2.5. Layers and masks
| 2. What's new in GIMP 2.10? |

### 2.5. Layers and masks

GIMP now ships with two groups of blending modes: legacy (perceptual, mostly to make old XCF files look exactly as before) and default (mostly linear).

New blend modes are:

- LCH layer modes: Hue, Chroma, Color, and Lightness.

- Pass-Through mode for layer groups.

- Linear Burn, Vivid Light, Linear Light, Pin Light, Hard Mix, Exclusion, Merge, and Split.

Layers, paths, and channels can also be tagged with color labels to improve project organization. This will be even more useful once we add multi-layer selection later on.

Compositing options for layers are exposed to users now, and all layer-related settings are finally available in the Layer Attributes dialog.

Moreover, if you always need alpha in your layers, you can enable automatic generation of the alpha channel in imported images upon opening them. See Edit → Preferences → Image Import & Export page for this and more policies.

Layer groups can finally have masks on:

2.4. Color management revamped |  | 2.6. More use for CIE LAB and CIE LCH

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