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The main reason was to use the system Python interpreter and therefore to reduce the size of the package. But there are some minor issues fixed too.
In previous versions of GIMP on OS X, if you wanted to bring GIMP's windows into front, you need to click on the X11 icon in the dock. Clicking on GIMP's icon simply did nothing. Now you can click on the GIMP icon to bring all it's windows up.
Another thing is, that you now can use the context menu by right clicking (or CTRL clicking) on the icon to quit GIMP. This also didn't work in the past.
The Leopard build of GIMP 2.6.7 is already compatible with Snow Leopard and runs well without any flaws.
Besides making GIMP available as a 64 bit binary, one reason for separate builds was to reduce the package size by using the Python interpreter which is shipped with Mac OS X. All builds of GIMP so far use their own copy of Python. This is because the packages were built with MacPorts and MacPorts has decided to always use own copies of libraries even when they are already available on the system. This may have some advantages with some special ports, but in case of the Python interpreter it just blows up the GIMP package by about 30 MB.
Another reason is, that using system libs instead of own copies will make the build process faster and easier to maintain as there are less sources.
Additional plugins for photo editing
To the already wide range of default plugins shipped with a standard GIMP distribution, GIMP on OS X now adds some more, really great plugins for photo editing and retouching.
Noise reduction: GREYCstoration
GREYCstoration is a powerful noise reduction plugin, comparable (not to say better) to other well known commercial products.
Content-aware resizing: Liquid Rescale
The Liquid Rescale procedure aims at resizing pictures non uniformly while preserving their features, i.e. avoiding distortion of the important parts.
Lens-alike focus: Focus-Blur
Focus-Blur offers the ability to give your photos an out of focus effect and depth of field effect, just like SLR lenses do.
RAW image support: improved UFRaw
Improved compatibility with Aperture on using TIFF images.
UFRaw's main window now remains open, after you have saved an image. So you can easily make various versions of your picture using different parameters without the need to reopen the raw image again.
Smart Removal and texture synthesis: Resynthesizer
Given a sample of a texture, Resynthesizer creates more of that texture. The most surprising usage is to remove objects from an image and replace them seamless with the surrouding background.
Edit images in different detail scales: Wavelet Decompose
The wavelet decompose plugin is really great for softening skin in portraits without loosing too much details.
For more information, visit:
http://gimp.lisanet.de/Website/News/News.html
Tags: Software Updates ď Graphics & Design ď Software News ď
