There's A New Version Of GIMP Coming And It's Still Free To Download

There's a new version of GIMP arriving soon and as well as general improvements to memory use and how it handles other system resources, a new shadows-highlights filter has been added along with the ability to finally use layer masks on layer groups. 

As the name suggests, the new shadows-highlights filter allows the user to adjust the shadows and highlights in an image and this tool can be found under the 'Colours' menu. Masks on layer groups are finally possible, too, and the curves and levels filters have been updated so users can now switch between linear and perceptual (non-linear) modes.

Those who regularly use the brush tool can now lock it to a certain zoom level and rotation angle and colour picking with the colour dock (on macOS) is now colour-managed. 

Other additions include a new dashboard dock that helps with monitoring GIMP's resource usage, a built-in debugging system that gathers data on errors/crashes and a crash recovery that will attempt to backup all images with unsaved changes, then suggest to reopen them the next time you start the application.

Tweaks have been made to the screenshot system and JPEG 2000 codestream files are also now supported.

There's no confirmed date on when GIMP 2.10.0 will be available but the GIMP team says they are '12 blocker bugs away from making the final release' so watch this space.