New unstable version of GIMP is out with improvements and bugfixes. If no serious bugs are discovered, this could be the last release before the final v2.8.

The user-visible changes are really mostly improvements, and quite sensible ones at that. Tabs in the single-window mode now have a close button:

In case of transformation tools names of changes in the Undo History dialog are more like descriptions now:

The rest of the changes are really just bugfixes and minor improvements (such as importing a working path from PSD).

An stated above, v2.7.4 can be the last unstable version before release of GIMP 2.8. This mostly depends on amount of bugs reported against it. As of today there are no more major changes expected to land in this development cycle.

The team had also released new version of babl and GEGL back in November, but didn't announce it until now. While babl got mostly improvements to existing code base, GEGL actually got some new features.

The new version of GEGL got all the operations ported from GIMP filters by Robert Sasu, a GSoC2011 student, plus some other operations written by the team. Robert published a gallery for the operations he wrote.

The distinction between lens-distortion and lens-correct is very simple: the former is a GIMP filter, while the latter is a completely new operation that uses LensFun library and lens database for fixing lens distortions.

This version also got improvements in the resampling department thanks to Nicolas Robidoux who has been active in the project since GSoC2009 when he mentored two of his students. Nicolas works on providing the best interpolation methods for upscaling and downscaling, and now GEGL has a lohalo resampler, API and infrastructure for doing non-affine resampling, the latter being part of his 2009 plan.

As if it wasn't quite sufficient, there are even more changes. Back in July we reported on work by Jon Nordby (MyPaint) to make GEGL easier to use in GTK and Qt based applications (for full story read his blog entry from August). This work is now available: Jon moved the GeglView widget from GEGL to a separate project (GIMP doesn't use gegl-gtk yet) and did the same for Qt. There are also “bindings” for Clutter currently available in Git only.

Here is the overall list of source code archives:

For GIMP please use mirrors listed at the official Downloads page. A build for Windows is available at partha.com.