The powerful GIMP open-source and free image editor and viewer software received a new major release, GIMP 2.10.18, which brings numerous new features and improvements.

GIMP 2.10.18 comes three months after version 2.10.14, which probably most of you out there are running on your GNU/Linux distributions, but the development team released version 2.10.16 a week ago without announcing anything official. Now, GIMP 2.10.18 is here, and we finally have details about the new features that were implemented during this cycle.

Without any further ado, the highlights of the GIMP 2.10.18 release include a new 3D Transform tool to let users rotate and pan items in 3D space (you can check it out in action below), a new high-contrast symbolic theme, a new “Composited Preview” option for most transformation tools, and the ability to group tools by default in the toolbox, which is enabled by default after you update to this version.

“You can customize groups by creating new ones and dragging tools between them. The changes will take effect immediately. Or you can disable the grouping entirely. You’ll find configuration options on theInterface/Toolbox page of the Preferences dialog,” explained the devs.

New 3D Transform tool in GIMP 2.10.18

GIMP 2.10.18 also adds a compact style for sliders by default for better user interaction, makes the ABR brushes load faster than in previous releases, and highlights the dockable areas when dragging a dialog. Moreover, this release makes loading of PSD files imported from Adobe Photoshop much faster, especially for large files, and supports loading of CMYK(A) PSD files.

Among other improvements, there’s better symmetry painting, the brush outline preview motion is now much smoother on the canvas, the Layers dialog for merging layers and attaching floating selections was consolidated, and the implementation that notifies users of new GIMP releases got smarter.

A total of 28 bugs were addressed in this release, which also updates 15 language translations. Don’t hesitate to check out the release announcement page for screenshots and more details about the new features and improvements added in this release.

As usual, you can download GIMP 2.10.18 right now from the official website. You should also be able to install this release from the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution in the coming days. Meanwhile, the development team is working hard on the next major release, GIMP 3.0, which will be fully ported to GTK3.

Last updated 7 months ago