Gimp 2.8 Is Here

Gimp 2.8 is here. For Windows users this is the best place to get GIMP.

Anti aliasing is improved. I didn't like the text entry at first but like it now. The old way of text entry is still available but I have not reverted to it. Gimp 2.8 is very good.

Finding working plug-ins and extensions can be a struggle. This link provides and install program for many of the plug-ins in one package and claims to keep them up to date. Of course reinstall of the plug-in would be required. I was shy about using it and tried install the GAP portion, which is impossible to find anywhere else. GAP worked perfectly. Here is the full link:
https://code.google.com/p/gimp-extensions/downloads/detail?name=GIMP_Extensions_v2.8.20130215.exe

I has many plug-ins including G'mic. FX Foundry, liquid rescale, etc. I don't know if it installs Script Fu but I would dare let it install everything after my experience with GAP.

Creating a contrast mask works great if parts of an image are too dark or dull.
gaussian is 1% of average image size HxW/2x.01=gaussian amount

I think this is much better
I did sharpen with unsharp mask. Keep radius below 1 and raise amount

Same here but also added grayscale mask and sharpened after resize
He suggests selecting the foreground but I just dropped the opacity of the gray mask.
I lost some water color by not deleting the background from the gray mask.
I think the gaussian blur calculation helped also. Larger than I would have imagined.
This works wonders.

Here I selected and deleted the gray mask from the water and sky. It does look better.
This saves an unacceptable picture.

This is another method.