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Last year, GIMP 2.10 was released with an updated user interface, revamped color management, new transformation tools, and many more changes. Yesterday, the GIMP development team shared their further plans about GIMP 2.10.x and 3.0 releases. As per the announcement, GIMP 3.0 will support the latest GTK3 toolkit and have a much leaner code base. The GIMP 2.10.x releases will support HEIF images, simple horizon straightening, and new filters.

With the release of GIMP 2.10, the team also revised their release schedule. The new features will now be developed on feature branches separately and then merged to the main branch once they are ready. This essentially means that developers need not wait for a new release for years, as there will be a new release every 1-2 months.

Here is what we can expect in the GIMP 2.10.x and 3.0 releases:

  • Smart colorization: A new feature called smart colorization will be introduced in 2.10.10, that will simplify filling inked sketches with color where areas are not completely closed.
  • Support for extension management: To support extension management within GIMP they have started working on ZeMarmot project. With this feature, you will be able to search, install, uninstall, and update extensions. Under this project, developers will also focus on better canvas interactions, as well as animation support improvements, starting from merging existing work.
  • Better performance: Async operations such as lazy loading of fonts has been introduced to improve the performance of GIMP. All the parallel processing in multiple threads has been moved over to GEGL.
  • Space invasion: Previously, sRGB color space was hardcoded into all processing in GIMP. To change this, the team introduced some updates to support any RGB color spaces in the 2.10 release. Now, the master git branch of GIMP allows taking an image that is originally in any color space, processes it in a different color space, and outputs an image, which will be in original color space again.
  • CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key): GEGL now supports CMYK. It can now open a CMYK JPEG file, composite an RGB PNG file with an alpha channel on top of it, then write a CMYK TIFF file to the output.

GIMP 2.10.10 will be released in January/February, and we can expect further 2.10.x releases throughout the year. This version will feature faster layer groups rendering, smart colorization, and various usability improvements. They are also planning to release the first unstable version 2.99.2 once the space invasion feature is complete, eventually leading up to version 3.0.

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