Appendix - GIMP 2.6 for Photographers: Image Editing with Open Source Software - page 349

5.2 So Far, So Good—How to Proceed from Here:
Tips and References

Congratulations! You made it through the tutorial. You've learned all the basic
techniques to touch up and edit digital photos and images. You became
acquainted with the most important tools necessary for producing collages
from image elements. You now should have a fairly good idea of how to create
your own image and text elements and insert them into an image.
If you are looking for further suggestions and assistance for working with
GIMP, you can find tutorials as well as pages with tips and tricks for digital
image editing on the Web. Have a look at the sites at the following locations:
http://www.gimp.org/tutorials a nd http://www.gimptalk.com/. O n http://
www.gimp.org/links/, y ou will find many links and tutorials to help you get
started. And http://gug.criticalhit.dk/?page=tutorials is a great website from
the GIMP User Group (GUG) with many amazing tutorials. Another website
offering video tutorials for GIMP is http://meetthegimp.org/. Y ou can also
search the Web for video tutorials (search for “gimp” and “video”).

5.3 A GIMP 2.8 Preview

GIMP was created by a group of independent, noncommercial programmers
and is continuously being developed further. In January 2004, GIMP 2.0 was
released, followed by version 2.2 in December of the same year. GIMP 2.4
appeared in October 2007, followed by version 2.6 a year later in October 2008.
The developers have begun their work on a new and more stable GIMP 2.8. It is
still hard to say when it will be released, but some of the goals of the developers are
identifiable. Nevertheless, the developer release of version 2.7x is freely available.
Interested users can get an overview of the new program and try out the new
tools. However, one shouldn't expect a fully functional program. Moreover, as the
stable version competes with the beta version when used on the same computer,
it is possible that one of the two programs won't work. At the end of this section I
will point where you can download a developer version and what to watch out for.
I would like to give you an overview of the most important innovations
and what to expect of GIMP 2.8.
In all likelihood, you won't be able to edit GIMP 2.8 with a greater color
depth than 8 bits per channel, 24 altogether. Furthermore, editing in the color
model CMYK and direct editing of RAW images with 48-bit color depth will be
available only in later versions.
I expect the program interface to change quite a bit. Besides the well known
multi-window-interface, a new single-window mode is in the works. Moreover, all
windows will allow multi-column docking. Currently no new tools are planned,
but the handling and the functionality of certain tools will be improved..

Figure 5.2
The startup window of the development
version GIMP 2.7