Week highlights: new releases of GIMP, Inkscape and FreeCAD; KDE Plasma is getting an HDR calibration wizard.
HDR calibration in Plasma
KDE’s Plasma 6.4.0 is getting a simple HDR calibration wizard:
Some more information is available in this recent post.
The work was done by Xaver Hugl who is, apparently, one of the people behind HDR support in Wayland. You can read his earlier posts on HDR and color management in KDE on his blog.
GIMP 3.0.4
The new version comes with bug fixes and minor improvements:
- The space bar now allows temporarily switching to moving layers (or paths) again. You can also set it to do nothing — that’s a new option in the drop-down list on the Canvas Interaction page of Preferences.
- The Difference Cloud filter lost its settings when the team obsoleted it and switched to the GEGL-based implementation of the same functionality. The settings are now available again.
- The Screenshot plug-in now uses radio buttons again rather than drop-down lists for selecting the area and the color profile options.
- The MyPaint Brush tools options UI has been redesigned to match the layout of other painting tools.
In the meantime, 3rd-party plugin developers continue to port their old plugins. Resynthesizer, most commonly used for editing objects out of photos, is now initially available for GIMP3 in a dedicated git branch. Lloyd Konneker hasn’t finished cleaning things up (e.g., translations are to be brought back), but I tested the port, and it’s functional.
Another recent attempt is the Fix-CA plugin for fixing chromatic aberration in photos. The plugin seems to work on GIMP3 now, but the preview widget has an unholy size on a HiDPI display. I’m not sure where the bug is, but reported it all the same.
It could be useful turning Fix-CA into a GEGL op instead, but the plugin has an extra feature — rendering custom guides in the preview. GEGL ops can totally render handles on the canvas in GIMP (try Vignette), but I’m not sure that goes as far as guides.
An earlier example of a GIMP3 port is the Batcher plugin by Kamil Burda for batch-processing images, where the first GIMP3-capable release was out in February. Or Intel’s OpenVINO plugins for AI-based processing (upscaling, semantic segmentation, and, regrettably, Stable Diffusion).
Inkscape 1.4.2
The team released a new release that, I think, was originally intended to be bugfix-only, but some new features sneaked in.
Release highlights:
- Inkscape now displays a splash screen to hint that the program is loading in the background.
- Initial support for importing Linearity Curve files (formerly Vectornator).
- Improved support for importing Affinity Designer files: better support for vector masks, support for linked and embedded images, support for symbols and additional shapes.
- A new extension, Clean up Paths, removes duplicate nodes and nodes closer than a given threshold.
- Over 70 major and minor fixes and improvements; also, updated translations.
FreeCAD 1.0.1
This is purely a bugfix release with over 170 commits backported from the main development branch. The release is a bit overdue, and there should be more releases like it. MangoJelly went through the list of commits and did a video on the changes in this release.
Among recently proposed changes, I’d probably pick the new tool library for the CAM workbench, contributed by knipknap:
Artworks
NOOR: The Tragedians (3/3) by Jerry Yu, made with Blender and Photoshop:
Necromanсer by Darya Siarheyeva, made with Krita:
Broken Seal by Dmitriy Parchutov, made with Blender, Photoshop, and Procreate:
Oswald’s Alchemical Aether by Shawn Looyen, made with Blender and Photoshop
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