GIMP 2.8.4 Released, Install It In Ubuntu

GIMP 2.8.4 has been released yesterday, bringing some important bug fixes. This is the stable GIMP branch and no new features will be added in the 2.8.x releases, only bug fixes.

Here are the most important changes in GIMP 2.8.4:

• Better names for the default filters in save and export
• Make tool drawing (esp. the brush outline) much more responsive
• Remember the "maximized" state across sessions
• Simplify the splash image code a lot, makes it appear immediately again
• Allow the text tool to start on an image without layers
• Various fixes for text style attribute handling
• Set unconfigured input devices to eraser if GTK+ says they are erasers
• Make libgimp drawable combo boxes aware of layer groups
• Fix item width in GimpPageSelector (used e.g. in PDF import)
• Better default values in the Drop Shadow script
• Fixed bugs in the BMP plug-in
• Lots of bug fixes and translation updates

The next major GIMP release - 2.10 -, should get high bit depths, support for layer masks on layer groups, complete the port to GEGL and more, while with version 3.0, GIMP should finally be ported to GTK3. There's no planned release date for either GIMP 2.10 or 3.0 yet.

Install GIMP 2.8.4 in Ubuntu 12.04, 12.10 or 13.04

Ubuntu 13.04, 12.10 or 12.04 users can install the latest GIMP 2.8.4 by using Otto's PPA - add the PPA and install / upgrade GIMP using the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:otto-kesselgulasch/gimp
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gimp

From the same PPA you can also install GIMP Plugin Registry which is a collection of hundreds of GIMP plugins:

sudo apt-get install gimp-plugin-registry

G'MIC is also available in this PPA. It's a tool that comes with a huge list of filters and effects - install it using the following command:

sudo apt-get install gimp-gmic

For source files, Windows or Mac OS X binaries, see the GIMP downloads page.