GIMP 3.0 released

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 menu 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.
↫ GIMP 3.0 release notes

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.