Great, lots of new features. But the crucial thing for me is still marked "wontfix": allow saving to external formats directly.

I often open some png or jpeg, edit it and want to save it. But no, I have to export it, confirm that I want to overwrite the file I am editing, and then confirm that I don't want to save to .xcf before closing file or Gimp. Infuriating. It makes me want to fork it just fix this nonsense, but I doubt anyone would want to go into trouble to install my fork. If gimp team don't want to change default behaviour they could at least add a setting to .gimprc: insane_export_behaviour=off. I know I would use it.</rant>

I haven't used Photoshop in quite a few years, but I'm pretty sure it works (or worked) the same way as Gimp. Maybe people who do a lot of work in image editing software are accustomed to this workflow? It seems reasonable, since exporting flattens layers and such, which a professional would probably want to preserve (and may not want to risk accidentally losing).

In PS you have "save as" dialogue in which you pick extension, and "save for web" which additionally lets you fine-tune optimisation.

In gimp ctrl+s brings you "save image" dialogue that explictly forbids you from saving anything but XCF, which I too find very annoying when doing quick fixes in batch of graphics that don't have xcf source.

I've taken to using the "File > Overwrite $filename..." option.

IIRC, the workflow in Photoshop is this: If you open a photo file, and when you press save there is only one layer in the file, pressing ctrl+s will not change the file format. Generally this means that minor changes (crop, recolor) preserve file types, while larger ones require you to export.

I don't use PS, but in my use case this behaviour is really annoying. Maybe I am not their target user, I don't know - the problem is that Gimp is really nice piece of software and it is exactly what I need.

I am baffled why they changed this and why they stick to this decision. But it looks like there is a plugin which fixes that (see one of the other answers), so - yay! :)

I'm using 2.8.10, and this behavior seems fixed. If you open a JPEG or PNG, there's now a menu option in File called "Overwrite file.jpg". If you do an export, this menu option is replaced with "Export to file.jpg" that repeats your last export without a dialog box. The shortcut is Ctrl+E.

The Overwrite option has been in there a long time and is essentially just an alias for the Export funtionality. Although it does help alleviate the situation, I totally agree with what Drdrdrq is saying - just make Ctrl-S work properly!

I don't think it's really clear that this is proper behaviour, though? If we're talking JPGs, every time you go through opening that file and "saving" it, it's going to be more and more mangled by the compression. (Also, each time you have to ask yourself "how much do I want to mangle it this time?" - which doesn't make sense). Effectively, the file you save definitely does not preserve what you have in the editor. On the other hand, with the current behaviour, Ctrl-S provides a certain guarantee that the output will be lossless.

And, sure, one can go off and appeal to nature and say "it's standard," but, I really don't buy that argument. There really isn't that much software that deals with the same stuff as GIMP. This isn't like a text editor or something. They are very much in a position to set their own standards when the defacto behaviour is wrong.

It's not just lossy compression you lose things like layers and stuff when you flatten the file to a bitmap.

In the general sense this is the correct behaviour but in the specific instance of doing simple bitmap manipulation like cropping "export as save" is expected and since thats the most common use case for many people it's probably frustrating.

To be perfectly honest people using gimp for image cropping should use something else, gimp gui is clunky, it starts slowly and there is no benefit.

There's a plugin for that :)

Maybe this is for you: https://github.com/akkana/gimp-plugins/blob/master/save-expo...

THANK YOU!!! Didn't know that, will try it as soon as I can. You made my day. :)

As a user of GIMP for what must be about 13 years (?) - this is the most retrograde change I can recall. I understand it philosophically, but it definitely feels like holding purity of a metaphor above established usability norms.

This used to be the default, in some older GIMP versions. There are good reasons for the change, but I agree with you - I should be able to doubleclick a png, edit it, save and quit. A config option would be just fine.

Managing a famous software, with each release we get "Good release but the crucial thing for me is that they didn't fix feature-X-for-me". However, in the current situation, I confirm that Gimp is obnoxious in claiming that other formats don't exist.

Second that, this is the only way I, and I suspect many others, ever use GIMP. The default save system is completely unintuitive in that context.

If that is your primary use case, all you need to do is to assign Ctrl+S to Overwrite command instead. Boom, you got your saving back.

And assuming you have dynamic keyboard shortcuts turned on (and why wouldn't you? Best thing ever.) this is about as painless as it gets.

Not really, no. I just use Edit -> Keyboard Shortcuts to configure GIMP, since it doesn't happen very often. (I didn't assign Ctrl+S to Overwrite for myself though, I like the new behaviour.)

I think the perfect work flow would be to automatically save a .xfc(could even be hidden) file and a name_edit.png file.

My main issue with Gimp was and still is the user experience. Every year I try and get back to using it, and every year I realize it doesn't compare to things like Sketch, Acorn or Adobe's suite. That's honestly the only reason I am still using MacOS.

There are also Affinity's Photo and Design apps for Mac that are very promising.

Try Krita, friend

I found Krita didn't work very well on OSX when I tried it this week. There was about 100ms of lag when drawing using the default brush on a blank canvas which is pretty unusable. Disappointing since I really like it on Windows. At least there's pixelmator I guess.

Krita developers are working on improvements to the Mac OS port, keep an eye out for 3.0 and 3.1 come out in the next few months.

ITT: People comparing gimp to Photoshop. I didn't see a mention of GEGL, which is the reason this release is so important. GEGL has been worked on for the better part of a decade now. it's finally being implemented. This is like Netscape 6 levels of big.

Using Gimp since the 90's, sure has changed for the better. Lately trying 2.9 on Linux, most recent versions seemed to have ironed out bugs pretty well and I can get work done with it.

Under Windows, gimp 2.8 has been marginal at best, runs quite slowly, sometimes crashing or freezing, kind of frustrating to use. I downloaded the 2.9 development binary this morning. While still slow, seems a bit faster than 2.8, and didn't crash. More testing will show if this holds up.

I know about people disfavoring workflow of gimp vs. photoshop, but given cost of latter, gimp remains a potentially worthy alternative. It depends on improving the efficiency of operations at least moderately, if so, it looks like the new version of gimp can succeed, even on Windows.

>...such as non-destructive editing are planned to be exposed in GIMP at a later development stage (v3.2 and onwards)

My grandchildren will probably see that.

good support for 16 bit editing, finally! Maybe I should try to come to terms with Gimp's GUI again...

I guess it's obvious to some but I just recently learned about the single window mode even though I used gimp for years.

This really is an amazing milestone. Almost a decade of work getting up to here!

Well done Gimp devs, and everyone involved.

Finally catching up to Photoshop from 1992. Only 23 years behind!

but going a bit beyond that as well ;)

"Porting plugins to use GEGL buffers simply means that a filter can operate on whatever image data you throw it at, be it 8bit integer or 32bit per color channel floating point. Which is great, because e.g. Photoshop CS2 users who tried 32bit mode quickly learnt they couldn't do quite a lot, until at least CS4, released several years later." http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/gimp-2-9-2-released

The two big things that I see in the release is GEGL support and better color management. The GEGL image process engine gives you lots of things but I think the most important is the ability to read and write 16/32bit per color channel data. I think this has been on everyones wish list for a long time. This release also upgrades to LittleCMS v2 providing much better color control and support for ICC v4 color profiles. :)

Finally, 16 bit per channel. It took freaking forever. Good job, guys.

The trouble with changing the guts of an image program to a new system is not just building the new guts, but then you realise it affects just about everything.

Source: I did the same thing on a much smaller open source project - not only was I still finding things broken up to 4 years later, but fairly early on, turned out I was the main person that understood the code after doing that, so became the maintainer too.

IMHO they need to push 2.10 out quickly with no new features unless they are completely ready to go. Then I'd like to see GTK3 get done with Wayland support. At that point GIMP would finally have its internals up to date. Feature work should be a lot easier from there.

On that topic I would be curious what people use on mac other than photoshop for both Gimp and Inkscape. The best I found so far is Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer but while they are superior than Gimp and Inkscape in many regards, they are also lacking in others :(

Pixelmator [1] for rasters (though it does have some vector support) and Sketch [2] for vectors are popular alternatives.

[1]: http://www.pixelmator.com/

[2]: https://www.sketchapp.com/

You can use Gimp and Inkscape on a Mac too. Gimp works very well with it. Inkscape isn't quite as good as it runs with Ctrl-based bindings under X11.

The experience of both is abysmal. Especially Inkscape is absolutely terrible and makes me angry every time I use it.

I have Sketch and Affinity designer, and both are very good programs, but for raw SVG-ing (where I want full compatibility or anything similar) I still use Inkscape. It works, and works well, I'm not sure what your issues may be but I've been using it for, like, 8 years already (on Mac, I mean) and the latest versions are the best so far. Same for Gimp. I usually use Pixelmator, but Gimp is my second option (and depending on what I want to do, first option.)

Keep in mind there are "native" apps now for both Gimp and Inkscape (i.e. no longer requiring X11 open and using C- bindings, I'm not sure if for Inkscape it's a fork or what, though, been a long time since I installed it). This has made working with them much better for me.

I love Inkscape on Linux (and it worked well on Windows for me in the past), but it's close to unusable on OSX.

This is one of the biggest reasons I could never use OSX as my OS.

AFAIK, Gimp and Inkscape (like most gfx software from Linux) doesn't support retina resolutions either (on Mac OS X at least), leading to all kinds of problems.

There is a gtk3 branch of gimp which brings HiDPI support. I still need to land the new frame clock (for vblank sync) for the gtk quartz backend though.

Check out Acorn. Been using it for a few years now.

I like Intaglio [1] for vector drawing. It always seems to get overlooked in threads like these, so I suspect it's not as well known as it IMHO deserves to be.

[1] http://www.purgatorydesign.com/Intaglio/

Not quite a replacement but I use Sketch for Mac. I really like it.

Same - recently began using using Sketch & would recommend it highly

Installed only to check if they fixed the problem with font antialising. Unfortunately no - white text on black background still has a rainbow on its edges.

It's still 2.8.16 in the Downloads section for me.

Here you go http://download.gimp.org/mirror/pub/gimp/v2.9/

It's a development release so it was in the Development snapshots section.

Thanks! There's no osx folder, so I guess there are no OS X binaries for development snapshots.

Not yet.

2.9.x are development releases.

Is this program any good on OS X? I am curious if it truly is as useful as Photoshop. Thanks.

I'm still using 2.6.12 ... would like to try the new versions if they work well.

Are there any famous/popular graphic designers that use GIMP?

Seems like an innocuous question. Why is it being downvoted?

I love Gimp, I'm using it everyday. It took me some time to get used to it coming from PS but now I don't even remember how PS was, haven't used it in almost a decade since it was PS3 or something.

Kudos to the Gimp developers and contributors.