The release of the GIMP 2.99.8 graphics editor is available for testing, which continues the development of the functionality of the future stable branch of GIMP 3.0, in which the transition to GTK3 has been made, native support for Wayland and HiDPI has been added, a significant cleanup of the codebase has been carried out, a new API for plugin development has been proposed, rendering caching has been implemented , added support for selecting multiple layers (Multi-layer selection) and provided editing in the original color space. A flatpak package (org.gimp.GIMP in the flathub-beta repository) and assemblies for Windows are available for installation.
The following changes have been added compared to the previous test release:
- The Clone, Heal and Perspective selective copy tools have the ability to work when multiple layers are selected. If the result of the operation is applied to a separate image when several initial layers are selected, then the data for the operation is formed based on the merging of layers, and if the result is applied to the same set of layers, then the operation is applied layer by layer.
- Adjusted the correct display of the selection border in Wayland-based composite window managers and in modern releases of macOS that previously did not show outlines on the canvas. The change is also planned to be backported to the GIMP 2.10 stable branch, where the issue only occurred on macOS, as Wayland-based environments ran the GTK2-based version using XWayland.
- Flatpak builds now request fallback-x11 permissions instead of x11 permissions, which eliminates unnecessary access to x11 functionality when working in Wayland-based environments. In addition, large memory leaks when running in Wayland-based environments have disappeared (apparently the problem was fixed in one of the Wayland-specific dependencies).
- GIMP and GTK3 on the Windows platform have added the ability to use the Windows Ink input system (Windows Pointer Input Stack), which allows you to work with tablets and touch devices that do not have Wintab drivers. An option has been added to the settings for Windows OS to switch between Wintab and Windows Ink stacks.
- Provided the ability to return focus to the canvas by clicking anywhere on the toolbar, similar to pressing the Esc key.
- Removed the display in the taskbar of an icon with a thumbnail of an open image superimposed on the GIMP logo. This overlay made it difficult for some users to identify GIMP windows when there were a large number of applications running on the system.
- Added support for loading and exporting images in JPEG-XL (.jxl) format with RGP color profiles and grayscale, as well as support for lossless encoding.
- Improved support for Adobe Photoshop project files (PSD/PSB) with the 4 GB size limit removed. The allowable number of channels has been increased to 99 channels. Added the ability to upload PSB files, which are actually PSD files that support resolutions up to 300k pixels wide and long.
- Added support for 16-bit SGI images.
- The WebP image support plugin has been migrated to the GimpSaveProcedureDialog API.
- Script-Fu provides handling of GFile and GimpObjectArray types.
- Extended API capabilities for plugin development.
- Fixed memory leaks.
- The infrastructure for testing changes in the continuous integration system has been expanded.
Source: opennet.ru