While Adobe stretches the Photoshop brand into many different programs, the popular open-source alternative: GIMP, continues to catch up to the features of the world’s best image editing tool.

Despite only having a decimal increase, the developers could have very well called this new version of Gimp 3.0, and no one would complain. Not only does it have a new look, thanks to the Tango-styled icons, but also comes with a plethora of new features:

• Scalable Brushes
• Selection Tools
• Foreground Select Tool
• Align Tool
• Changes in menus
• Improved display when zooming in or out
• Support for file formats
• Fullscreen Editing
• Color Management and Soft-proofing
• New Crop Tool
• Improved Printing
• Red Eye Removal
• Perspective Clone
• Lens Distortion
• JPEG quality

Thanks to my recent experience with Ubuntu 7.10, I’ve been playing around with the 2.40 release candidate for a few years, and although it’s still no Photoshop, it can mimic very well most, if not all, of the features I use in Adobe’s “heavy” image editing program. Not to mention that it boots in just a few seconds, compared to CS3’s 30 seconds start-up time.

You can download the Gimp from the official website for Windows, Linux or Mac OS X, and see the complete description of the new changes in the release notes.