GIMP 2.8 Released

For all those art-lovers and Linux image editors out there, GIMP has been updated to version 2.8 after 2 long years of development.

GIMP 2.8 boasts a wealth of improvements - both under the hood and above it. The GIMP Users site has an excellent summary of all that’s new in GIMP 2.8, but a few choice highlights are listed below.

Single window mode

One thing I always hated about GIMP was the its panels and toolbars being all in separate windows. With this new release, they all fuse into one. single. window. Finally they heard the community and they provided us with a more Photoshop-like experience.

On canvas text editing
This is a nice feature to have and it makes text editing much easier. I have been too accustomed to Photoshop's quick text editing on the canvas so this gave me lots of trouble before. Now it's available in this new release.


Layer Groups
Layers can now be grouped. So all you Photoshop converts- rejoice!

Download

As the release GIMP 2.8 hasn’t been officially announced you can’t get the latest release anywhere but the FTP.

The release candidate of GIMP 2.8 is, however, available to install in Ubuntu 12.04 via a dedicated PPA. The usual caveats apply when installing software from third party sources.

• sudo add-apt-repository ppa:otto-kesselgulasch/gimp
• sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install gimp

[via OMG! Ubuntu!]