GIMP 2.9.2 Released With GEGL Technical Preview

Days after celebrating the project's 20th birthday, GIMP 2.9.2 has been released as the latest development snapshot towards the GIMP 2.10 image editor.

GIMP 2.9.2 features the GEGL port in its "first technical preview" form with the goal of GIMP 2.10 to be using the Generic Graphics Library for "everything under the hood." The port of GIMP to using GEGL already allows basic OpenEXR support, 16 and 32-bit per color channel processing, on-canvas previews for filters, experimental OpenCL hardware acceleration, and higher-quality downscaling. Support for non-destructive editing is planned in the future.

GIMP 2.9.2 also features new unified transform and warm transform tools while boasting improvements to existing tools. There are also some experimental tools added via the playground area of GIMP. Besides supporting OpenEXR, GIMP 2.9.2 also has initial support for WebP images.

Many more details on GIMP 2.9.2 along with planning for GIMP 2.10 can be found via the GIMP.org news entry. The port of GIMP to GTK+ 3.x isn't planned until after GIMP 2.10 ships, which will then lead to GIMP 3.0.