GIMP 2.10.30 It is now available as another minor release of the eternal second version of the well-known image manipulation application, which is showing itself in good shape since it is under the GNOME umbrella and its future leap to the third major version is well under way.
This time we don’t have many groundbreaking news, but there are some interesting improvements. For example, support for AVIF, HEIF, PSD, DDS, RGBE and PBM image formats has been improved in GIMP 2.10.30, which never hurts for those who manipulate or export to things other than JPG and PNG, the two most popular formats. Being more specific with one of them, the export to AVIF now favors the AOM AV1 renderer.
Another interesting point that has been improved in GIMP 2.10.30 has been the support of PSD, the file format (or rather documents according to your own defined) used by Adobe Photoshop projects. Added here support for “Layer Masks labeled with invalid dimensions, CMYK no alpha, CMYK no layers, blended image of a 16 bit per channel RGBA that had an opaque alpha channel, and so on. For CMYK PSD files, for now, GIMP will convert to sRGB to allow you to view the contents of a file instead of displaying a message that the file is not supported. ”
At the systems level, In Linux, the color selection on the screen has been implemented with the freedesktop API while keeping previous implementations of the feature as alternate pathways. On the other hand, the screenshot plugin also uses the freedesktop API first instead of the KDE or GNOME specific one, since the environments have implemented restrictions on that front for security reasons as of versions 5.20 and 41 respectively.
For macOS, the reimplementation of the GIMP 2.99.8 selection scheme has been ported back to Big Sur and later versions of Apple’s desktop operating system, while for Windows it has been moved from ‘GetICMProfile ()’ to the API ‘WcsGetDefaultColorProfile ()’ because the first one is broken in Windows 11, so the monitor profiles could not be obtained.
In addition to everything mentioned, we have a series of minor improvements, such as those that have reached the metadata support both in the code of the central part of the application and the viewer and editor plugins.
A correction applied to the text tool will make it stop following the font sub-pixel rendering option from the system settingsAs this feature is more geared towards graphical user interfaces and is not suitable for the contents of an image, which can be zoomed in or out, displayed on multiple screens or printed. This change depends on a patch contributed to Cairo that will be available in the next version of the library that supports vector graphics and image compositing.
Apart from being able to see all the details in the official announcement, those who are interested in using GIMP 2.10.30 can download the application for GNU / Linux (Flatpak), Windows and Mac from official website of the project. In addition, it should be available in a matter of time in the distributions rolling release and possibly also in format Snap and through the RPM repositories of at least version 35 of Fedora (it can also reach 34).
