Week highlights: new releases of GIMP, Blender, PDF4QT, libwacom, and LosslessCut.
GIMP 3.0
This release was nearly seven years in the making and delivers some long-overdue features:
- Layer filters
- Multiple layers selection
- Layer locks
- CMYK exporting / late binding
- Color management updates
- Text outlines
- Better file formats support
I already covered those in a dedicated post, check it out.
The roadmap will likely be revisited sometime after the v3.0 release.
Piranesi
Bruno Postle published his Python script called piranesi which implements the perspective transformation technique by the Italian archaeologist, architect, and artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi (18th century). You probably have seen some of the etchings by Piranesi before:
Source: The Metropolitan Art Museum
As an architect, Bruno has a lifelong interest in veduta (which used to be a thing for people in the Hugin community, check out e.g. the Panini projection). If you want to know more about this particular project, Bruno posted a detailed write-up on his Piranesi perspective research several years ago.
libwacom 2.15
The new version adds data for built-in Wacom units in various Dell, Lenovo, and Fujitsu laptops, but beyond that it ships with support for:
- XP Pen Innovator 16, Deco 01 V3, and Deco Pro S tablets;
- Wacom Intuos 3rd gen S, M, and L tablets.
Once the new release finds its way to distributions, the GNOME configuration panel will pick the new data to expose the right controls (and so should the KDE configuration panel, but I’m not sure).
PDF4QT 1.5
Completely missed this update of PDF4QT, a PDF editor by Jakub Melka, a couple of weeks ago.
This is mainly a bugfix release with some quality-of-life additions:
- Zooming in now anchors to the cursor position.
- When you enable the highlighting tool, you now select the highlighter color first (the color was hardcoded before that).
- The page order can now be reversed in the PageMaster mode (useful when you scan pages back to front).
For a full list of changes, please see here.
Blender 4.4
The new version arrives with fixes for over 700 reported issues, which alone is very impressive, but also with various new features and improvements:
- Newly introduced action slots to easily animate multiple elements together.
- VSE now has text editing right in the preview, as well as H.265 and 10/12-bit video support. It has also switched to BT.709 for rendering video.
- Various modeling improvements.
- The sculpting toolbox got a brand-new Plane brush.
- The CPU compositor has been rewritten, several filter nodes are now much (up to x10) faster.
- Blender 4.4 is built with libraries that are in the VFX Reference Platform 2025.
See here for the full release notes. There’s a video recap as well:
LosslessCut 3.65.0
This is a convenient video editor designed for one job, which is cutting bits out of videos without re-encoding.
Lots of changes in this new version, here are some of the most interesting ones:
- Markers are now available to mark locations (not used for exporting).
- You can now play multiple audio tracks simultaneously.
- Faster waveform rendering.
- Shortcuts for jump & seeking to previous/next segments.
See here for the full list of changes.
Tantacrul on UX
Martin Keary aka Tantacrul gave a talk about UX design at FOSS Backstage Design 2025 in Berlin recently, showcasing his team’s work on Audacity and MuseScore, but also showing some user testing he did for Inkscape (and the devs are listening).
Artworks
The Legend of Ramayana with Amish by Sachin Chauhan, made with Krita:
Winter by Philipp A. Urlich, made with Krita:
Iron Trials - Village by Asher Sobek Israel, made with Blender and Photoshop:
Runic - Aden by KyzosArt, made with Krita:
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