Základní nástroje v Gimpu 2 se od svých předchůdců z verze 1 zásadně neliší. Nástroj Výběr podle barvy je nově umístěn i v panelu nástrojů, ale v nabídce Výběr byl přítomen již v Gimpu 1. Transformační nástroj byl rozdělen do několika samostatných nástrojů: Rotace, Změna velikosti, Naklonění a Perspektiva. Barevné operace jsou nyní svázané s vrstvami přes nabídku Vrstva → Barvy, ale opět se jedná pouze o přesun položek, původně nelogicky umístěných v nabídce Obrázek. V Gimpu 2.0 se tedy neobjevily žádné zcela nové nástroje, ale dva ze starých byly od základu přepracovány: nástroj pro práci s textem a nástroj pro práci s cestami. Podrobnosti jsou popsány dále.

Uživatelské rozhraní nástrojů se změnilo poměrně výrazně. Dialog Volby nástrojů nyní nemění svou velikost při změně aktivního nástroje, protože to většina uživatelů považovala za nepříjemné. Nyní je tento dialog ve výchozím nastavení trvale otevřený a ukotven pod panelem nástrojů, kde ho lze snadno nalézt.

Volby nástrojů mají nové možnosti, v Gimpu 1 nevídané. Mezi nejdůležitější patří následující:

Všechny nástroje pro výběr mají tlačítka režimu: Nahradit, Přidat, Ubrata Průnik. V Gimpu 1 bylo stejné funkcionality možno dosáhnout pouze pomocí modifikačních kláves Ctrl nebo Shift, což bylo pro některé uživatele matoucí, neboť tyto klávesy mají i jiné funkce. FIXME

For transformation tools, buttons now control which object (layer, selection or path) is affected by the transformation. You can for example transform a rectangular selection to various quadrilateral shapes. Path transformation in particular is now easier than it was before.

„Fade out“ and „Paint Using Gradient“ are now available for all drawing tools. In fact, all drawing tools now have their own individual brush, gradient and pattern settings, in contrast to GIMP 1 where there was a single global setting that applied to all drawing tools. Now you can select different brushes for the Pencil and the Paint Brush, or different patterns for the Clone and Fill tools. You can change these setting by using your mouse wheel over the relevant resource button (this is most useful for quickly and easily choosing a brush).

FIXME

The Image window has some interesting new features. These are not necessarily activated by default, but they can be checked as options in the Preferences → Interface → Image Windows menu. „Show Brush Outline“, for example, allows you to see the outline of the brush when using drawing tools. In the „Appearance“ sub-section, you can toggle whether a menu bar is present at the top of image windows. You can set an option to work with the new fullscreen mode. Viewing options are also available from all image windows using right click to bring up the menu, then selecting „View“. The so-called „image“ menu is also available by clicking on a little triangle in the top left corner of the drawing space. The setting you choose in the „Preferences“ dialog is used as the default value, and options you set from an image are used only for that image. (You can also toggle fullscreen mode by using the F11 key; the Esc key also exits fullscreen mode).

GIMP 2 features keyboard accelerators to ease menu access. If you find that navigating through menus using your mouse is onerous, the solution may be to use the keyboard. For example, if the menu bar is present, to create a new image just hit Alt+F+N. Without the menu bar, hit Shift+F10 to open the top-left menu, and use direction keys or F then N to create the new image. Keyboard accelerators are different from shortcuts: accelerators are useful to navigate through menus, whereas shortcuts call a specific menu item directly. For example, Ctrl+N is a shortcut, and the quickest way to open a new image.

To ease access to your most commonly used menu items, the GIMP has provided dynamic shortcuts for many years. When a menu is open, you can hover over the desired menu item and hold down your shortcut combination. This feature is still present, but is deactivated by default in the GIMP 2.0, to avoid accidental re-assigning of existing shortcuts.

The GIMP also ships with a number of sets of key-bindings for its menus. If you would like to replace the default GIMP keybindings by Photoshop bindings, for example, you can move the file menurc in your user data directory to oldmenurc, rename ps-menurc to menurc and restart GIMP.

FIXME

Furthermore, at the bottom of each dialog, there is a dockable area: drag and drop tabs here to attach dialogs beneath the bottom tab group.

Python Fu. Hadi hadi hadi:) FIXME

GIMP-Perl is no longer distributed with the standard GIMP 2 distribution, but is available as a separate package. Currently, GIMP-Perl is supported only on Unix-like operating systems. It includes both a simple scripting language, and the ability to code more polished interfaces using the Gtk2 perl module. Direct pixel manipulation is available through the use of PDL.

Script-Fu, based on „Scheme“, has the same drawbacks as before: not intuitive, hard to use and lacking a real development environment. It does, however, have one major advantage compared to Python-fu: Script-Fu scripts are directly interpreted by GIMP and do not require any additional software installation. Python-fu requires that you install a package for the Python language.

FIXME

FIXME

In Design mode, you can create a path, add nodes to an existing path and modify the shape of a curve either by dragging edges of the curve or dragging the „handles“ of a node.

In Edit mode, you can add nodes in the middle of curve edges, and remove nodes or edges, as well as change the shape of the curve. You can also connect two path components.

The third mode, Move, is, as you might expect, used to move path components. If your path has several components, you can move each path component separately. To move all components at once, use the Shift key.

Two other path-related features are new in the GIMP 2.0. The GIMP can not only import an SVG image as a raster image, but can also keep SVG paths intact as GIMP paths. This means that the GIMP is now more able than ever to complement your favorite vector drawing tool. The other feature which has made the path tool much better is the introduction of vector-based stroking. In previous versions, stroking paths and selections was a matter of drawing a brush-stroke along the path. This mode is still available, but it is now possible to stroke a curve accurately, using the vector library libart.

Některá další vylepšení: