The release of the GIMP 2.99.6 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 development of tools for editing outside the canvas continued - the ability to place guides outside the border of the canvas is implemented, which can be useful in situations where the initially selected canvas size is not enough. As for the previously provided ability to remove a guide by moving it outside the canvas, this behavior has changed a bit and instead of the host boundaries, now you need to move the guide outside the visible area to remove it.
- In the canvas size dialog, the ability to select predefined templates that describe typical sizes corresponding to common page formats (A1, A2, A3, etc.) has been added. The size is calculated based on the actual size, taking into account the selected DPI. If the DPI of the template and the current image are different when the canvas is resized, the choice is to change the DPI for the image or scale the template to match the DPI of the image.
- Added support for zooming the canvas via the pinch gesture on touchpads and touch screens. Pinch scaling only works in Wayland-based environments so far, in X11 builds this feature will appear in the coming months after the adoption of a patch with the necessary functionality in the X Server.
- Improved the experimental Paint Select tool, which allows you to gradually select an area using approximate brush strokes. The tool is based on the use of a selective segmentation algorithm (graphcut) to select only the region of interest. The selection now takes into account the visible area, which can significantly speed up the operation when scaling.
- Added a plugin for generating an ICC color profile based on the gAMA and cHRM metadata embedded in a PNG image, which describe the gamma correction and color parameters. This feature allows you to correctly display and edit PNG images supplied with gAMA and cHRM in GIMP.
- Several implementations of the plugin for creating screenshots have been proposed. In particular, a variant has been added that uses Freedesktop portals to take screenshots in Wayland-based environments and to work from flatpak packages that use application isolation. In this plugin, the screenshot creation logic is moved to the side of the portal, which itself forms a dialog about the parameters of the captured content, without showing the old GIMP dialog.
- The plug-in for exporting in TIFF format ensures that the color profile and comments are saved for each layer of the image.
- Continued reworking of the API for plugin development. A few lines of code are now enough to generate GTK dialogs. By default, an array of drawables is passed in, as GIMP now supports multilayer selections. Work has been done to unify the names of functions. Provided the ability to save and access additional data attached to an image, layer, or GIMP instance, allowing the plugin to persist arbitrary binary data between restarts.
Source: opennet.ru