GIMP 2.10 RC2 Released With Multi-Threaded Painting, Rewritten Themes

In the three weeks since GIMP 2.10 finally reached the release candidate stage a lot of changes have continued to land and today marks the GIMP 2.10 RC2 availability.

GIMP 2.10 RC2 most notably offloads painting to its own CPU thread. This should yield better performance with the painting and display code-paths running on separate CPU threads. Thanks to underlying improvements, in the future this parallelization framework may also be used elsewhere besides just for the painting process. The GIMP 2.10-RC2 release also features GEGL updates that should further enhance the performance of this open-source image manipulation program.

GIMP 2.10 RC2 also overhauls the themes support, improves the gradient tool to work with a linear color space, provides new on-canvas controls for 3D image rotation, better mask handling, translation updates, and more.

According to the GIMP 2.10 RC2 announcement, the release is just eight blocker bugs away from finally releasing GIMP 2.10.0 stable. For reference, GIMP 2.8.0 premiered back in May of 2012.