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The GIMP developers are proud to release version 2.2 of the GNU Image Manipulation Program. About nine months after version 2.0 hit the road, we have completed another development cycle and can bring a new stable GIMP to our users’ desktops.
The GNU Image Manipulation Program is ideal for amateur photographers, web designers, and many other people who want to create and edit digital images. It is a very powerful application, with features including: channels, layers and masks; colour operations such as levels, curves and threshhold; advanced selection operations using intelligent scissors and selection channels; and much more.
GIMP is free software, which means it can be freely distributed and modified. This makes it well suited to be included on cover disks of magazines dedicated to digital photography or image editing, or to be included with digital cameras, scanners, printers etc. As free software, its capabilities are ultimately limited only by the collective imagination of the community of free software contributors. More information about GIMP is available at www.gimp.org.
GIMP can be downloaded as source code from ftp.gimp.org or from one of the mirrors listed in the Downloads section. We expect that binary packages for the different supported platforms and distributions will show up soon. Unless you are experienced with building software from source, you should wait until binary packages become available.
Version 2.2 is an update on GIMP 2.0. GIMP 2.2 is fully backward compatible to GIMP 2.0. Plug-ins and scripts written for GIMP 2.0 will continue to work and don’t need to be changed nor recompiled to be used with GIMP 2.2. We do however hope that plug-in authors will update their plug-ins for GIMP 2.2 and adapt the GUI changes we did with this version.
GIMP 2.2 replaces GIMP 2.0. It is advised that you uninstall GIMP 2.0 before installing GIMP 2.2. If you want to keep GIMP 2.0 installed in parallel to GIMP 2.2, you have to choose a separate prefix which is not in your default library search path.
The GIMP user manual has been improved a lot over the last couple of months. We stronly suggest that you install the latest version of the gimp-help-2 package together with GIMP 2.2. You will then have context-sensitive help in almost all dialogs by hitting the F1 key or by pressing the Help button which has been added to most dialogs.
gimp-help-2 is available from ftp.gimp.org. The manual can also be accessed online at docs.gimp.org.
Thanks to the pre-releases we did over the last month, this code has already seen quite some testing but a lot has changed since version GIMP 2.0 and we could very well have introduced new bugs. If you find any , make sure you report them at bugzilla.gnome.org (after checking that it isn’t reported already).
We have collected a list of changes and new features in the GIMP Wiki. For a detailed list of changes, please have a look at the NEWS file, which is contained in the tarball and available online.
You can expect updated versions of gimp-gap, gimp-freetype, gimp-plugin-template and hopefully also gimp-perl to appear over the next weeks. The GIMP source tree will soon be branched so that development can continue towards GIMP 2.4. We haven’t yet made up a detailed roadmap, but we will try to publish one soon.
Lots of people have helped to make this release happen. Thanks to all the contributors who wrote code, sent patches, worked on the docs, translated the user interface, reported bugs or just made helpful suggestions. GIMP 2.2 wouldn’t exist without your help. Keep it coming!
Happy GIMPing, The GIMP developers