Hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by Davies Media Design
My name is Michael Davies. And today I'm just gonna be going through some of the GIMP 2.10.2 updates
So this update just came out last night. It was pretty late last night actually, so it's been less than, well
actually probably right around 12 hours or so since this came out
so this is brand new. GIMP has made some tweaks to this latest version of GIMP.
So GIMP 2.10 came out not that long ago, and there's been a few bugs that people have been reporting on and sort of
griping about. And so I think this version is made to sort of tackle
some of those issues GIMP 2.10 has been having. But there's also some other great news with this news
And we'll get into that a little bit later.
But today we are going to be going over some of the new features that you can now see in GIMP 2.10.2
and also some of the great new bug fixes. But of course before we get into that
I just want to direct you guys over to my website at DaviesMediaDesign.com. Now
we have a brand new homepage now up and you'll see it here and you can go directly to our tutorials page from here
which is where I usually direct you guys. You can also see some new features down here though.
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So if you want to partner with our YouTube channel - if you own a business or a brand or anything like that -
you can partner with us now. You've got a link to our course.
You've got our latest GIMP 2.10 tutorials right here on the home page, or again
you can just go straight to the tutorials page if you want and we also have project translate highlighted here.
And for those of you who haven't heard yet
I'm working on an initiative right now to get my videos translated into some of the more popular
languages that are demanded by our viewers and subscribers and you'll see the most requested languages down here. Right now it's Spanish at about
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I just need to update this.
But anyway
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So definitely check that out.
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So here's the official news release that contains some of the GIMP 2.10.2 new features.
And so we're gonna dive into this now. And I've got an image here. This is just an image I took the other day.
I haven't edited this or done anything to it yet,
so it hasn't had any image adjustments made to it or anything.
But just to give you an overview of some of the new updates that come with GIMP 2.10.2 - for starters
there's 44 new bug fixes. So I think in 2.10 rolled out a little bit early
I think they were just kind of antsy or anxious to get the newest version rolled out.
I think there was a lot of hype around it. And so it did come with some bugs
And again GIMP does have a pretty small development team considering the popularity of the software itself.
But that developer team has addressed a lot of the major issues.
And so they've created these bug fixes to kind of help mitigate some of those issues
you guys might have experienced.
And I'll get into the main bug fixes that are gonna affect you in a second. But a new feature that comes with GIMP
2.10.2 is that it now supports HEIF image formats
Which is H.E.I.F. - that stands for High Efficiency Image File Format
And so now you can import and export these file formats. Now, HEIF files are found on the new iPhones
So if you're using iOS 11 or newer
I believe that they have now replaced JPEGs with HEIF as the go-to file format that your image is saved in.
So, if you take a photo on your camera
it's gonna save as a HEIF file rather than a JPEG. And, from my research, the reason they've done this is because there's twice as
much information that can be stored in a HEIF image over a JPEG image and I guess, in theory, HEIF images are also supposed to
produce better quality. Although, based on what I've seen on the internet,
I guess this is a sort of debatable topic. But now GIMP supports being able to
Import and export HEIF images. Now, the GIMP team has also added two new filters, and that includes the Spherize filter and the Recursive
Transform filter - and i'm going to show you how to use that right now. So if I go to Filters>
Distorts>
You'll see Spherize down here. And this is a GEGL filter of course. So click on that.
And you'll see what this does basically is
it just converts your image into like a sphere shape here and
it almost looks like a fish-eye lens sort of effect. And you can adjust the curvature which is how much this
lens is bent. And so if you decrease the curvature you don't get those hard edges which sort of helps with that fish-eye look.
And then you've also got the amount - and that also determines how much of the
pixels are displaced on here. And that's sort of just another factor in how bowed out this looks or how convex this looks
And you can also adjust the angle here
So if you don't want this,
you know, coming straight on - if you want the camera angle to be slightly skewed in one direction,
you can go ahead and adjust this angle of view and you'll see that the
Angle of this image and how it's bowed out with the curve here starts to change.
Now the resampling method is just going to be the quality of the image after it's had the transformation applied to it.
And so you can go to nearest, linear, cubic, No Halo, Lo Halo. I believe No Halo and Lo
Halo are going to produce the best results.
But they're gonna take longer and then you've got these options down here
which don't take as long but they don't produce
quite as good of a result. And then you can determine if you want to use a Selection as input.
So if you have just a selection area
selected it'll
spherize that selection area. Or, you can use the entire layer, which is what we're doing in this case. And I believe it defaults
To using the entire layer
anyway - if you don't have a selection area. And, of course, with all things in GIMP 2.10,
you can create a split view. So you can see a before and after, and then you can click OK to apply the
transformation, or you can hit cancel,
Or reset if you want to start over. I'll hit OK just so you guys can see what this looks like. Now, personally,
I don't get why they don't put this on a new layer. Right now
It's just kind of right on your image layer as opposed to creating a new layer and putting that
spherized effect on a new layer.
I personally think that would be more useful because then you could hide the original image layer and all you would have is this like
bubble looking thing. But looks like for now it just puts this directly on the image layer.
Of course, you could get rid of this background pretty easily by grabbing your selection tool and just kind of creating a selection area
that is the same size and shape of this sort of globe that's created here - or the sphere
I should call it . And then Select>
Invert.
Come over here, right-click, Add Alpha Channel, and then hit the Delete key, and
Select>None. And now you have your sphered image without all the other stuff behind it. So that's one workaround for that.
But I do still think that they should just create this filter so that it
automatically gets rid of that stuff behind it and puts this onto a new layer. So I'm going to hit ctrl z and go back.
All right
so the next new feature that comes with GIMP 2.10.2 is actually a really cool one - and that is the Recursive
Transform filter. And so I can access this by going to Filters>
Map
Recursive Transform. And you'll see here that, by default, it's going to pop up with the Unified Transform Tool controls.
I don't know if you guys have used the Unified Transform Tool yet.
If you've watched my tutorials you definitely have. But this is the tool right here
It's a new tool in GIMP 2.10 and it just allows you to scale, shear,
And just kind of distort your image,
rotate it, all within one tool versus having to go through all the Transform Tools to do that.
Well, what the Recursive Transform tool does is it takes all of the Unified
Transform tool actions and it recursively applies those actions to the image
you're working on - the image layer - and what I mean by that - I'll demonstrate here.
So, if I grab the scale, and scale this down, and then hover my mouse over here, and then shear this image,
you'll see that this is performing recursive iterations of this transformation
and so basically it's not only transforming our main image once, which is this first one here, but it's also
creating three iterations. So, the first iteration is the original, and then there's a second one.
So basically, it applies all those transformations again, and then it does it again here at the third iteration.
So now you have one, two, three iterations here of these transformations. And so for example if I rotate this,
it'll apply that rotate to all three of these iterations. Now,
I can adjust the number of iterations here. So I could turn this up to like 6 for example.
And now instead of just the three images you'll see three new ones are produced here.
So three new
iterations to create six total. And you can see why this is pretty cool, because it's already starting to create some interesting shapes here.
So it almost looks like this is starting to spiral and, I don't know, just do some crazy stuff here.
So if I turn this up some more - to like, for instance, 15 iterations
you'll see it spirals even more and it just creates a really cool almost like kaleidoscopic effect.
Now you've also got a Fade Opacity here
So if I turn this down right now, it's set to 100 or 1 and if I turn this down to 0.72
Which is essentially 72% you'll see that this will start to fade with the iterations. So instead of these all being 100% opaque,
they just start to fade instead. So some of them are transparent. And then you can choose the fade color here.
So right now these are fading based on a black fade.
So it's kind of getting darker as it fades out, but you can come over here and you can choose white for example.
And then you've got an Alpha slider here. So you can bring that alpha slider down a little bit, and that's going to determine how
transparent that color is that's going to be included in the fade.
And so now you can see that these are fading with the white color here.
I'll go ahead and click cancel. And then you've got the option here to choose which one of these is the first iteration.
So right now this is set to zero, which means that the original iteration you
created from scaling and everything is just going to be that main image, but with all the transformations applied to it.
So that was this one right here.
And if I go up to one, it's still gonna be that same one right here,
but you'll see that some of these back here get adjusted. So I'm not really sure what happens there
but if you turn this up to 2, that first one fades out and the first iteration now becomes this second one here and
then I believe a new one is placed in its place back here somewhere.
So basically each time you do this
It's replacing that top one because the new first iteration is now the third iteration if that makes sense.
It's kind of like an inception -
iteration within an iteration - which makes sense for this tool because it kind of looks like inception here.
Anyway, not trying to blow your minds here. And then you've got the Paste Below option.
So if I check that - if I hover over it, you'll see it says "paste transformed images below each other."
So I'm guessing that that just puts all of those different iterations behind each other which now they're all behind here.
So I'm not sure why you would want to do that.
But that's an option. And then the resampling method is just going to be the quality of the different
Transformations after you've applied the transformations. Or, in other words, like the quality of the image after transformations are applied to it.
So I'm going to actually move this back down to zero and then just click OK.
And so now here is our final result of our Recursive Transformation.
So, it's kept that original image layer here, and then here is that first transformation we applied. And
then it just kind of recursively keeps transforming and creates this really cool effect. I'll hit ctrl z. Now
this next feature was a bug fix - and that is better single window screenshots.
So I'm gonna hit the forward slash "/" on my keyboard to bring up my search actions, and I'm gonna type in
"Screenshot." And so you'll see - here's a screenshot function here.
Now what the screenshot allows you to do is take a picture of the image window.
So this is not a tool that I use very often - just a disclaimer real quick - but I'll show you guys how it's used.
So I have this set to "area - take a screenshot of a single window." I'm gonna convert the color profile to the native sRGB
that's found in GIMP, and I'll hit "snap." And now it asks me to "Drag a crosshair to select window" and
I'll just drag this on the active window. And
I guess that takes a screenshot. It looks like it took a screenshot of the entire GIMP.
So I'm not sure if that's what it's supposed to do.
But that's what it appears that it did and I just open that screenshot up in the GIMP immediately.
So apparently there's some fixes there to the screenshot feature. Now
this next feature is actually one that I think is pretty highly important and it's something that I was experiencing issues with while doing my
tutorials. And that is an improved histogram computation, which eliminates UI freezes - UI standing for User Interface.
So I'll show you an example real quick. I'm gonna come over here -
this is the image that I edited in my last tutorial - but if I go to Colors>
Levels for example.
You'll see that there's a histogram here. Now
I was personally having an issue where every time I brought up - or a lot of the times when I brought up the Levels or
the Curves tools - they took a second or two to
load up, and this would turn white and it would almost kind of freeze for a second or two.
And so I guess the bug fix that they made to this is that that no longer happens.
So, I don't know if you guys noticed, but when I went to Colors>
Levels, this didn't freeze at all. So, they basically
rearranged the API or the code to just make this work in the background somewhere else. And that just keeps this from freezing up and
it just speeds up your GIMP. I'm not a developer
so I don't know the entire nuts and bolts of what they did.
But they did make some changes to help speed up GIMP and keep it from freezing and that's just going to help improve your workflow
overall. So definitely a cool and necessary bug fix in my opinion. I'll come back over here to our original image.
So, another feature they've added is that when you're drawing with your Select tool -
so for instance, I'll grab this select tool and draw a rectangular select.
Before, if you clicked outside of the select tool it would just create an empty selection.
But now you'll see that it doesn't do that.
So the empty selection would have - you'll notice when I click it's got these four squares here -
Now it would leave those four squares there like that like it just did here
But it doesn't do that anymore. So now you've got your selection here - if I click off of it
All it does is deselect that selection. And the same applies to the Ellipse Select tool.
So if I click off of it now
It just deletes it, as opposed to applying an empty selection. Now while we're on the selection tools,
there's also a tool called the Foreground Selection tool -
I do go over this in my movie poster tutorial -and that's this tool right here. And
they've just kind of added some usability improvements to this.
So now - it wasn't really easy to figure out that when you draw something you're supposed to press the Enter key to move on
to the next step in here.
That was something I had to kind of figure out on my own. But now they've got it down here -
there's some instructions that say "roughly outline the object to extract. Press Enter to refine."
So if I hit enter, now it gives you the ability to refine this - and obviously I'm doing a sloppy job,
but this is just to demonstrate real quick. But you'll see down there it says "selecting foreground, press ENTER to preview."
So if I hit enter...
That will now give us a preview of the foreground object we've selected, and again, this is very rough.
That's why it looks pretty bad.
I didn't take my time on this. But now it says down here to "press escape to exit the preview or enter to apply."
So if I hit enter again, it'll now apply the selection area, and there's the selection area on my object.
So, yeah, that just kind of helps users figure out how to use that tool a little bit easier now.
So go Select>None. Now, there's also been some cool improvements to the zoom tool.
So for instance if I come over here and click on my zoom tool -
if I hold ctrl I can zoom in with my mouse wheel - and that was something that a
subscriber mention in one of the video comments. So thank you for that tip.
But now they've improved this so when you're zooming in, it will now always zoom in on the center of your mouse pointer.
So you'll notice that, for instance, I'll start with my mouse pointer over here
and this will zoom in on that object. Now if I zoom out and
change my pointer over here - it'll now zoom in on this object.
So you'll just see that they've improved the mouse wheel zoom by allowing this to zoom in on whatever object
your mouse pointer is hovering over.
So I think that's a pretty cool feature. And another feature that has to do with the zoom of an image -
so I'll zoom in on here real quick. Now if I hit shift J that will automatically center my image in the zoom window.
So you'll see that my image just shifted over a little bit. That was because this was being centered in the window.
And I'll zoom out a little bit and show you another way to access this.
You can go to View>Center image in window, and now you'll see that our image quickly gets centered into the zoom window here.
So that's just another quick feature to help improve the usability of GIMP. And that'll work no matter how zoomed in or zoomed out on
the image you are. Now the last feature I'll highlight that they've updated GIMP 2.10.2 with is,
if I come over here to, for instance, the paintbrush tool and I adjust my tool options... I guess
every time you close down GIMP and reopen it the tool options would reset. Well
now the tool options will remain where you set them after you close down GIMP.
And so that's just another thing that they've updated with GIMP 2.10.2. Now
there's also a bunch of developer things that they've updated in the background that aren't entirely
relevant or related to the average user like you and I, so I'm not going to go into those things.
But those are the main new features found in GIMP 2.10.2. And my last update in this tutorial is that GIMP
3.0 is on its way
this is something that I'm very excited about and the GIMP developer team is working on cleaning up the code and upgrading GIMP from
Gtk+2 to
GTK+3, and that is essentially just going to improve the functionality of GIMP and improve the speed and it's going to take GIMP
to a whole new level.
So I'm super excited for that. And definitely subscribe to our channel and turn on notifications for updates on GIMP 3.0 updates
And of course more GIMP tutorials. Alright, so that's it for this tutorial. Thanks for watching.
If you enjoyed it, please subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube.com/DaviesMediaDesign
You can also visit our website at DaviesMediaDesign.com, and you can enroll in our GIMP photo editing course: From Beginner to Pro Photo
Retoucher on Udemy, and you can support us on Patreon - and I'll include a link to both the Udemy course and
Patreon in the description of this video. So thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.