New Shores

Until recently, the feature-rich GIMP graphics program [1] was very much an acquired taste. Too complex for amateur users and lacking CMYK support, GIMP had a way of annoying professional photographers with a meager 8 bits per color channel. The developers took the criticism seriously and improved usability in version 2.4. The introduction of the new GEGL [2] version 2.6 brings GIMP a step closer to the promise of professional image processing. GIMP supports up to 32 bits per color channel and includes sorely missed support for CMYK (see the "GEGL" box).

If you are familiar with GIMP 2.4, you might not notice any major differences in version 2.6. The most obvious change is that the file window is displayed permanently; GIMP displays the window without first loading a file. Because the window has a menubar, the toolbox has become redundant, and the developers removed it to improve visibility.

When you load an image, the scale is shown as a percentage at the bottom of the screen (Figure 1). Whereas GIMP only offered fixed values previously, it now accepts keyboard input, thus letting users freely scale the image view.

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