Software Update: GIMP 2.10.30

Version 2.10.30 of the open source photo editing program GIMP has been released. The name GIMP is an abbreviation for “GNU Image Manipulation Program.” The software is available for various operating systems, including Windows, FreeBSD, Linux, macOS and Solaris. New in version 2.10 include the GGL-image processing engine and the ability to rotate the canvas. We also encounter various new and improved tools. The complete release notes for version 2.10.30 can be found on this page are being found. In short, these are the main improvements:

Improved file format support

Several file format supports were updated with fixes or improvements: AVIF, HEIF, PSD, DDS, RGBE and PBM. Let’s highlight in particular:

• PSD support received various types of improvements allowing it to load more sub-cases of PSD (layer masks tagged with invalid dimensions, CMYK without alpha, CMYK without layers, merged image of a 16 bit per channel RGBA which had opaque alpha channel…).
• AVIF export now favors AOM encoder.

OS evolutions

Some backends got reworked to follow OS evolutions:

• Backport of selection outline drawing reimplementation from GIMP 2.99.8 for macOS Big Sur and over (already discussed patchitself exceptionnaly backported to the 2.10.28 DMG package so that macOS users enjoyed visible selections earlier).
• On Windows, we moved from GetICMProfile() to the WcsGetDefaultColorProfile() API because the former is broken in Windows 11. Thus we were failing to get monitor profiles.
• On Linux and other OSes which might use Freedesktop portals, we implemented color picking on display (Colors dockable) with the Freedesktop API when available, keeping old implementations as fallbacks. Screenshot plug-in now also uses in priority the Freedesktop API rather than specific KDE or GNOME API (which are getting restricted for security reasons since KDE Plasma 5.20 and GNOME Shell 41).

Other improvements

Various improvements were made on metadata support, be it on core code as well as in the metadata plug-ins (viewer and editor).

A noteworthy fix is ​​that the text tool won’t follow anymore the subpixel font rendering choice from system settings. Subpixel rendering is for GUI on a screen of a specific type and pixel order and is not suitable for image contents which can be zoomed in or out, showed on various screens or even printed. This change also depends on a patch we contributed to Cairo which will be available in their next release (we include the patched version in our flatpak).