Week highlights: new releases of RapidRaw, Gradia, Friction, and Handbrake; new features in GIMP.
GIMP
Recent changes are mainly various under-the-hood improvements and fixes. CmykStudent also restored support for HRZ Slow Scan Television Images and added support for JPEG-based file formats by Seattle FilmWorks (designed for digitized film).
Another WIP patch by CmykStudent is bringing support for the LCMS2 Fast Float plug-in. This will speed up 8-bit and 16-bit conversions and floating point precision operations.
RapidRAW
It’s a bit scary (but also impressive) how many changes have accumulated in RapidRaw in the past three weeks since I last mentioned it:
- Fuji RAF X-Trans Support (confirmed to work)
- Image importer
- Batch renaming
- Automatic image tagging with CLIP by OpenAI
- Color labels for images (plus a corresponding filter)
- Image straightening tool + reworked crop & transforms tool
- Grow, shrink, and feather AI-generated masks
- Simple OpenCV-based panorama stitcher
- Non-destructive eraser tool
- Better preset organization
- More realistic exposure adjustments and better highlights control
- Auto-crop when rotating to remove black areas
I think that the program would benefit from greater emphasis on processing quality. You can see the infamous pink tones where the image is overexposed:
You can fetch the latest build from GitHub.
Gradia 1.9.0
Alexander Vanhee made two new major releases of Gradia, a screenshot annotation tool. Here are the most interesting changes:
- New on-screen display design
- Support for zooming in and out (Shift and Alt work as modifiers for scrolling horizontally and vertically)
- Background gradient changes: redesigned color selector, up to 5 movable steps in a gradient, radial and conic gradients now possible
- Improved drag-and-drop support for loading from URLs
Get the latest code here or install from Flathub.
Friction 1.0.0rc2
Ole-André Rodlie published the second release candidate for the Friction animation editor.
Here are the major changes:
- New horizontal toolbar for tool settings (similar to what you know from e.g. Inkscape, see below fpr a screenshot)
- SVG can now by copy-pasted into your Friction project
- PNG images now have proper unassociated alpha, and TIFF images now have proper associated alpha
- 19 various UX/UI improvements and fixes
See here for the full release notes and download links.
Handbrake 1.10
The popular video transcoder got a new update:
- New “Social 10MB” presets
- Improved metadata passthru, preserving additional metadata including creation date, cover art, and location
- New option to choose the encoder color range
- SubRip/UTF-8 subtitles are now passed through to MKV without conversion to SSA
- Various OS-specific fixes and improvements for Windows, Linux, and macOS
Full release notes and downloads are on GitHub.
Artworks
New Arkandis by Deltakosh, made with Blender and Photoshop:
Ruined Mountain Pass by Doosan, made with Blender, Photoshop, Quixel Megascans, and Unreal Engine:
Hangar E by Mauger Baptiste, made with Blender and Photoshop:
The Station by Brendon Bauman, made with Blender and Photoshop:
Deep in Poison Forest by Andrew Andreev, made with Blender and Photoshop:
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