It’s been in the works for 3 years and finally there is a first official release of a development version of the GIMP 2.9 series!

Many users are complaining about the long development, however you’ve to keep in mind that practically everything has changed in GIMP 2.9 (most of it under the surface), and it takes time to give users the options and features they already enjoyed in prior version also in the future. GIMP 3+ will really benefit from the long development which it is currently.

Nevertheless it will still take some time until 2.10 is out but 2.9.2 is a great milestone for the development already.

Here is quick overview what the team mentioned in the official news:

GEGL Port

• 16/32bit per color channel processing
• Basic OpenEXR support
• On-canvas preview for many filters
• Experimental hardware-accelerated rendering and processing via OpenCL
• Higher-quality downscaling

New, Improved and Experimental Tools

• Unified Transform
• Warp Transform
• Blend tool
• Align tool
• Foreground Select tool
• N-Point Deformation, by Marek Dvorožňák, implements a new way to bend objects while preserving a natural look.
• Handle Transform, by Johannes Matschke, is an interesting approach at applying scaling, rotating, and perspective correction using handles placed on the canvas.
• Seamless Clone, by Barak Itkin, simplifies merging one image into another by adjusting brightness and colors of the pasted image to match the look of the image it is pasted to.
• MyPaint Brush tool is a first shot at using more brush engines in GIMP. The code was written by Michael Natterer.

Better Color Management

• Overlay Blend mode repleaced by the correct formula
• View Metadata such as EXIF
• Digital Painting improvements with Canvacs rotation and more

If you’re really in need of the new stuff described below you can try GIMP 2.9.2, but you should not use it for production use, because things are still subject to change.

We will update the news with links to pre-compiled versions soon.