GIMP Curves: Cleaning up old settings

Each and every time you use the Curves function in GIMP 2.6, it saves that setting, and labels it with the time it was used. The same color curve can then be used again, just by recognizing the time in the Presets drop-down menu within the Curves dialog box. This is a great feature, since it’s common to want to repeat a good curve setting, even if it wasn’t clear it’s so good when it was done.

Anyhow, there’s a little problem: The list gets very large after a while. Presets saved by name will most likely appear last, making them effectively unavailable.

The presets are stored as LISP code in a file called ~/.gimp-2.6/tool-options/gimp-curves-tool.settings (the tilde means “your home directory”). This is great news, because editing or clearing this file (possible deleting it) allows you to clean up this list.

But even better, it looks like these LISP expressions can be copied into a script, to repeat a Curves operation. I’ve discussed GIMP scripts here, so you may want to give it a try. I haven’t tried to adopt these curve settings in a script yet, because I haven’t had the need. If you’re successful with this, please leave a comment below.