It’s taken a Herculean seven-year effort, but GIMP 3.0 has finally been released. There are so many new features, changes, and improvements in this release that it’s impossible to highlight all of them. First and foremost, GIMP 3.0 marks the shift to GTK3 – this may be surprising considering GTK4 has been out for a while, but major applications such as GIMP tend to stick to more tried and true toolkit versions. GTK4 also brings with it the prickly discussion concerning a possible adoption of libadwaita, the GNOME-specific augmentations on top of GTK4. The other major change is full support for Wayland, but users of the legacy X11 windowing system don’t have to worry just yet, since GIMP 3.0 supports that, too.
As far as actual features go, there’s a ton here. Non-destructive layer effects is one of the biggest improvements.
Another big change introduced in GIMP 3.0 is non-destructive (NDE) filters. In GIMP 2.10, filters were automatically merged onto the layer, which prevented you from making further edits without repeatedly undoing your changes. Now by default, filters stay active once committed. This means you can re-edit most GEGL filters in the
↫ GIMP 3.0 release notesmenu on the layer dockable without having to revert your work. You can also toggle them on or off, selectively delete them, or even merge them all down destructively. If you prefer the original GIMP 2.10 workflow, you can select the “Merge Filters” option when applying a filter instead.
There’s also much better color space management, better layer management and control, the user interface has been improved across the board, and support for a ton of file formats have been added, from macOS icons to Amiga ILBM/IFF formats, and much more. GIMP 3.0 also improves compatibility with Photoshop files, and it can import more palette formats, including proprietary ones like Adobe Color Book (ACB) and Adobe Swatch Exchange (ASE).
This is just a small selection, as GIMP 3.0 truly is a massive update. It’s available for Linux, Windows, and macOS, and if you wait for a few days it’ll probably show up in your distribution’s package repositories.
Amazing! Hopefully we will see bigger improvements more often now especially with colour spaces (eg. CMYK and CieLab) and non-destructive editing. Maybe even UX.
It is easy to be cynical about the pace of GIMP development and indeed it has been slow. However, I think a lot of the problem has simply been that the version that the rest of us were using was not the one that the devs were adding new things to. The big architectural changes meant that new features added years ago are only seeing the light of day now.
ReactOS has the same problem. The “stable” version is years out of date. Anybody close to the project has been using versions with far more functionality for a really long time but, unless you are downloading nightly dev versions, you would never know that progress is being made. As a result, progress is much slower than it should be and far fewer people are able to participate.
Now that 3.0 is out, I do hope that the apparent pace of GIMP evolution accelerates and we can all get more exited about where it is going next.
As a light user who finds the ui of most image editors equally obscure, I am curious as to what the photoshop crowd thinks of this new version.
Is there a list of what file formats are actually supported? I couldn’t find any at the site.
GTK? Motif or GTFO! =)))))
In a more serious note, I am happy this is out now and I am eager to try it. Years ago, I dumped all subscription software out of my life (I don’t mind perpetual licenses), but GIMP or even Luminar Neo choke with 4×5 and 8×10 300-800mp scans.
GIMP scrolls and redraws the screen very slowly, and previewing any levels adjustment is impossibly slow. Luminar Neo leaks memory like there’s no tomorrow, slowly going through all 64GB of RAM and more than 100GB of swap space.
I was just yesterday considering going back to Adobe, but will now give GIMP another shot.