Highlights: new releases of Zrythm and Guitarix, new features in Krita, darktable, Siril, Blender.
Graphics
Niels De Graef continues bringing more GTK3-specific features to GIMP. The program now uses a listbox widget for icon themes and title bar formats. And thanks to Stanislav Grinkov, you can now reverse the order of pages as layers when importing PDF.
There’s a lot of bugfixing in Krita following v4.4.2 release but also some new things: the context menu for on-canvas crop tool now provides options to lock width/height/ratio, and then there are some styling improvements all around.
Photography
darktable now has with a new darkroom tab: basic adjustments. Basically, if you only ever change e.g. white balance, exposure, contrast, and ‘strength’ in the velvia module, you can pull out these sliders and make them accessible in a single place. No need to navigate modules at all.
If you ever used Ardour extensively, you will be nodding right about now, because it’s exactly like adding a plug-in’s setting as a slider to a mixer’s channel. Except instead of right-clicking on the plug-in in the mixer, you do it from the dialog where you configure module groups.
The Siril team seems to be switching to bugfix mode for 0.99.8 release:
New in dev, maybe last feature before the release:
— SiriL (@SiriL_Official) January 25, 2021
Very convenient for finding small objects in wide field, like the star of an exoplanet.#photometry #astrometry #astrophotography #FOSS #opensource #science pic.twitter.com/BzNYBHRGvR
3D
Blender 2.92 isn’t out yet but there’s already even more new stuff to be available in 2.93: more drag’n’drop support in the Asset Browser, new Attribute Sample Texture node in geometry nodes, improved Object menu organization and naming, and more. See today’s meeting notes for details or watch this video:
Music-making
New alpha release of Zrythm is out with Modulator macro buttons (video by Zrythm team).
Robin Gareus recently started work towards M1 and macOS Big Sur support in Ardour, while Paul Davis keeps hacking on the nutempo 2 branch (bringing all sorts of MIDI fixes). The rest is plumbing work.
Guitarix 0.42.0 was out recently and now features a rework of tube emulation, contributed by Damien Zammit. This makes the simulation more believable, with better dynamic responses. It will break existing presets, although developers are confident that users will love the new sound a lot more than they will dislike updating presets. The release tarball is here.
Rob van den Berg released the first couple of versions of Drops, a simplistic sampler that allows loading a WAV files, cutting it, setting notes for clips, and tweaking filters. The second one adds pitch tune and oversampling.
Tutorials
A GIMP photo manipulation tutorials from Codingcreator:
Really quick tutorial on drawing a penguin with Inkscape, the part with shading on the beak is a bit wtf though :)
You might want setting 0.25 playback speed on this Krita painting timelapse. Fortunately, the video has 60 frames per second rate, so that’s bearable.
Okay, this is positively crazy: procedural galaxies in Blender:
Artworks
New interior design render with Blender, by George Turmanidze:
Great mini story about an evil sloth, by Juan Hernández, made with Blender:
Chris Hildenbrand did probably the funniest take for the hat challenge on Inkscape users’ group on Facebook.
Meanwhile, dillerkind keeps drawing cute characters with Inkscape:
New winter landscape by Philipp Urlich:
Each of my weekly recaps involves researching, building and testing software, reporting bugs, talking to developers, actually watching videos that I recommend, and only then writing. Time-wise, that's typically between 10 and 20 hours. If you enjoy the work I do, you can support me on Patreon or make a one-time donation.
