Week highlights: new releases of Gradia, RapidRAW, and displaycal; new features in GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape; Blender gets another major sponsor.
GIMP
Jehan started working on new infrastructure to pass messages to running GIMP installations. The intention is to notify users on those rare occasions where critical updates are available.
Meanwhile, Ohnishi Yasuo has been working on a 3rd-party plugin for creating parametric luminance masks.
Krita
Wolthera posted a Mastodon thread about her work getting rich text editing into Krita. If you want to test the builds and provide feedback, it’s crucial that you read the thread on Krita Artists, too.
Dmitry Kazakov has been busy with Wayland support for the past several weeks. Most recently, he merged Wayland color management support. The foundation is in place, HDR support is now work in progress (no publicly available patches yet).
I’ve seen some bickering online about how Krita is behind the times and should’ve adopted Wayland ages ago. The fact is, Wayland wasn’t color-managed at all until fairly recently, and that’s a kind of a big deal for Krita’s target audience.
In fact, several issues had to be addressed in both Wayland and KWin to ensure the basics worked in Krita. Similarly, the graphic tablet stack outside Krita wasn’t problem-free on Wayland and had to be patched as well. Not to mention that the latest dev builds of Krita are completely untested on other Wayland compositors. Rabbit hole, here we are.
Gradia 1.10
This screenshot annotation tool just keeps getting better. Here are some of the changes in the latest few releases:
- Annotation tools now have convenient single-key shortcuts.
- The Censor tool has been improved.
- The Text tool now supports multi-line annotations.
- The annotation section in the sidebar has been redesigned.
- You can now select if you want to copy or overwrite screenshot files on exit.
- Tools like Square and Arrow now use Shift to constrain drawing.
- The arrow tool shape has been redesigned.
- Gradient steps for the background can now be edited manually.
See here for the list of changes and source code archives. You can also install Gradia from Flathub.
RapidRAW 1.3.13
Here’s the latest in RapidRAW:
- Clipping warnings in the Curves tool.
- Notifications on new release availability.
- Enhanced accuracy in the HSL panel
- Community members can now share and reuse presets.
- High-quality inpainting should now provide results that have nearly the same resolution as the original image.
Downloads and full release notes are here.
Inkscape
Here are two patches I find most interesting:
- PBS submitted a patch that increases the input sample rate for several drawing tools from once per frame to whatever the input device allows, to allow for smoother drawing with high-resolution graphic tablets.
- Mike Kowalski adjusted the ruler rendering to align more closely with the proposal by Henrique T. M. Perticarati. This is already in the main development branch.
displaycal-py3 3.9.17
A while ago, the original DisplayCAL developer stopped working on this display calibration and characterization tool. As it depended on Python2, someone needed to port it to Python3 to unobsolete it. Erkan Ozgur Yilmaz did that, and he now maintains it as a fork.
Most recently, Erkan updated the code to support ArgyllCMS 3.4.0+. This primarily affects what observer names (e.g., CIE 2012 2° vs CIE 2015 2°) you are going to see in the user interface. Older ArgyllCMS versions are still supported.
See here for release notes and downloads.
Blender
Bolt Graphics has joined the Blender Foundation’s Development Fund as a Corporate Patron. That’s another €240k a year to boost the development:
This support will be dedicated towards general Blender core development, with the goal of continuously improving content creation tools for individuals and small teams.
BaconPaul Two Filters
Paul of Surge XT fame created a quick prototype for the new Filter API as a separate Two Filters plugin. And you know what? People seem to be loving it for what it is today.
Bedroom Producers Blog covered it, Synth Anatomy covered it, and so did a few more outlets.
Here is a quick demo from VU LUFS:
Builds are only currently available through GitHub CI.
OB-Xf
As if it wasn’t quite sufficient, the loosely formed Surge XT team now got another project, and it’s none other than a fork of OB-Xd called OB-Xf. Here is the deal.
Some time after the original source code was released, the FOSS version pretty much stopped being updated (as compared to the DiscoDSP version). So, around March 2025, joeloftusdev took matters into his hands and started making changes.
After introducing some minor improvements, he moved the development over to the Surge XT organization and started refactoring the code, adding new features, and changing the user interface. Here are some of the differences between the fork and the original:
- Previously hidden parameters are now exposed in the user interface.
- The mixer now has a ring modulator and noise color selection.
- The control section now has separate pitch bend ranges for up and down.
- An actual second LFO has been added (haven’t tested it yet).
- The Voice Variation now has the Levels parameter.
There’s also a lot of under-the-hood work going on, with BaconPaul’s involvement.
Unfortunately, the changes break compatibility with old Ob-Xd presets. Plus, installing the new theme is a bit cumbersome at the moment, and OB-Xf won’t show up properly without it. Still, it’s a really exciting development!
Artworks
Mobile Suit Gundam Wing 30th Anniversary by Yanting, made with Unreal Engine, Maya, and Blender:
Stoneflow Vale by Jonas Nathanael (who is back to his favourite cities topic, it seems), made with Blender and Krita:
The Crab Titan by Deltakosh, made with Blender and Photoshop:
Valley of Dead Trees by Daria Khmelewska, made with ZBrush, Blender, and Photoshop:
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