaelic,
    Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish.


Contributors
============

  Akkana Peck, Alberto Griggio, Alexandre Prokoudine, Alexia Death,
  Alexis Wilhelm, Anders Jonsson, Aryeom Han, Ben Touchette, Benoit
  Touchette, Björn Kautler, Cameron Gregory, Daniel P. Berrange,
  Debarshi Ray, Edward E, Ell, Elle Stone, HJ Imbens, Hartmut Kuhse,
  Jehan, Jeremiah Darais, Jernej Simončič, Jiri Eischmann, Joao
  S. O. Bueno, Juan Palacios, Kristian Rietveld, Lionel N, Marco
  Ciampa, Massimo Valentini, Matthias Junker-Petschick, Michael
  Henning, Michael Natterer, Michael Schumacher, Mihail Zenkov, Mikael
  Magnusson, Miroslav Talasek, Nikc M, Nils Philippsen, Pascal
  Massimino, Piotr Drąg, Richard Gitschlag, Richard McLean,
  SimaMoto,RyōTa, Simen Heggestøyl, Simon Budig, Thomas Manni, Timm
  Bäder, Tobias Ellinghaus, Tobias Stoeckmann, draekko, skal, Éric
  Hoffman, Øyvind Kolås

Translators
===========

  Alexandre Prokoudine, Anders Jonsson, Ask Hjorth Larsen, Balázs
  Meskó, Balázs Úr, Baurzhan Muftakhidinov, Ben Touchette, Benoit
  Touchette, Björn Kautler, Chao-Hsiung Liao, Christian Kirbach,
  Claude Paroz, Cédric Valmary, Daniel Mustieles, Dimitris Spingos
  (Δημήτρης Σπίγγος), Dušan Kazik, GNOME Translation Robot, Gábor
  Kelemen, Göran Uddeborg, Hartmut Kuhse, Jehan, Jiri Grönroos, Jordi
  Mas, Julien Hardelin, Khaled Hosny, Kristjan SCHMIDT, Marco Ciampa,
  Marek Černocký, Mario Blättermann, Martin Srebotnjak, Michael
  Natterer, Michael Schumacher, Miroslav Talasek, Pawan Chitrakar,
  Piotr Drąg, Sebastian Rasmussen, Sveinn í Felli, Tiago Santos,
  Yolanda Álvarez Pérez, draekko, gogo, klausstaedtler, Милош Поповић