GIMP 2.6 – Features for Digital Painters

I am quite in a great mood test driving GIMP 2.6 release.

It was released quite some time back, and had installed it on my Windows boot. But I had been lazy to install it on my Ubuntu boot where I usually work. The Ubuntu 8.04 did not have a backport of the latest GIMP 2.6 – and since it was not available through Synaptic Package Manager, I just waited a bit for Ubuntu 8.10 to be released on October 30.

Layout

With the upgrade complete, the first thing I did was to check out the new layout. The menu strip from the tool box has been moved to a ‘placeholder’ window. When you select the ‘Keep windows on top’ for utility and dockable windows in the Preferences (Edit > Preferences > Window Management), the setup is quite uncluttered.

Frankly, I was used to the older layout and it does not make much of a difference. But some of you might find it handy if you keep shifting between different tools, to have the tool box always stay on top, and not be cluttered with menu items.

Brush Dynamics

The plesant surprise was when I selected the brush tool. Brush tool is the standard tool that you will use for doing digital paintings.

As you can see in the Brush Dynamics section, there are three sets of check boxes. The Pressure relates to what should vary based on the pressure of your graphics tablet. A usual setting I keep is to have the Opacity and Size of the brush be affected by the pressure. The improvement is the slider, situated at the end of the check boxes. This allows you to specify how much the pressure should effect the ones you have selected.

The next set of check-boxes is for the velocity – or how fast you move the tablet. I guess it would effect even the mouse movements. I see this go into simulating real world mediums like oil and water color.

The Random row, should help a lot while applying texture using custom brushes. The problem I have seen on using custom brushes is that the end result somehow seems unnatural due to repeated patterns. The randomness factor should remedy that issue.

Improved Select Tool

The freehand select tool has undergone major improvement. Do not let the name ‘freehand’ fool you. It allows you to do freehand as well as polygon select in the same selection action.

Allowing the polygon selection alone is a major improvement. Regular readers might remember the post on Path Tool in GIMP. This new feature almost makes the slightly round about method obsolete. You can even save a selection as Path by doing Select > To Path.

Path and selection construction became much easier, and that should allow you to construct those flats layer quite easily now.

Inking

Though, not actually digital ‘painting’, illustration and drawing is a prerequisite to better paintings.

Inking is a technique that you may often need to use to give that illustrative feel, or perhaps be required for inking a comic book.

For this purpose, I earlier used to set the Brush with pressure sensitivity on only size of the brush. Such inking would have lack of flow that you had to fix by going in with a hard-edge eraser. This process too is no more required.

There is this nifty inking tool that lets you create smooth strokes that responds realistically to the tablet pen’s movements. It even has tilt sensor (which I have not yet seemed to master it in Inkscape), that would make calligraphic illustration much more controlled.

There are a lot more ‘under the hood’ changes (like GEGL), that may not seem to make much difference to the end user (us) as of now. But I think, this is that first step GIMP needs to take to deliver more features. There are a lot more minor changes too – check out the GIMP 2.6 release notes.