After 6 Years, GIMP 2.10 is Here With Ravishing New Looks and Tons of New Features
BY: Abhishek Prakash
Brief: 6 years after the release of GIMP 2.8, the major new stable release 2.10 is here. Have a look at the new look, new features and installation procedure.
Free and open source image editing application GIMP has a new major release today. GIMP 2.10 comes six years after the last major release 2.8.
It won’t be an exaggeration if I say that GIMP is the most popular image editor in Linux world and perhaps the best Adobe Photoshop alternative. The project was first started in 1996 and in the last 22 years, it has become the default image editor on almost all major Linux distributions. It is also available on Windows and macOS.
What’s new in GIMP 2.10
GIMP 2.10 has been ported to GEGL image processing engine and that’s the biggest change in this release. It brings out several new tools and improvements.
Some of the main new highlights of this release are:
- Four new themes: Light, Gray, Dark, and System
- Basic HiDPI support
- GEGL is the new image processing engine providing high bit depth processing, multi-threaded and hardware accelerated pixel processing
- Warp transform, the Unified transform and the Handle transform tools are some of the new tools
- Many existing tools have been improved as well
- Digital painting has been improved with canvas rotation and flipping, symmetry painting, MyPaint brush support
- Support for OpenEXR, RGBE, WebP, HGT image formats have been added
- Metadata viewing and editing for Exif, XMP, IPTC, and DICOM
- Color management revamped
- Linear color space workflow
- Digital photography improvements with Exposure, Shadows-Highlights, High-pass, Wavelet Decompose, Panorama Projection tools
- Usability improvements
If you want to see the GIMP 2.10 features in detail, please refer to its release note.
Install GIMP 2.10
Since GIMP 2.10 has just been released, it will be some time before your Linux distribution provides you the new version (unless you use Arch Linux).
If you want to use it right now, you have two ways: Source Code or Flatpak.
Installing GIMP 2.10 via PPA in Ubuntu-basedLinuxdistributions
There is an unofficial PPA available that you can use to install GIMP 2.10 on Ubuntu, Linux Mint and other Ubuntu based Linux distributions right now.
Open a terminal and use the following commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:otto-kesselgulasch/gimp
sudo apt update
sudo apt install gimp
This will install GIMP 2.10. If you already have GIMP 2.8, it will be upgraded to GIMP 2.10.
Installing GIMP 2.10 with Flatpak in Ubuntu-based Linux distributions
You need to enable Flatpak support first. Use the commands below to install Flatpak in Ubuntu.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alexlarsson/flatpak
sudo apt update
sudo apt install flatpak
You can refer to this page to know how to enable Flatpak support in other Linux distributions.
Once you have Fltapak support, use the command below to install GIMP 2.10:
flatpak install https://flathub.org/repo/appstream/org.gimp.GIMP.flatpakref
Once installed, if you don’t see it in the menu, you can run it using the command below:
flatpak run org.gimp.GIMPGet GIMP 2.10 source code
Alternatively, you can always install from source code. You can download the source code from the link below:
I have been waiting for GIMP 2.10 release for some months now and I am looking forward to using its new features. How about you? Do you use GIMP? What new features you liked in GIMP 2.10?
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