While the developers are already working on interesting features and new stuff in the so-called goat-invasion branch they try to push out GIMP 2.8 as soon as possible. The first release candidate (RC) has now been released to the public!

You might ask why they still do a RC because 2.7.5 worked pretty well already. There have been some discrepancies withs GIMP graph-based graphics library GEGL which is no longer fully backwards compatible. Therefore the developers had to implement their own Contrast & Brightness operation.

Good news on the other side: GIMP 2.8 will depend on GEGL 0.2.0. This means that OpenCL support (hardware acceleration through multi core CPUs and graphics cards shaders) is going to be available for operations – although only theoretically, because OpenCL is not actually used yet. But at least it is now possible to integrate new super fast operations in GEGL and GIMP. A good progress!

GIMP 2.8.0 is now definitely very near. You may expect it in the next days/weeks ahead (but there is no official word on this ;))!

These are the changes taken directly from the NEWS file:

Core:

Add our own GimpOperationBrightnessContrast because GEGL one is different

Plug-ins:

Fix some GFig rendering issues

Source and build system:

Depend on Babl 0.1.10, GEGL 0.2.0 and some other new library versions

General:

Bug fixes

Translation updates

The source code is available in our downloads section – there are no binary versions available yet. We will keep you up to date regarding Windows or other binaries of GIMP 2.8-RC1.

Update

The Windows binary for 32 and 64 bit is now available!