GIMP v2.10 Released (April 27, 2018) Release Notes Spoiler: The Changes in short https://www.gimp.org/news/2018/04/27/gimp-2-10-0-released/ Still, to get you a quick taste of GIMP 2.10, here are some of the most notable changes: Image processing nearly fully ported to GEGL, allowing high bit depth processing, multi-threaded and hardware accelerated pixel processing, and more. Color management is a core feature now, most widgets and preview areas are color-managed. Many improved tools, and several new and exciting tools, such as the Warp transform, the Unified transform and the Handle transform tools. On-canvas preview for all filters ported to GEGL. Improved digital painting with canvas rotation and flipping, symmetry painting, MyPaint brush support… Support for several new image formats added (OpenEXR, RGBE, WebP, HGT), as well as improved support for many existing formats (in particular more robust PSD importing). Metadata viewing and editing for Exif, XMP, IPTC, and DICOM. Basic HiDPI support: automatic or user-selected icon size. New themes for GIMP (Light, Gray, Dark, and System) and new symbolic icons meant to somewhat dim the environment and shift the focus towards content (former theme and color icons are still available in Preferences). And more, better, more, and even more awesome! Download
Image Editor GIMP 2.10 is out (after six years) April 29, 2018 https://www.ghacks.net/2018/04/29/image-editor-gimp-2-10-is-out-after-six-years/
This is a fantastic release and has been working very well on Windows 10 so far and throughout the release candidate stage. I've been a long time GIMP user (10+ years) for photography needs in particular and this release has made a handful of steps forward as far as GUI design and user experience in general. I use the official build at times but for most of my work I use the Windows builds from Partha (https://www.partha.com/) since it also contains a lot of great plugins such as GMIC and many more. I just have to wait until he releases the final 2.10 build. His RC1/RC2 builds have been great thus far.
GIMP v2.10.2 Released (May 20, 2018) Announcement Spoiler: Complete list of Changes https://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/tree/NEWS Overview of Changes from GIMP 2.10.0 to GIMP 2.10.2 =================================================== Core: - Discard fonts which fail to load and popup an info dialog to allow people debug their fonts. - New API to suppress updates in UI until plug-ins are done introducing changes. - New API to calculate histograms in separate threads, with possible further extension to handle similar cases elsewhere in GIMP. - Tool options are now properly saved and reloaded per-device at startup. Plug-ins: - New plug-in for importing and exporting HEIF images. - Enable visibility of rasterized vector layer from PSD. - Single-window screenshots in Windows fixed to correctly snap a window even when it is partly off-screen or covered by another window or when display scaling is not set to 100%. Filters: - New Spherize filter to wrap an image around a spherical cap - New Recursive Transform filter to create Droste effect. Usability: - Warn users, when alpha-only painting has no effect. E.g. when target drawable doesn't have an alpha channel, or the alpha channel is locked. - Make the splash texts dynamic, so they are larger on larger splashes. - Mention pressing Enter to complete Foreground selection in the status bar. - Make sure that clicking outside any selection prevents Rectangle Select and Ellipse Select tools from creating empty selections. - Improve mouse wheel zooming behavior to keep the same point centered under the pointer even if the image is completely visible in the canvas. - Add "View -> Center Image in Window" (Shift+J) as a quick way to center the image at any zoom level. Translations: - Updated translations: Catalan, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Latvian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian. - New translation of Windows installer: Chinese (Taiwan) Build: - Add a --with-bug-report-url configure option allowing packagers to set the address of their own bug tracker. This address will be the one opened by the debug dialog for reporting bugs. - Add a flatpak manifest for the gtk3-port branch. - Remove the possibility to disable script-fu. - Add a --with-icc-directory configure option to customize the color profile directory. By default, it is set to the common path /usr/share/color/icc. Documentation: - Updating the description of the XCF format "devel-docs/xcf.txt", for third-party readers wishing to support GIMP 2.10 XCF files. - Add documentation skeletons for all enums in libgimpbase/, there is much room for improvement. Download
official download link: https://download.gimp.org/mirror/pub/gimp/v2.10/windows/gimp-2.10.6-setup.exe
Photoshop 7.0? It's a piece of software 16 years old, I can't even remember what features it had, though I used it extensively at the time. And then you are comparing it with the fairly recent Gimp. These are apples and oranges, good luck finding compatible plugins for that version of PS. Nevertheless, neither Gimp nor Photoshop are really intended for basic tasks, both are advanced editors. So they are both more than adequate, no matter the age of PS7. (I still keep PS5.5 installation btw, it is almost 20 years old. 5.0 does not work on Win10 anymore)
Honestly, if you're on XP, I'd go with Photoshop. If nothing, it will be faster and more snappier. Both apps are so feature rich, even if the PS7 is so old, that for basic tasks it's a moot point. Cheers.
GIMP v2.10.10 Released (April 7, 2019) Announcement Download Spoiler: Version 2.10.10 highlights Version 2.10.10 highlights include: Line art detection in the Bucket Fill tool for comic artists Various usability improvements in transformation tools Sample Merged option added to the Heal tool and fixed in the Clone tool Parametric brushes now have 32-bit per channel precision Easier brush and pattern creation workflow On-canvas layer selection Faster saving/exporting and layer groups rendering Initial DDS support Many improvements in GEGL, the image processing engine
GIMP v2.10.12 Released (June 12, 2019) Announcement Download Spoiler: Version 2.10.12 highlights Still, some very cool improvements are also available: Improved Curves tool Layers support for TIFF exporting Support for user-installed fonts on Windows Faster painting Improved symmetry painting support Incremental mode in the Dodge/Burn tool Free Select tool now creates a preliminary selection New Offset tool Among most pesky bugs fixed: crashes for various reasons, with more crashes to fix yet; various color management related bugs; unwanted change of foreground and background colors in tools’ presets; brush transformation improved and fixed in various places in symmetry painting mode; a few localization bugs, and most importantly broken translation display for several supported languages (so far, we believe it to be a bug in the Pango dependency); some brush format bugs; …
Updated installer available (June 17, 2019) https://download.gimp.org/mirror/pub/gimp/v2.10/windows/gimp-2.10.12-setup-1.exe
GIMP 2.10.12 Update 3 Updated installer available (July 29, 2019) https://download.gimp.org/mirror/pub/gimp/v2.10/windows/gimp-2.10.12-setup-3.exe