Week highlights: new releases of GIMP and Annotator, DIGImend’s developer resigns, Blender Studio publishes the Project Gold showcase.
GIMP 3.0rc1
The GIMP team finally released the first release candidate of v3.0.
Main changes as compared to 2.99.18:
- The program now ships with a new logo designed by Aryeom Han with input from more designers.
- The legacy icon theme has been redrawn in SVG by Denis Rangelov, so you can get the old icons scaling up nicely on 4K displays.
- The accuracy of transforms between color spaces has been improved. I’m particularly happy that Elle Stone was part of the effort because she is great at finding discrepancies.
- GEGL-based filters now can be applied to layer groups and have a “Merge filter” option to apply the filter destructively.
- The API is now stable, but there are no guides for porting old plugins yet. There are plans to write some, though.
Right now, there’s no knowing if the final v3.0 will drop before 2025, and I don’t see the point in speculating. After 24 years of waiting for non-destructive filters, I think we can wait a few more months if need be.
For the release announcement, please see here.
Annotator 2.0
Trevor Williams released a major update of Annotator, a nice little image editor designed for adding various annotations to images.
Highlights:
- PNG exporting now has support for transparency preservation.
- You can now use custom stickers.
- Inserting images is now possible.
- A color picker tool has been added.
- Speech and thought bubble shapes are now available in the Shape tool.
See here for more details on the release.
Nick resigns from DIGImend
Nikolai “spbnick” Kondrashov published a blog post where he announced his retirement from DIGImend, the project that brought support for numerous non-Wacom graphic tablets to Linux users:
I think I exhausted all the energy and interest I had for DIGImend now. [..] I’ll keep the project website and the GitHub organization in place, of course, but I will not be the one helping people out, or working on them. Thank you everyone!
He started the project in 2008 and did an amazing job developing drivers for Huion, KYE, UC-Logic, Ugee, XP-Pen, and Yiynova tablets. However, by mid-2020, his involvement with the project stopped almost entirely.
The next active contributor, José Expósito, did some work on both upstream kernel code and DIGImend in 2022, but he is reportedly in favor of switching everything over to HID-BPF. So while this could be the end of the project, it’s definitely not the end of support for non-Wacom tablets on Linux.
Project Gold showcase
Blender Studio released a showcase from Project Gold demonstrating stylized rendering.
For some behind-the-scenes details, you can watch the premiere party with the team behind the project.
New sculpting features in Blender 4.3
Farrukh Abdur published a great review of new sculpting features coming to Blender 4,3m currently scheduled for release on November 19.
Artworks of the week
“The Knife” by Sergio Villa-Isaza, made with Blender:
“RiverSide” by Abraham Joshua, made with Blender:
“Self Discovery” by hamzamajeedkhan, made with Blender
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