14 DAY TRIAL // On November 21, 2015, the GIMP developers were euphoric to announce the 20th birthday of the cross-platform, free and open-source GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) software.
In 20 years of activity, GIMP has become one of the most popular image manipulation programs, distributed for free in hundreds of GNU/Linux operating systems as the default image viewer and editor software.
But things will certainly not stop here, as the devs have big plans for GIMP, such as to finish the GTK+3 port, make a fully functional GEGL port, add basic OpenEXR support, further improve color management, and bring 16/32bit per channel processing.
These and many others will be implemented in the next major release of the software app, GIMP 2.10, which should see the light of day sometime in the near future. However, the big news we want to share with you today is that GIMP 3.0 will come someday with highly anticipated and very exciting features, and after that, the devs will work on non-destructive editing.
"On November 21st, 20 years ago today, Peter Mattis announced the availability of the 'General Image Manipulation Program' on Usenet (later on, the acronym would be redefined to stand for the 'GNU Image Manipulation Program')," wrote the developers.
On this monumental occasion, the team released a new maintenance version, GIMP 2.8.16, for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.
Here's what's new in GIMP 2.8.16
According to the internal changelog, which we've attached at the end of the article for reference, GIMP 2.8.16 brings improvements to the user interface, plugins, as well as various small under-the-hood changes.
Among the most important things, we can mention support for displaying image tabs in the Single-Window mode, improved support when writing XCF files, better support for the latest Mac OS X platform, and support for layer groups in OpenRaster files.
A crash in the Save dialog was fixed, the scroll area for tags will no longer appear too small, it is now possible to switch dock tabs using DND hovering, the BMP plugin received various improvements, and the PDF plugin now offers better font exporting.
Of course, there are several other small fixes, some of them related to things like the velocity parameter on .GIH brushes while others linked to layers transformation, ruler, loading of PSD files that have layer groups, Gfig, etc. Several translations were updated as well.
Download GIMP 2.8.16 right now from Softpedia.
On this day, 20 years ago, GIMP was announced. Wilber celebrates and thanks all users!
— GIMP (@GIMP_Official) November 21, 2015