If you don’t already know, a new version of GIMP has been released. This new version has a bunch of all around improvements to the engine, the tools, the UI, and everything.
Big changes in GIMP 2.8 are:
- A single window mode
- Tabbing. I love tabs!
- Layer groups
- Less annoying dialogs when you save
- improved brush tool
- new cage tool (quite slow)
- Canvas tools have been redone with Cairo (not sure what Cairo is)
- Improved text tool
- You can input pixels, or percentage into fields
but the biggest change of all is that 90% of the GIMP’s core uses GEGL. At first I thought that since I have a crappy GPU, this wouldn’t mean much, but it does. GIMP seems to be almost double as fast. Simple filters like blurring is much faster. Many filters like the sharpening filter rely on the blurring filter. Many complex filters including 3rd party filters are much faster, as they are now using GEGL technology underneath. Another great thing about GEGL, is that it brings us one step closer to 16 bit images.