The Gimp 2.3.9 Beta

It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.

• Full suite of painting tools including brushes, a pencil, an airbrush, cloning, etc.
• Tile-based memory management so image size is limited only by available disk space
• Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high-quality anti-aliasing
• Full Alpha channel support
• Layers and channels
• A procedural database for calling internal GIMP functions from external programs, such as Script-Fu
• Advanced scripting capabilities
• Multiple undo/redo (limited only by disk space)
• Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip
• File formats supported include GIF, JPEG, PNG, XPM, TIFF, TGA, MPEG, PS, PDF, PCX, BMP and many others
• Selection tools including rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy, bezier and intelligent
• Plug-ins that allow for the easy addition of new file formats and new effect filters

- better interpolation for "smooth" curves in the Curve tool
- added an Auto button to the Threshold tool that picks a suitable value
- simplified user installation, only display a dialog in case of an error
- added Red Eye Removal plug-in
- added thumbnail loader to GIF load plug-in
- declared even more data as const
- refactoring of the PDB and plug-in management code
- allow Merge to work on a single layer
- added a way to remove all keyboard shortcuts from the Preferences dialog
- added menu items for "Text to Path", "Text along Path" and "Text to
Selection"
- allow to initialize a new layer mask with any of the image's channels
- added clipboard brush and clipboard pattern
- added scripts to sort color palettes
- swap meanings of "dilate" and "erode" which have been wrong for a long time
- show Clone tool source location while painting
- use GtkFileChooserButton in place of GimpFileEntry
- added script to reverse the order of layers
- added "Sample merged" and "Selected Pixels only" options to Palette import
- added actions to select palette and colormap colors
- new environment variable to control which batch interpreter to use
- give plug-ins access to the CPU detection so that they can use MMX code
- speed up Selective Gaussian Blur plug-in
- improved tool cursors, added edge resizing cursors
- improved behaviour of new selection tools
- allow to reset all gimprc values from the Preferences dialog
- optionally show guides in the Crop tool
- bug fixes and code cleanup