Weekly-ish recap — 9 November 2022

Wed Nov 9, 2022 by Alexandre Prokoudine

Major changes in GIMP, new Ardour release, fun with Olive

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Hopefully, not many people will object to shorter yet more regular weekly-ish recaps!

GIMP updates

Version 2.99.14 is supposed to be released soon and whenever it comes, it will arrive with two more major changes.

The most important one deals with the much hated floating selection that used to seriously annoy users. Now, whenever you paste something into GIMP, it becomes a layer rather than a floating selection.

And since we are talking about @GIMP_Official, bitmaps are no longer pasted as godawful floating selections, they are just new layers now. See nothing fancy is happening in this video? That's the point! :) pic.twitter.com/4gC856Z8JP
— Libre Arts (@lgworld) November 9, 2022

There are just three cases where a floating item still makes sense, like pasting into layer mask. That’s a really big deal. It’s one of the things even experienced users hated because most of the time one would have to create a new layer from the floating selection anyway to work on whatever was pasted.

The change was introduced by Cmyk.Student (with help from Jehan) who is now busy working on the color picker tool:

Currently working on updates to the color picker tool. Now it shows you what the current color profile is! It also uses that profile to provide more accurate ranges instead of assuming sRGB space. The final part should be correcting the out-of-gamut indicator to match. pic.twitter.com/LNovX9pIwQ
— CMYK Student (@CmykStudent) November 8, 2022

Their other patches add loading of clipping paths from JPEG files, as well as loading and exporting clipping paths from/to PSD. I’m not sure if they will make it into the next development release, this remains to be seen.

The upcoming release is also featuring improvements to the Align/Distribute tool, made by Jehan Pagès. There’s now a pivot widget to choose which part of the target items will be aligned or distributed, new options to distribute with even horizontal or vertical gaps (rather than using anchor points), and a few more changes.

Quick demo for the pivot thing:

New Align/Distribute tool interaction in @GIMP_Official: select reference object, select multiple layers to align to it, choose which parts of these layers to align by pic.twitter.com/QrfYaGscSP
— Libre Arts (@lgworld) November 9, 2022

Now, something that isn’t coming in 2.99.14 yet something you should probably brace yourself for are… Vector layers!

Cmyk.Student pretty much cleaned up patches from the 2006 Google Summer of Code project to add this feature and did a quick demo:

Please note that this does not automatically mean shape drawing is coming. It’s a related feature, but it wasn’t part of the original project, so it will have to be developed separately.

The last time I checked there was no final decision if vector layers will be part of 3.0 or a later release (even something like 3.0.2). But c’mon, we’ve waited for 16+ years, this seems to be finally coming, we can wait a little longer yet.

Krita

The Krita team made two bugfix releases recently, you can get them here. Meanwhile, Tom Tom added a command to reset zoom mode, rotation, and mirroring status all at once. And Amy Spark introduced improvements and fixes to HEIF and JPEG-XL plugins.

Video editors

Shotcut 22.10 is out mostly with bugfixes.

Olive code has been upgraded to support building with Qt6, multiple markers can now be selected (press Ctrl and do rubberband selection on the timeline):

Recent new feature in @OliveTeam: press Ctrl and rubberband-select multiple markers to move them around, use a different color code, or delete pic.twitter.com/giYxyP54mm
— Libre Arts (@lgworld) November 9, 2022

There’s mask editing improvements in the works by WileECoder:

Ardour 7.1

The Ardour team released the first update in the new 7.x series. Most changes are various enhancements, usability improvements, and bugfixes. A few things stand out for me:

The Quick Audio Exporting dialog. This is mostly for when you need just the output file. No extra options, no slick export file naming, no loudness analysis. Just the output file, thank you very much.
Automation editing usability. This is actually part 1 of the work in the progress. Mads Kiilerich has a lot more in the pipeline, hopefully in time for 7.2.

By the way, there’s now an official v7.0 release video. It focuses on the timing revamp and several new features.

Narration was done by Paul’s wife Julie, production — by yours truly (voiceover script, video and animation, background “music” — for lack of a better word). All made with OBS, Inkscape, GIMP, Olive, Ardour 7. Fun experience, a lot more to learn and improve.