Hi,

we're getting closer to releasing 2.10!

We just released the first release candidate on the way to the final GIMP 2.10.0 release.

This is (still!) an unstable development release and might crash or do whatever. If you try it for work, please save your images more often.

But please use it and report bugs, it's actually usable :)

For a complete list of changes since 2.9.8 please see the "Changes" section below.

There is also a release announcement on www.gimp.org with screenshots of new features:

https://gimp.org/news/2018/03/26/gimp-2-10-rc1-released/

Happy GIMPing, --Mitch

Download
========

GIMP 2.10.0-RC1 is available from:

https://download.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.10/

and from the mirrors listed at:

https://www.gimp.org/downloads/devel/#mirrors

The checksum of the tarball is:

e8892481e70c4ee3c204b6aa484f4eba gimp-2.10.0-RC1.tar.bz2

Overview of Changes from GIMP 2.9.8 to GIMP 2.10 RC1 ====================================================

Core:

- New dashboard dockable: shows the current GEGL cache and swap sizes and CPU usage and active time, and their recent history. It has options to control the update rate and history duration of the data, and an option to warn (by raising/blinking the dialog) when the swap size approaches its limit. - Make the selection boundary detection the same as 2.8. - The environment variable GIMP_DEBUG can now be set to "list-all" to display available debug domains. Non-recognized flags will also trigger the debug flag list output. - Improve migration from 2.8 to 2.10 by recursively migrating configuration files (up to 5 levels, to protect from recursive symbolic links).
- Mark legacy plug-ins and scripts in menus. - Enable "save-tool-options" and "save-device-status" by default, it's the expected behavior these days. - GIMP doesn't warn any more for unknown darktable XMP metadata. We now register the corresponding namespace. - Adding settings for metadata export handling in "Image Import & Export" page of Preferences. By default, the settings are checked, but you can uncheck them (in particular since metadata can often contain a lot of sensitive information). - Splash image now scaled down to maximum 1/2 of the screen area. This will allow to ship a big splash image which will be visible on all type of screens, whichever low or high resolution. Vector splash images are scaled both up or down to have them always at ideal size.
- Brightness-Contrast, Curves, Levels and Threshold are now available in "Repeat last" history.
- Improve action history to not show newly excluded actions (which were already in our history from before the exclusion). - Use GEGL for transform-tools preview, allowing faster and more accurate previews.
- Re-arrange color models in the Color dock (WIP). - New debug tool and infrastructure to handle WARNING and CRITICAL errors, as well as fatal errors (crashes), raising a pop-up with all version information on GIMP and its main dependencies, as well as the error message and backtraces, and encouraging people to make bug reports.
- Support layer masks on layer groups. - GIMP now attempts to backup unsaved images when it crashes. Then at next startup, it will suggest to recover the salvaged images. Image recovery is not 100% guaranteed. - New gimp_spawn_async() function uses vfork() to help avoid hanging during a fork process, currently used for plug-ins. - Dock color picker is now color-managed on macOS.

Libgimp:

- New gimp_export_exif(), gimp_export_xmp() and gimp_export_iptc() functions returning the creator choice regarding default handling for metadata export (as set in the Preferences). - GIMP Protocol version incremented. - New gimp_get_pdb_status() to return the status of the last PDB call. This is needed for plug-ins which depend on other plug-ins' procedures. If for instance, a second-level plug-in is interrupted interactively, we don't want to process this as an error but as a cancellation.
- New gimp_stack_trace_available(), gimp_stack_trace_print() and gimp_stack_trace_query() for debugging. - Use gegl:distance-transform in gimp_edit_blend() implementation making it much faster for all GRADIENT_SHAPEBURST_* gradient types. Legacy gimp:shapeburst operation has been deleted. - New gimp_context_get_distance_metric() and gimp_context_set_distance_metric() for distance metric used in gimp_edit_blend() (and future usage).

GUI and Usability:

- New icons: "gimp-attach", "gimp-color-space-linear", "gimp-color-space-perceptual", "gimp-color-temperature", "gimp-dashboard", "gimp-detach", "gimp-tool-desaturate", "gimp-tool-exposure", "gimp-tool-shadows-highlights". - Switching between linear and perceptual (gamma-corrected) spaces in the Histogram dialog is easier now: two buttons instead of one two-way button where current state was difficult to understand. - Shorten color channel labels in the color frame (color picker tool, sample point editor…) with conventional 1 or 2-letter abbreviations, and split coordinates on 2 lines. - We now switch to "Huge" icons by default when the display pixel density is over 250 PPI (used to be 300 PPI). - Improve action history sorting: items climb up the list faster, while top items retain their relative position longer. - Extend action search "initialism": Extend initialism-based search (e.g.: "gb" for "Gaussian Blur"), by matching arbitrarily-long initialisms, and by allowing partial matches (with lesser priority).
- Values in the GimpNumberPairEntry widgets can now be cleared by clicking an icon.
- Transform Grid controller is now available for custom UIs of GEGL operations (currently used for Recursive Transform op). - New GimpHighlightableButton widget is used to draw attention to buttons in certain cases. Currently used for anchoring and removing loating selections.
- Composite modes were renamed to be more descriptive, as follows: Source Over => Union
Source Atop => Clip to Backdrop Destination Atop => Clip to Layer Source In => Intersection

Configurability:

- Wilber logo in the toolbox can now be disabled via Preferences (the Toolbox page).

Tools:

- "Link brush size with canvas zoom" paint option becomes "Lock brush to view" to make a brush invariant in display space whichever scaling, rotation, and reflection. - Blend tool now displays the line length (in current shell unit and with ideal digit accuracy) and angle in the status bar. - Constrain line angles in display space: all tools which have a line constraint feature (for instance blend tool, paint tools in line mode, etc.) will now do so relatively to the display, allowing you to rotate the canvas in order to constrain to any arbitrary angle. - Levels and Curves can now work on linear light data, the toggles are at the top of respective dialogs, right next to linear/log toggles for the histogram.
- Blend tool now has a distance metric option to determine how distances are computed (Euclidean, Manhattan or Chebyshev distances).

Filters:

- New GEGL-based Shadows-Highlights filter now available in the Colors menu. The implementation is based on the code from darktable.

Plug-ins:

- Screenshot with the generic Freedesktop API has been implemented. It is meant to replace all desktop environment specific APIs eventually but needs to get reasonable features first. Therefore currently GNOME/KDE and X11 implementations still have priority. - qbist ported to GEGL and float.
- Colors for the standard output and standard error texts in the Python console are now themeable, mapping respectively to normal text and insensitive text colors for the "python-fu-console" widget. We updated the default colors a bit for our themes. If this is not good enough (for instance, if one has a specific type of color blindness), at least it is now possible to create a custom theme adapted to one's needs. - PSD export now happens with progress bar update for feedback. - Win32 Screenshot improved to handle hardware-rendered software and multi-monitor displays.

File formats:

- Fix various vulnerabilities in file plug-ins: GBR (CVE-2017-17784), PSP (CVE-2017-17787 and CVE-2017-17789), TGA (CVE-2017-17786) and FLI (CVE-2017-17785).
- Fix WebP export under Windows.
- No more max dimension limitation for X cursors. We still warn when cursor size is over a max limit for X bitmap cursors, but we don't clamp anymore on export.
- JPEG, PNG, TIFF and WebP export plug-ins updated to honor creator's default choice regarding metadata handling. - Fix GIH brushes using different-sized layers. - RGBE (Radiance HDR) format files can now be imported and exported. - JPEG2000 loading now done via OpenJPEG library and supports any bit depth (over 32-bit per channel will be clamped to 32-bit and non-multiple of 8-bit will be promoted, for instance 12-bit will end up as 16-bit per channel in GIMP). JPEG 2000 codestream also supported and displays a dialog asking for the color space (whereas JPEG 2000 image color space are auto-detected). JPEG 2000 images or codestream in YCbCr, xvYCC and CMYK color spaces are converted to sRGB images upon loading.

Building:

- poppler and poppler-data now hard dependencies. PDF import is considered a granted feature nowadays and fallbacking to the Postscript plug-in was bad experience. - move PDB generation and sources to toplevel/pdb. - New configure option `--enable-windows-installer` to generate the necessary files for the installer translations during the build. - Improve POTFILES generation for po-*/ directories. - Require glib >= 2.54.2.
- New dependency to mypaint-brushes-1.0 for stable MyPaint brushes available at installation.
- AppStream ID renamed from gimp.desktop to org.gimp.GIMP following current convention.
- Require fontconfig >= 2.12.4. Lower versions are particularly a problem on Win32, where many cache update failure were reported to us, resulting in very slow startup and close-up (and not only the first time, but every time).

Translations:

- Windows installer now localized with gettext. - String freeze has started and GIMP received updates from: Basque, Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, Chinese (Taiwan), Danish, Esperanto, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish.

Contributors ============

Alexandre Prokoudine, Alexis Wilhelm, Darshan kadu, Ell, Elle Stone, Jehan, Kristian Rietveld, Lionel N, Massimo Valentini, Michael Natterer, Mukund Sivaraman, N Ferreira, Nathaniel Graham, Partha, Piotr Drąg, Richard McLean, Sebastian Rasmussen, Simon Budig, Simon Mueller, Thomas Manni, Ting-Wei Lan, Tobias Ellinghaus, Tobias Stoeckmann, Zhouyang, shark0r, tcapix, Øyvind Kolås

Translators
===========

Alan Mortensen, Alexandre Prokoudine, Anders Jonsson, Balázs Meskó, Balázs Úr, Chao-Hsiung Liao, Christian Kirbach, Claude Paroz, Daniel Mustieles, Dimitris Spingos (Δημήτρης Σπίγγος), Ell, Emin Tufan Çetin, Hajime Taira, Inaki Larranaga Murgoitio, Jehan, Jiro Matsuzawa, Jordi Mas, Julien Hardelin, Kristjan SCHMIDT, Luis Angel Gonzo, Marco Ciampa, Mario Blättermann, Martin Srebotnjak, Michael Natterer, Muhammet Kara, Piotr Drąg, Rafael Fontenelle, Rūdolfs Mazurs, Sebastian Rasmussen, Sveinn í Felli, Tim Sabsch, raja rizki, Милош Поповић.