Hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by Davies Media Design my name
is Michael Davies and today you guys are joining me in a new studio here - this is
a new recording location that we're gonna be using. And right now I just have
some makeshift lighting setup right now so I apologize for that.
I also have this kind of makeshift set set up here and I'm gonna be adding to
this as the tutorials go on so excuse the makeshift setup here for today.
For this tutorial I'll be giving a brief recap of Davies Media Design and GIMP
for 2018 as well as what is to come for GIMP in 2019 and there are a lot of
exciting new things coming so let's go ahead and dive in here.
Of course before I get started I want to direct you guys over to my website at
DaviesMediaDesign.com. As always we have tons of GIMP video and text
tutorials on here so definitely check that out.
You can also enroll in my GIMP
2.10 Photo Editing Course: From Beginner to Pro Photo Retoucher on Udemy, and
you can support our channel and help us grow by becoming a Patron on Patreon and
I'll include a link to this as well as all the relevant links from this
tutorial in the description of the video. So I'll start with a quick recap of
Davies Media Design for 2018; it was a big year for us. We uploaded over
100 video tutorials on GIMP and this is actually the most tutorials I've ever
uploaded in a year for my channel, or for anything really, so thank you guys for
supporting the channel and watching those tutorials. We hit a few major
milestones throughout the year so we hit 15, 20, and 25,000 subscribers. Super
excited about that. And we also hit over 2 million views for the year and we
almost reached 2.5 million views - we did that shortly after the new
year - so thank you guys again for supporting us for watching the tutorials
and for subscribing to the channel. And the last thing I'll mention real quick
is that we did publish our first ever Udemy course and that was what I
mentioned in the beginning of this tutorial, and that is our GIMP 2.10 Photo
Editing Course from Beginner to Pro Photo Retoucher on Udemy. And I just want
to thank everybody who enrolled in that course. We did get over a thousand
enrollees this year or the past year so thank you to everybody who has supported
our course. But Davies Media Design wasn't the only one who had a huge year -
GIMP of course released its first major
update in over six years with GIMP 2.10 and it of course followed that with GIMP
2.10.2 through GIMP 2.10.8.
So these new releases came with things like new filters and new tools. So we had
the unified transform tool introduced in GIMP 2.10. It also came with some
performance improvements a lot of stuff was migrated over to GEGL, and GEGL
of course I have a whole tutorial on what GEGL is, but that allowed us to do
things like live preview filters and just be able to apply filters a lot more
quickly and they also made some general performance improvements to the back end
to the coding side which is some stuff that we don't usually see as, you know,
normal users - everyday users - but of course we do appreciate that backend
coding that a lot of those developers do. And there were updates made to existing
tools such as the measure tool which got the straighten feature, which allows you
to straighten crooked images, and of course the vertical text feature was
introduced in 2018 for the text tool and this just allows you to type text
vertically which is obviously really useful for languages that write
vertically as opposed to horizontally. So those are just a few of the many new
features that were added to GIMP throughout the year. I do have a few
tutorials that go into a lot more detail as to what exactly was added in each new
version of GIMP. So I have the Top 10 New Features Found in GIMP 2.10 video
and that is in regards to the major update that went out earlier this year
and then I have the what's new series. So I have What's New in GIMP
2.10.2 and I have that all the way through GIMP
2.10.8; and those go over the features found in each individual
release, so definitely check out those tutorials if you haven't already and you
can get some more information on those new features. All right so all that being
said let's dive into what is coming up in GIMP for 2019. So there is obviously a
lot of exciting new features coming to GIMP, at least just the ones that they
have announced. So GIMP has said that it plans to release GIMP 3.0 probably
sometime in 2019 - I'm not gonna get my hopes up about that, but I do think that
that is their intention. But with the release of GIMP 3.0 is going to come an
upgrade in the graphical user interface from GTK2 to GTK3. GTK stands for
GIMP Tool Kit. It is a language basically that GIMP is built around - it was created
for GIMP by one of the founders of GIMP, Spencer Kimball, as well as I think some
other people that helped him out with it and even though this framework is named
after GIMP there are actually other programs that use it and as far as I've
read there are actually programs that are
ahead of gimp in the form of GTK that it uses. So like I said GIMP is currently on
GTK2. I've heard that there are programs that are already built on GTK3 and I
think there might even be some built on GTK4. But anyway GIMP does plan on
upgrading to GTK3. So I'm not going to get too much into the technical side of
all of this but essentially what the GIMP team is hoping to accomplish with
these upgrades is they want to make a leaner codebase and all you need to know
about that is that they are going to clean up and modernize the backend of
GIMP. This will of course open GIMP up to newer and more advanced features such as
non-destructive editing in the form of things like adjustment layers, and that
is something that a lot of GIMP users, including myself, are asking for and I
think it's also going to open up GIMP to the possibility of many other advanced
and modern features to rival premium programs such as Photoshop. So this is
why I am highly anticipating the release of GIMP 3.0. So backing up a bit before
the GIMP team releases GIMP 3.0 they are going to release another update which is
going to be GIMP 2.10.10. And there will be some new features added to this
version including smart colorization. This is a feature I've been talking
about for a few tutorials now, but essentially what it allows you to do is
use the bucket fill tool to fill in sketched in areas. So let's say you draw
a cloud or something using the ink tool and you didn't fully enclose you know
the borders of the cloud or whatever, the smart colorization feature is going to
recognize that you tried to sketch an enclosed shape but maybe missed a few
small spots and it's just going to fill in the area within the closed shape. So
it's just basically making it easier for you to fill in sketched out shapes. So
the next feature I want to talk about is actually the one I am most excited for
in 2019 and that is Extension Management. So Extension Management allows you to
search, install, uninstall, and update extensions directly within GIMP. For
those of you who have watched my tutorials where you have to download a
script or a brush or a font or anything like that, you know what the process is
like when you want to, you know, add some new functionality or feature to GIMP.
Right now you have to go onto somebody's site - it can be a third-party site you've
never heard of, maybe you don't trust it entirely, you
download a script or a font or whatever it is, and then you have to manually
upload that to GIMP. Well with the GIMP extension management this is going to
allow you to do all this stuff supposedly directly within GIMP. So now
instead you just open up your extension management window, and it's going to have,
based on the pictures, a pretty clean and easy to use interface. And then
you're going to just add your extensions directly from there. So they'll basically
have like a database of all the extensions that have been uploaded by
other GIMP users and so then you can just select your, you know, extension or
script or whatever it is directly from this extension management window and
then once you add it to your GIMP you're just going to basically toggle that
extension on to turn it on, or, you know, as far as I know, if it's a brush you
just toggle the brush on and then all of a sudden it's going to show up in GIMP.
So it's basically going to make the process for adding third-party
extensions to your GIMP a lot easier and a lot safer. The next new edition coming
again for 2019 is performance improvements and so there's already been
some performance improvements made to GIMP throughout 2018. They mentioned lazy
loading fonts as one of the things on here and that was something that they
released I believe with GIMP 2.10.8. And what that feature does is it
just loads your fonts in the background after you've opened GIMP up. That way you
don't have to sit there and wait for all your new fonts to upload onto GIMP
every time you open GIMP. So it just speeds up the process for, you know,
allowing GIMP to open up on your computer, and I actually ran a test on my
Patreon page which you could check out and it shows that GIMP actually now
loads faster than Photoshop, and I think this is partially thanks to features
such as this one - the lazy loading of fonts. One of the improvements that they
mentioned specifically in their press release is an improvement to bicubic and
bilinear downscaling. So I think what that is referring to - I'm
going to come over here and go to Image> Scale Image, and over here under
"Quality" you have "Interpolation." And right now if you click on this drop-down arrow
you've got a few options here - one is linear and one is cubic. So I think they
are either going to expand the interpolation options found here in the
Scale tool, or they are going to just improve the existing options in here for
when you're downscaling images. So I have been getting comments about,
you know, how do I keep my image from losing quality when I'm scaling it down.
The GIMP team is working on this so hopefully downscaling will receive a bit
of an update in future versions for 2019. So the next new feature coming to GIMP
in 2019 is just some more bug fixes and this is just become a standard with GIMP
you know every time they release an update they usually have bug fixes in
there - very common, of course, with software updates. And this is just going
to make it a little bit more reliable, a little bit more consistent, and it's just
going to take out some of those glitches that happen sometimes when you're
working in GIMP. They didn't get into too much detail about the bug fixes they're
working on and I think the reason for that is that because there's always you
know a few hundred maybe even a thousand bug fixes that they're working on at any
given time so they don't typically go into too much detail about those bug
fixes. So the next new feature coming to GIMP in 2019 is an interesting one - and
it is something that the GIMP team has dubbed "Space Invasion," and it's kind of a
weird name but basically what they are doing is they are allowing GIMP to
recognize outside RGB color spaces. So let's say you have an RGB color image
that you bring into GIMP, but it's not in GIMP's native sRGB color space. So
usually when you import an image into GIMP it's going to ask if you want to
convert to GIMP's native sRGB color space - you just go ahead and hit "convert,"
and that will convert your image to that default color profile. Well what the
"Space Invasion" feature is hoping to accomplish is allowing you to then
convert your final image back into the color profile that you brought it into
GIMP as. So you start with one color profile, you convert it to GIMP's native
color profile and then you export it back into the color profile that you
started with. And sticking with color profiles, the GIMP team is still working
on CMYK functionality. This is something they've been working on for quite some
time now. They have made some significant progress from what I've read. And I know
a lot of you have been asking me about CMYK functionality in GIMP. It can't
quite do it right now but it will in the near future
apparently in 2019 it will be able to work with CMYK images and then export
those images to CMYK, and that way you guys can, you know, sort of work
interchangeably with GIMP and Photoshop or work with, you know, printers or
clients who are giving you Photoshop files or asking you to
send them files that they are then going to open up into Photoshop. And the
last new feature I'll mention coming to GIMP in 2019 is one that is being
contributed by the ZeMarmot project. For those of you who don't know, the ZeMarmot
project is an open source animated film that they've been working on over the
past few years. It's animated entirely using open source software. The cool
thing about this project is that a lot of new GIMP features have come out of it.
The latest features to come out of this project are some animation features that
are going to be built into GIMP for 2019. Some of you have been using GIMP long
enough to remember that the GIMP Animation Package used to be offered on
the GIMP Plug-in Registry site. That is still floating around on the internet -
it's kind of hard to find a reliable source to download that animation
package into GIMP, and it's also not been updated for GIMP 2.10. So the
ZeMarmot project is going to be coming up with some animation features that will
be built directly into GIMP and I'm really hoping that this is going to
allow GIMP users to create things like cinemagraphs, which have become really
popular with Photoshop users over the past year, as well as just making
animated GIFs a little bit easier to create and to have a little bit more
features with, you know, just whatever animation you want to do within GIMP.
Alright, so all that being said, the GIMP team is going to release the next update
GIMP 2.10.10 either by the end of this month in January or
sometime in February after that the GIMP team plans on working on the Space
Invasion project, and at the conclusion of that project they are going to
release GIMP 2.99.2 - that is going to be an unstable
development version. And they're gonna work off of that development version in order
to get to GIMP 3.0, and then hopefully that will be released sometime in 2019.
Alright so that's it for my tutorial hopefully you guys enjoyed it - if you did,
please subscribe to my youtube channel at YouTube.com/DaviesMediaDesign.
You can visit our website at DaviesMediaDesign.com. You can enroll in our
GIMP Photo Editing Course: From Beginner to Pro Photo Retoucher on Udemy, and you
can support our channel and help us grow by becoming a Patron on Patreon, and
I'll include a link to that as well as all the relevant links from this
tutorial in the description of the video. So thanks for watching, and we'll see you
next time.