Pre-release
The Gimp 2.4
by Stacey Falconer
ithin a month, the newest version of The Gimp should be released. Pre-release versions have been available for both Linux and Windows, but they are hard to find, and also still unstable and potentially prone to crashing. I have recently downloaded a Windows version of The Gimp 2.3.5, and see some very significant changes that many Gimp/Photoshop users will find very useful.
The first apparent addition is three new buttons on the tool bar, one a new extraction tool, a second for aligning layers and layer objects, and a third rectangular selection tool. I really cannot say much about the new selection tool—other than it works much the same as the crop tool, allowing for cursor control of the selection boundaries, and masks all the area outside the selection, sort of like the cropping tool in Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. For now, this new selection tool does not allow for rotation. It is obviously a byproduct of the crop tool. The option palettes in each of these tools look almost identical and the new crop tool also shades the area outside the crop in the same manner as the new selection tool. Like the new selection tool, the cropping tool does not allow for rotation. Both these tools though allow for fixed width, height, and aspect ratio options, which is an improvement over the Gimp’s old cropping tool.
The second tool to be added was an alignment tool, and though it took a bit of getting used to, this was a very welcome addition to The Gimp since many, if not most, other photo editing programs have this feature.
Now a new extraction tool works amazingly well, and has a lot of tweaking capability if it gives you a hard time. I tried in on my Spider image. All you do is start out by drawing a rough outside line around the object to be selected, and then paint a rough splash of paint over the object to extract. Hit the enter key and the object is extracted, with amazing accuracy. It did an amazing job extracting the spider’s web from around the spider.
A significant change that seems to work really well is pressure sensitivity for the painting tools, including the eraser, airbrush, pencil, clone, and brush tools.
Another significant change is re-nesting the menu items in a manner that makes a lot more sense. Now you do not have to go through some sub menus to get to things like levels and curves, you can now access them under the colours menu—makes a lot of sense and it should make many users happy. This also extends to the filters, which are re-nested as well, though I consider this a questionable improvement, since die-hard Gimp users now will have to spend time and effort learning the new locations for their favorite filters. The new menu tree does make a lot of sense however and really should not be much of a learning curve.
Last, there is now colour management support. To be honest, I have not had much time to play with this; I have just installed this program a couple days ago.
Do I like it? You bet! Any disappointments? I will reserve my decision until after the stable version is released, after all, this is only a development version.
