GIMP 2.10 ships with a number of improvements requested by digital painters. One of the most interesting new additions here is the MyPaint Brush tool (Y) that first appeared in the GIMP-Painter fork.

The Smudge tool got updates specifically targeted in painting use case. The new No erase effect option prevents the tools from changing alpha of pixels. And the foreground color can now be blended into smudged pixels, controlled by a new Flow slider, where 0 means no blending.

All painting tools now have explicit Hardness and Force sliders except for the MyPaint Brush tool that only has the Hardness slider.

Most importantly, GIMP now supports canvas rotation and flipping to help illustrators checking proportions and perspective.

A new Brush lock to view option gives you a choice whether you want a brush locked to a certain zoom level and rotation angle of the canvas. The option is available for all painting tools that use a brush except for the MyPaint Brush tool.

New Symmetry Painting dockable dialog, enabled on per-image basis, allows to use all painting tools with various symmetries (mirror, mandala, tiling…).

This new version of GIMP also ships with more new brushes available by default.

Contributors: Michael Natterer, Alexia Death, Daniel Sabo, shark0r, Jehan Pagès, Ell, Jose Americo Gobbo, Aryeom Han…