gimp-2.4 – In Photos dot Org

The new release of GIMP 2.4 is finally out! Sven announced it on the Gimp User mailing list this morning. It seems like forever since 2.2 was released but he has promised that 2.6 won’t be as long in the making.

The roadmap for GIMP 2.6 will be discussed over the next weeks on the gimp-developer mailing-list. We can only tell you so much now: It is going to rock and it shouldn’t take as long to get it done as it took to finish GIMP 2.4. If you want to join the effort, your help is much appreciated.

GIMP.org is fairly slow now but the release notes have the low down on changes since 2.2. Some of the biggest user visible changes include red eye removal, healing tool and a better alignment tool. Plugins and scripts now live in the same place, the “Filters” menu. I’m using the rc3 release in Ubuntu Linux 7.10 and it’s been rock solid for the past few days. I’m sure Ubuntu will update their .deb package in the next few days.

After you update, get the GIMP Lomo plugin I posted yesterday. It’s 2.4 ready! 🙂

This is a slighly modified version of an old GIMP Lomo plugin I’ve used for ages that will now work with the new GIMP 2.4 release thanks to some advice I remembered reading on the GIMP User mailing list. The original plugin is by Francois Le Lay but hasn’t been updated since 2005. It’s a basic script but it’s very effective. Just be warned, if you resize your image, make sure you right click on the Vignette layer and click “Layer to image size” before the resize. Otherwise odd things happen!

Download

Download gimplomo.scm.

Install

Installation is easy. Simply copy gimplomo.scm into your .gimp-2.4/scripts/ folder and restart the GIMP. It will appear as Image->Filters->Light and Shadow->Lomo.

Example Images

Below are two before and after examples of what the Lomo plugin does to images. I have also posted fake lomo photos in the past which should give a really good idea of what it’s capable of.

Before and After Lomo images

Why the change to Script-fu?

Script-fu in GIMP 2.4 requires that variables be defined before using them which has broken a lot of Script-fu scripts unfortunately. In theory it’s a great change because it tightens up on sloppy programming but it hurts the end user!