GIMP is mentioned in best photo editing software of 2021. The 2.10 version of GIMP is available as a free download on our website. In users' view, the benefits of it are: GIMP has an intuitive interface, has a great price, has lots of features, is extremely powerful, there are frequent updates, this tool is really helpful and works well. Krita is a professional FREE and open source painting program. It is made by artists that want to see affordable art tools for everyone. VERDICT: GIMP is a powerful free software for image manipulation. The program allows you to soften the noise, make color correction, use brushes, gradients, and make collages, posters. GIMP provides constant development, you can use Photoshop plug-ins to work in GIMP, any program.
As featured in:
Customizable Interface
Each task requires a different environment and GIMP allows you to customize the view and behavior the way you like it. Starting from the widget theme, allowing you to change colors, widget spacings and icon sizes to custom tool sets in the toolbox. The interface is modulized into so called docks, allowing you to stack them into tabs or keep them open in their own window. Pressing the tab key will toggle them hidden.
GIMP features a great fullscreen mode allowing you to not only preview your artwork but also do editing work while using the most of your screen estate.
Photo Enhancement
Numerous digital photo imperfections can be easily compensated for using GIMP. Fix perspective distortion caused by lens tilt simply choosing the corrective mode in the transform tools. Eliminate lens' barrel distortion and vignetting with a powerful filter but a simple interface.
Digital Retouching
GIMP is ideal for advanced photo retouching techniques. Get rid of unneeded details using the clone tool, or touch up minor details easily with the new healing tool. With the perspective clone tool, it's not difficult to clone objects with perspective in mind just as easily as with the orthogonal clone.
Hardware Support
GIMP includes a very unique support for various input devices out of the box. Pressure and tilt sensitive tablets, but also a wide range of USB or MIDI controllers. You can bind often-used actions to device events such as rotating a USB wheel or moving a MIDI controller's slider. Change the size, angle or opacity of a brush while you paint, bind your favorite scripts to buttons. Speed up your workflow.
File Formats
The file format support ranges from the common likes of JPEG (JFIF), GIF, PNG, TIFF to special use formats such as the multi-resolution and multi-color-depth Windows icon files. The architecture allows to extend GIMP's format capabilities with a plug-in. You can find some rare format support in the GIMP plugin registry.
Thanks to the transparent virtual file system, it is possible to load and save files to from remote locations using protocols such as FTP, HTTP or even SMB (MS Windows shares) and SFTP/SSH.
To save disk space, any format can be saved with an archive extension such as ZIP, GZ or BZ2 and GIMP will transparently compress the file without you needing to do any extra steps.
What's New:
GIMP 2.10.12 is mostly a bug fix release as some annoying bugs were discovered, which is to be expected after a 2.10.10 with so many changes!
'Don't squash bugs… free them!', by Aryeom, CC BY-SA 4.0 (a poetic approach to debugging)
Still, some very cool improvements are also available:
- Improved Curves tool
- Layers support for TIFF exporting
- Support for user-installed fonts on Windows
- Faster painting
- Improved symmetry painting support
- Incremental mode in the Dodge/Burn tool
- Free Select tool now creates a preliminary selection
- New Offset tool
Improvements and features
Improving curves editing and Curves tool
Generic curves interaction
Gimp Clipart
The interaction with curves in general has been greatly enhanced, which is an improvement both to the Curves tool and all other places where curves need tweaking (currently paint dynamics and input device settings):
Relative motion when dragging points
When dragging an existing curve point, it won't 'jump' anymore to the cursor position upon pressing the button. Instead it will move relatively to its current position as the cursor moves. This allows selecting a point with a quick click without moving it, and adjusting a point position more easily.
Additionally, when the cursor hovers above a point, or when dragging a point, the coordinate indicator now show the point's position, rather than the cursor's.
Snap to curve when holding Ctrl
When holding down Ctrl while adding or dragging a point, the Y-coordinate will snap to the original curve. This is particularly useful for adding points along the curve.
Likewise, the coordinate indicator shows the snapped coordinates.
Curves tool specific interaction
Additionally, some improvements are specific to the Curves tool:
Numeric input of Curves tool points
Two new spin-buttons labelled 'Input' and 'Output' are now available in the Curves tool interface. They allow setting the selected point's coordinates numerically and accurately if needed.
Add smooth or corner curve-point types
Control points can now be either smooth or corner points. Smooth points produce a smooth curve, while corner points result in sharp angles (previously, all points were smooth and this is still the default).
Corner points are displayed using a diamond shape, instead of a circle and the type can be changed in the Curves tool.
TIFF now has layer support!
Thanks to Tobias Ellinghaus, well known as a darktable developer, TIFF can now export images without merging layers.
Support of user-installed fonts on Windows
Though not fully tested, we now have a temporary support of a new Windows 10 feature. Windows 10 users indeed now have the ability to install fonts without admin permissions since a recent update.
Therefore we added this non-admin font folder to our search path when running GIMP. It should be only a temporary workaround since eventually this should be supported by fontconfig, the upstream library used to manage fonts.
Note also that it is not fully tested because of our lack of Windows developers. Therefore we are mostly hoping it will work as expected, and this is a good time to make a call again:
Are you a Windows developer? Do you love GIMP? Please contribute!
Seriously, none of our current developers use Windows and bugs are piling up in our bug tracker for this platform (same can be said on macOS by the way), whereas GIMP is so enjoyably stable on GNU/Linux. We are happy to do the occasional good deeds, but there are limits to what we can do for a platform we don't use. On the other hands, we happily welcome patches and new contributors!
Faster painting
GIMP now doesn't replace the paint buffer on every dab if the paint color/pixmap hasn't changed. This results in faster painting on specific cases.
As a by-product of the change, the color-from-gradient dynamics is now fixed when the image has a color profile.
Incremental mode in the Dodge/Burn tool
The Dodge/Burn tool got a new 'Incremental' option which, similarly to the Paintbrush, Pencil, and Eraser tools, applies the effect incrementally as the pointer moves.
Free Select tool creates preliminary selection
One of GIMP 2.10.0 changes which annoyed many people was that the Free Select tool was not creating a selection immediately when the region was closed. One was forced to perform an additional confirmation step (Enter or double-click).
This was done on purpose because we wanted to leave ability to tweak the polygonal selection that is built into the Free Select tool. Yet it could obviously be better, proof being the Rectangle Select tool which still allowed to edit the rectangle even though a selection was pre-created.
The Free Select tool now works the same way: even though a preliminary selection exists (allowing to directly copy or delete a contents without additional step), you will still be able to edit this free selection as long as you don't start another selection nor change tools.
New Offset tool
New Offset tool shifts pixels and optionally wraps them around the edges so that you could create repeatable patterns.
New Offset tool used to make a repeatable heart pattern
Gimp Art Program Download Full
There's a simple on-canvas interaction available: just drag on the canvas to shift the layer.
You can activate the new filter either via Layer > Transform > Offset menu, or via Shift+Ctrl+O shortcut.
Moving an intersecting pair of guides
The Move tool can now move together an intersecting pair of guides. by dragging the guides at their point of intersection. This is useful when the guides are used to mark a point, rather than a pair of lines (e.g., as is the case for the mandala symmetry guides, which mark the symmetry's point of origin).
Bug fixing
Many bugs were fixed, some more severe than others (in particular a few crashes), as well as some code cleaning, factorization, and so on. The usual deal! More than the new features, we actually thought these issues were enough to warrant this new release.
Among most pesky bugs fixed:
- crashes for various reasons, with more crashes to fix yet;
- various color management related bugs;
- unwanted change of foreground and background colors in tools' presets;
- brush transformation improved and fixed in various places in symmetry painting mode;
- a few localization bugs, and most importantly broken translation display for several supported languages (so far, we believe it to be a bug in the Pango dependency);
- some brush format bugs;
And more. GIMP 2.10.12 is the result of about 200 commits in 2 months! We will focus below on two specific bug fixing which deserve mentioning.
Improved symmetry painting support
The symmetry painting backend got some improvements, which resulted in a few fixes, in particular some artifacts could occur with big brushes or in the Clone/Heal tool when the brush was cropped to the bounds of a drawable. These are now fixed.
In the Ink tool as well, the brush shape was not properly transformed. This has been fixed as well.
Just open the Symmetry Painting dockable dialog, choose a type of symmetry and paint away!
Color space mixup on exporting images
Several people noticed that exporting some images ended up in washed-up colors sometimes. This was because in some cases, we were exporting by error sRGB colors with a linear profile (especially visible in GIMP 2.10.10 since we were exporting profiles by default even when using a default GIMP profile). We fixed this and took the opportunity to improve GIMP's export logics.
Now we are always exporting an explicitly set profile as-is, and pixel colors are stored according to this profile expectation. If you manually assigned a profile, GIMP should indeed always follow your request.
On the other hand, if no explicit profile was set, we implemented various strategies depending on the format:
- If the export format is able to store high-bit depth colors (e.g. PNG up to 16-bit and TIFF up to 64-bit), we follow the work format.
- If the export format is 8-bit only (such as JPEG), we transform the data to sRGB in order to avoid posterization and shadow artifacts (except if your work format is 8-bit linear, then we leave it as 8-bit linear for minimal loss).
Note that there are still edge cases which we may not find optimal yet regarding how profiles are handled. These should all be greatly improved when we will merge the 'Space Invasion' code (an ongoing mid-term project, as we were already talking about it when releasing GIMP 2.10.8). This code merge should hopefully happen soon enough!
Around GIMP
GEGL and babl
During this development span, GEGL 0.4.16 got released (91 commits), as well as babl 0.1.64 (31 commits) and 0.1.66 (7 commits).
The biggest user-visible change is probably the cubic sampler coefficient change, which used to produce smooth interpolation, suitable for some cases, but not as sharp as people would expect in most other cases. Now in all places where there is choice of interpolation (all transformation tools, Warp Transform tool, etc.), the result with cubic has changed and produces sharper results.
Another notable improvement in GEGL is an updated memory management, by conditionally freeing memory from the heap (thanks to manual calls of malloc_trim()), hence forcing the underlying libc to release memory more often. This behavior is especially suitable for long-running applications whose memory need can greatly vary, such as GIMP. In practice, it means that GIMP process' memory size will now shrink much faster when you will close big images on supporting systems.
What's next:
Though it gets less visibility, work on upcoming GIMP 3 continues and is going well. We will give more news soon enough. For the time being, don't forget you can donate to the project and personally fund several GIMP developers, as a way to give back and to accelerate GIMP development.
Popular apps in Image Editing
