# GIMP increments uo to 2.8.16



## tolusina (Nov 26, 2015)

Sometime in the last few days, a GIMP incremental update from 2.8.14 to 2.8.16 was released.

Release notes here
http://www.gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-2.8.html

Download page here
http://www.gimp.org/downloads/
Scroll down the download page for the user manuals, GIMP always offers these as separate, language specific downloads.

Among many updates described in the release notes is

*Support loading 16bit (RGB565) raw data.*
Been anxiously awaiting this*.

*Installer page notes, "installer contains both 32-bit and 64-bit versions"
---
It's downloading here as I write, I'd critique it if I though myself qualified.
A better critique might come from a current and experienced Photoshop user who's fed up with Adobe's required tithe by subscription business model and seeks a lower cost alternative.


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## distant.star (Nov 26, 2015)

.
Definitely a lower cost!

Thanks for the heads up. I use this several times per month.


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## tolusina (Nov 27, 2015)

Cost is the learning curve.

As far as

*Support loading 16bit (RGB565) raw data.*
Goes, I'm clearly missing something.
Below is a screenshot taken as I Sent to GIMP from Lightroom 5.3 for external editing.


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## koenkooi (Nov 27, 2015)

tolusina said:


> Cost is the learning curve.
> 
> As far as
> 
> ...



Your picture is 16 bit *per channel* for a total of 48 bit per pixel. The release notes are talking about 16 bit per pixel, arranged 5 bits red, 6 bits green and 5 bits blue.


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## Valvebounce (Nov 28, 2015)

Hi koenkooi. 
Ok so where does one get the RGB565 file to import? 

Cheers, Graham. 



koenkooi said:


> tolusina said:
> 
> 
> > Cost is the learning curve.
> ...


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## LDS (Nov 28, 2015)

tolusina said:


> Among many updates described in the release notes is
> 
> *Support loading 16bit (RGB565) raw data.*
> Been anxiously awaiting this*.
> *


*

Don't be fooled by the "raw" word. This has nothing to do with cameras RAW formats - RGB 565 is a format to cram the three RGB values into a single 16 bit value (sometimes used by some video streams to save on bandwidth and storage), instead of the usual 24. Actually, it's worse than 8 bit RGB and of course far worse than camera RAW formats that have more than 10 bit per channel.

"raw" in image formats is often use to describe a format that has no headers with information about the data it contains (BMP, JPEG, TIFF etc. all have headers) - you need to know how it's encoded to open it properly.*


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