A new release of the venerable GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) is now available for download. Version 2.6 offers a variety of new features, user interface improvements, and is also the first release to include support for the Generic Graphics Library (GEGL), a powerful, graph-based image editing framework.

The GIMP is an open source graphics editor that is available for Linux, Windows, and OS X. It aims to provide Photoshop-like capabilities and offers a broad feature set that has made it popular with amateur artists and open source fans. Although the GIMP is generally not regarded as a sufficient replacement for high-end commercial tools, it is beginning to gain some acceptance in the pro market.

One of the most significant limitations of the GIMP is that it has traditionally only supported 8 bits per color channel. This weakness is commonly cited as a major barrier to GIMP adoption by professional artists, who require greater color depth. This problem has finally been addressed by the new GEGL backend, which delivers support for 32-bpc. The inclusion of GEGL is a major milestone for the GIMP and takes it one step closer to being a viable Photoshop replacement for professional users. In this release, GEGL is still not quite ready to be enabled by default, but users can turn it on with a special option.

GIMP 2.6 also includes some minor user interface enhancements. The application menu in the tool palette window has been removed, and its contents have been merged into the document window menu. A document window will now be displayed at all times, even when no images are open. The floating tool windows have also been adjusted so that they are always displayed over the document window and cannot be obscured. To reduce clutter and make the windows easier to manage, the floating windows will no longer be listed in the taskbar.

The GIMP user interface has long been a source of controversy, and is characterized by some users as one of the worst on the Linux desktop. The modest changes made in this release are nice improvements, but probably won't be enough to satisfy the most vehement haters. A more extensive redesign is in the works, however, and the developers are gathering insight from users and experts. The empty window behavior in version 2.6 is based on one of the first specification drafts that emerged from the redesign project.

There are a number of important functionality improvements that will be welcomed by users, too. The freehand selection tool now has support for polygonal selections and editing selection segments, the GIMP text tool has been enhanced to support automatic wrapping and reflow when text areas are resized, and a new brush dynamics feature has added some additional capabilities to the ink and paint tools. Version 2.6 also has a few improvements for plug-in developers, like a more extensive scripting API for manipulating text layers.

For the next major release, the developers plan to improve GEGL support and integrate the development work that was done in Summer of Code projects. One of the Summer of Code projects that could land in 2.8 brings support for editing text directly on the image canvas, thus obviating the need for a text input dialog. Another project that we could see in 2.8 adds support for marking specific brushes and gradients with tags so that they are easier to find and organize.

Users can download the latest release from the GIMP web site. For more details about the new version, check out the official release notes.