Back to recaps after a summer break. What’s new recently: Wacom upgrades its Blender Foundation support; new releases of GIMP, RapidRAW, Kdenlive, and Shotcut; new features in Inkscape and Ardour.
GIMP 3.1.4
The very nearly π release comes with major and minor new features:
- Vector layers, a 2006 GSoC project finally merged. Useful on its own accord, but also a prerequisite for shape tools.
- Link layers, a hack from a few years ago, now more or less finalized and merged.
- Ctrl+B/I/U shortcuts now available when formatting text on the canvas.
- The MyPaint Brush tool has been switched to use the v2 engine, sans spectral blending.
- The Animation Playback plugin UI has been revamped to look more like a regular video player.
I’ll probably make a separate post about the release.
RapidRAW 1.3.11
I’ve missed a few recent releases, so here’s the overall recap starting at 1.3.9:
New features:
- One-click AI sky masks
- Faster editing thanks to optimized pipeline
- LUT files in .cube, .3dl, .png, .jpg, .jpeg, and .tiff file formats can now be applied
- Chromatic aberration correction is available now
- RapidRAW will now try to estimate the file size of exports
- Various fixes have been applied
I did a quick test of AI sky maps, and the result isn’t great. The algorithm will miss enclosed parts of the sky entirely, e.g., between branches of trees on the horizon.
The mask will also cross over bits of a mountain ridge:
However, since it’s early code, let’s hope things will improve eventually. You can grab downloads here.
Inkscape
The object attributes dialog is really beginning to look like the original proposal, and quite similar to what Figma/PenPot users have grown accustomed to:
Blender + Wacom
When Wacom joined the ranks of corporate sponsors of Blender Foundation with a €30K/year contribution around December 2024, there wasn’t much talk. Now that they’ve upgraded all the way to Corporate Patron, which means €240K/year, it’s all the talk in the community :)
This sponsorship boost will provide the necessary funding for Blender to expand its presence to tablet devices—a project the team announced in July this year.
FreeCAD
There have been some interesting changes in FreeCAD lately.
Kacper Donat delivered the main code of his grant-funded work to add transparent previews in PartDesign. There may be further changes in other workbenches, but for now, here is a quick demo:
You can now create a two-sided extrusion, as well as two-dimensional arrays and multiple spacings in one go. Both features have been added by PaddleStroke. Here is his video:
ArchSite now has interactive sun position and ray visualization, developed by furgo16:
Multiple bodies support is now available by default. The feature was added in v1.0, but it was considered experimental and thus off by default. Seems like it has earned its right to be on for everyone now.
Additionally, Brad Collette finalized the initial CAM workbench roadmap, you can find it here.
The project soon enters hard feature freeze. There’s a possibility we’ll see FreeCAD 1.1 later this year. However, if the v1.0 development cycle is any indication, I’d rather bet on early 2026.
Kdenlive 25.08
This is a pretty exciting update:
- Moving and resizing SVGs and images in the titler is now possible
- Better system theme support for scopes
- A whole lot of UX/UI improvements for project notes, monitor, and guides/markers
- NVIDIA 10-bit x265 encoding
- 10-bit export profiles in the render dialog, with a fallback to 8-bit when using composition or non-avfilter effects
- Cleaner UI for the audio tracks mixer
The team also made this somewhat confusing statement in the release notes:
Added Enable Hardware Decoding option in the Config Wizard in preparation for future hardware acceleration features
I asked them to explain what it means, and Farid was kind enough to provide some background:
This feature adds hardware decoding, but you won’t see any huge performance improvement yet because there needs to be more work done in MLT to improve moving frames between GPU and CPU.
See here for full release notes.
Shotcut 25.08
This is mainly a bugfix release. Here are two new features, though:
- BT.2020 color space can now be selected in the preview.
- You can now embed markers as chapters when exporting a video (see the export job context menu).
Full release announcement is here.
Ardour
There’s been a ton of under-the-hood changes in Ardour in August, but here are some user-visible ones:
- You can now easily remove all inactive tracks (hidden from view in the Mixer)
- Automation editing from keyboard has been more or less completed (but I’ve yet to test it myself).
- basics of tempo & meter fields in region editor(s), regions can create their own tempo map
- Now that the bottom panel is available for both MIDI and audio regions, you can select in Preferences where to edit the regions when you click on them.
- Another new Preferences option allows disabling implicit grouping in the Mixer window. So if you don’t like selecting multiple channels and adjusting faders by the same amount or batch-toggling Mute/Solo, you can switch that off entirely.
Realistically, I don’t think we’ll see v9.0 this year (although I’d love to be corrected on that). 2026, though? Seems doable to me.
Artworks
Hope by Philipp Urlich, made with Krita:
Occult Ritual by Marcus Östergren, made with Krita:
How To Train Your Dragon (2025) - Dragon Visual Development by Juan Hernández, made with Blender, ZBrush, and Substance 3D Painter for the live action movie:
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