Also introduces clip warning and better color management

Dec 13, 2017 16:55 GMT  ·  By

GIMP 2.9.8, a development version towards the major GIMP 2.10 release, was announced by developer Alexandre Prokoudine for all supported platforms, including Linux, Mac, and Windows.

GIMP is one of the most popular open-source and free image editors and viewers, used by default in numerous GNU/Linux distributions. While still working on the new features of the GIMP 2.10 stable release, the development team pushed yet another development build that introduces a bunch of improvements and a highly-anticipated feature, on-canvas gradient editing.

"First of all, it pretty much eliminates the need for the old Gradient Editor dialog, as all of the dialog’s features are now available directly on the canvas," write Alexandre Prokoudine in the announcement. "You can create and delete color stops, select and shift them, assign colors to color stops, change blending and coloring for segments between color stops, create new color stops from midpoints."

On-canvas gradient editing also makes default gradients editable, which means that when you change an existing gradient from the system folder, GIMP will duplicate it and name the copy as "Custom Gradient," preserving it across all of your GIMP sessions. The new feature can also be used in future releases for brushes and other types of resources.

Clip warning, Paste in Place, and Wayland support

Among other enhancements implemented in the GIMP 2.9.8 release, we can mention clip warning as a way to visualize underexposed and overexposed areas of a photo, which, for now, it's only useful if you work with 16-bit or 32-bit per channel float images like TIFF or EXR, as well as the ability to use the Babl library for converting images between color spaces when using matrix-based ICC profiles.

More of GIMP's components were ported to the next-generation Wayland display server, which is being adopted by more and more GNU/Linux distribution lately. Moreover, a new Paste in Place command was implemented to allow users to paste clipboard contents at the exact coordinates where the original contents were copied from.

Lastly, GIMP 2.9.8 improves the Wavelet Decompose filter, improves the PSD plug-in to properly handle Photoshop files that contain deeply enclosed layer groups, adds the ability to import HGT files in both SRTM-1 and SRTM-3 types, and updates thirteen language translations. You can download GIMP 2.9.8 for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems right now.

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GIMP 2.9.8 released
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