Gimp 2.8

[dragonwolf]

Anyone else play with Gimp 2.8? I grabbed it yesterday and, for the half hour I used it to make a very basic image, I'm absolutely loving it! If I get some time, I might write up a full review, but...

Layer folders!

And single window mode (and, even better, the option to switch between single and multi window mode)!

Seriously, if you use Gimp with any regularity, check it out if you haven't already.

Comments

[strikeslip]

thanks for the tip off! I'm excited about handling text on the canvas instead of in a separate window. :)

[triadruid]

That sounds great, actually. I wonder if it's in the Linux repositories yet...

[kerravonsen]

Depends on your distro. Arch Linux has it.

[ewx]

It’s in Debian unstable and although doesn’t seem to be in current Ubuntu it looks like it’ll be in the next one.

[(Anonymous)]

There's a third party PPA for Ubuntu/Mint. Noobs Lab has the info for it (http://www.noobslab.com/2012/04/install-gimp-28-on-ubuntu-1204-precise.html). It's the one I used and it's been stable for me.

[dragonwolf]

Ack, that was me, but yeah, there's a PPA for it.

[blnchflr]

I've been looking forward to single window mode since forever!

Will test this weekend :)

[kerravonsen]

Okay, I've been checking out various new things in gimp 2.8

The good:

* Single window mode! (I have also been waiting for this forever) This means I can just open gimp and set it to Maximize and everything is fine.

The not-so-good:

* It's no longer possible to have the old way of using a brush with a gradient; you have to go through a bunch of hoops first.
1) Make a new brush dynamic setting, where the "Color" setting is set to "Fade".
2) Select that brush dynamic in the brush tool.
3) Set the brush dynamic options on the brush tool to Repeat "Sawtooth Wave" or Repeat "Triangular Wave" (I'm not sure what the difference is)

* The ability to tag resources such as brushes and patterns is good in theory, but
a) You can't say "I want the Basic brushes and the Texture brushes"; - that is, you can't say "I want brushes that are tagged either Basic or Texture"; if you try to select Basic, Texture in the filter, it will give you only things which are tagged Basic AND Texture. Which is annoying.
b) I have so many brushes that when I tried to use the filter (using the handy auto-tag-from-sub-directory-name thing) the GIMP stood there at 100% CPU for ten minutes until I gave up. Which is completely unusable. So I'm going to stick with GURM, which IS still usable, so long as one remembers to change all references of "2.6" to "2.8".

The jury is out on:

* I'm not sure what I think of the new text setup. I'll have to play with it a while.
* I'm not sure whether I find the separation of "Save" and "Export" to be more or less annoying than what GIMP had before.

[dragonwolf]

Yeah, I'm not too keen on the forced export thing, though I do like the "Save for web" option. I'll have to see if I can hotkey the new save options.