Gimp 2.4
I’ve heard it said that a true artisan never blames his tools for his shortcomings. I say that better tools let you get more work done faster and with less aggravation, and in that vein I can only say FINALLY to the release of Gimp 2.4.
A quick qualifier here. I am not a Photoshop hater. I’m just cheap. Moving on…
Gimp has finally fixed my largest beef with the software, and a cause of much consternation with my image editing, especially digital paintings. Previously, when zooming your canvas in and out, the Gimp would simply do a point sample on the image, causing all kinds of chunky artifacts and making it extremely difficult to do anything with a canvas scaled below 50%. No more. The new Gimp finally scales canvases smoothly when zoomed, something that I wish would have been implemented a long time ago.
Besides the ability to see your canvas at scales smaller 100%, a quick glance at the toolbar on the side reveals quite a few new tools. There are a couple of new selection modes, none of which I think I will use, and a Photoshop style healing brush. Neat.
But the real kicker for me in the tools department are the new transformation tools. Any selection region or layer can be squished, scaled, rotated, perspective distorted, etc, using easy drag tabs. Which I think is just awesome. The previous transformation tools were almost universally difficult to use, some of them even required you to put in numbers and kind of guess what the result would look like. WYSIWYG tools like this are a great addition to the program.
One thing that I’m really curious to test out is memory consumption. The previous Gimp did a fairly poor job of managing memory, with layers taking up RAM according to the number of pixels on the layer, instead only storing portions of the layer that weren’t empty. I hit a few walls on larger images that required me to cut some corners and scale back a bit before, hopefully those times are a thing of the past now.
I haven’t really had a chance to get any hands on time with it yet, over the weekend I plan to do some coloring work to get used to the interface changes and such. Check back Monday-ish or so, I should have some new color work in the gallery by then.