The Free Selection tools' behavior is now more consistent with other selection tools' behavior. Now if you make a polygonal selection and close it, you still can tweak positions of nodes. Pressing Enter or switching to another tool will then confirm the selection and render the marching ants. To be released in 2.9.6/2.10.

Thanks to Benoit Touchette, GIMP now has an updated metadata viewer and a newly added metadata editor. Both features will be available in 2.9.6/2.10.

All right, all right, we know we told you we only fix bugs now. But that can be a bit daunting, no? So +Michael Natterer recently completed refactoring GIMP tools to move out all on-canvas user interaction code into reusable code. The intention of that is two-fold:

1) More code reuse between GIMP tools;
2) Making it possible for GEGL-based plug-ins to have on-canvas controls.

As a testbed, two GEGL-based filters, Supernova and Spiral (experimental GEGL op), support this currently. Here is a video by Ell who contributed to that effort.

We expect this to be one of the areas new developers could join, because it doesn't take too much effort to hack on, and it's definitely fun.

For now, one still needs to write C code to add on-canvas interaction to plug-ins. This is something we want to investigate further, either by extending the GEGL UI metadata language (GUM) or by using something like Lua. There is no decision on that yet.

All the code is in Git master and will make it to 2.9.6/2.10 (and yes, we know we should have released 2.9.6 by now, sorry about that).

"This tutorial is for GIMP version 2.8 and is intended to teach beginners how to use the software."

While GIMP is quite configurable, there used to be a bit of an issue with the Keyboard Shortcuts dialog. First of all, some action names were cryptic and difficult to understand. And then if you used translated version of GIMP, many action names were in English only.

So we did two things: 1) made action names more human-readable and descriptive, 2) marked a bunch of user-visible messages for translation.

Once 2.9.6/2.10 are out (at a later time), and contributors update respective translations, configuring keyboard shortcuts should be easier.

A quick templates update has just landed thanks to a contribution by Klaus Staedtler. GIMP 2.9.x now features a more up-to-date selection of templates for both print and digital media. Additionally, a handful of new presets are now available for the Crop tool.

Thanks to Lionel Ngo we'll be shipping GIMP 2.9.6 with much requested multipage PDF exporting (where every page is a former layer in GIMP). We are pretty much ready to release 2.9.6, just waiting for Windows and macOS packagers to sync their schedule to make .exe and .dmg builds along with the source code release.

The +G'MIC team just reached a nice milestone with a 2.0 release of their image processing framework and GIMP plugin! Congratulations to the team!