GIMP 3.0

3.0 is big for GIMP. Lots of features to make it viable for simple Desktop Publishing and YouTube thumbs.<p>Created a quick poster: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;pPgy255.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;pPgy255.png</a> Stuff that needs work:<p>* UI&#x2F;UX: &quot;Tool-&gt;GEGL Operation...&quot; is too much friction for such a common operation- just pop it up when you click on the &quot;FX&quot; button in the layers window.<p>* UI&#x2F;UX: Naming. Drop shadows and glow are currently not discoverable (its squirreled away in the generic &quot;GEGL Styles&quot;).<p>* UI&#x2F;UX: &quot;Move Tool&quot; should act like a common entry point to other tools if you&#x27;re not dragging. Switch to &quot;Transform Tool&quot; if I single click an image layer. Switch to the &quot;Text Tool&quot; if I single click a Text layer! Please!<p>* UI&#x2F;UX: Copying&#x2F;pasting layer styles does not work. Users can overlook many issues if you can duplicate&#x2F;destroy layer styles easily. Preset system is cumbersome. Idea: Presets usable from the Layers window directly (could be just add&#x2F;apply presets) would help a lot, but just copy&#x2F;paste would probably be better.<p>* BUG: Layers often clip GEGL Glow. Again could be worked around by just easy copy&#x2F;paste of layer styles. See clipping present on &quot;GIMP Halloween Party&quot; text in my image.

Usually I&#x27;d strongly bias toward OSS. But gimp&#x27;s ux is just so bad, I&#x27;d sooner use (_vomits_) adobe knowing I&#x27;ll have to wrestle a bear in order to cancel my subscription. But there&#x27;s no need. Figma, while not OSS, is free, and it does have acceptable UX. I&#x27;m a newb who occasionally needs to brush up an image or combine multiple images for my startup. I got more done in figma in thirty minutes than in gimp in 3 hours, and was much less frustrated. I could never find the relevant button (or sometimes even pane) in gimp. If you already learned gimp, use it, but for anyone else it&#x27;s false economy - the time you lose fighting its UX outweighs the feelgood&#x2F;freedom of using OSS.

&gt; Making pro-quality text got easier, too. Style your text, apply outlines, shadows, bevels, and more, and you can still edit your text, change font and size, and even tweak the style settings.<p>This is a game-changer. I tried to use GIMP to typeset comic translations many years ago, and the workflow was so terrible I had to resort to a few extra tools, complicating my workflow. I&#x27;ll have to try the new text editing to see for sure, but it sounds like typesetting is now comparable to what&#x27;s offered in proprietary editors.

I’ve been using GIMP as long as I can remember, more or less. Say what you will about the UI&#x2F;UX but it remains top tier free software. So glad to see this.

&gt; Updated graphical toolkit (GTK3) for modern desktop usage.<p>I&#x27;m scared, they already started messing with the toolbox stuff (putting multiple icons under the same button and then changing the icons too to make it entirely impossible to find anything).. &quot;modern desktop&quot; has taken on a different meaning for me, it&#x27;s all about making it look neat at first glance, then entirely undiscoverable, removing any affordance in sight, burger menus, ribbon menus.. f...

And sticking with tradition, zero screenshots of it on the announcement post.

Non-destructive editing is a huge shift for GIMP that&#x27;s really exciting to see. I&#x27;m quite happy with Rawtherapee so I don&#x27;t know if I&#x27;ll go back to GIMP, but the fact that you won&#x27;t have to create a bazillion extra layers with backups of your work will be a huge step forward.

I think GIMP could become a big proper competitor to commercial photo editors just like Blender did on the 3D space, as soon as they go the Blender way and do a complete overhaul of the UX&#x2F;UI like Blender did.<p>I remember, for years and years, trying Blender and quitting it due to the terrible UX choices. Likewise, I also remember the devs and some older users on the internet trying, at every turn, to tell us how much superior Blender UI&#x2F;UX was, that all the people were wrong and they were right. They weren&#x27;t right, of course. Then the team at Blender finally accepted it, they did a complete redo of the UX&#x2F;UI and now Blender is winning prizes at the Oscars.<p>The same could happen to GIMP if they just accepted the UX is terrible.<p>I&#x27;m saying this, totally agreeing that these devs did a fantastic job and that they don&#x27;t owe us anything. This is open source, of course. But, this level of stubbornness, is preventing GIMP from being used by a lot more people that want to finally ditch Photoshop.

Congrats and thanks for all the hard work.<p>I&#x27;m an occasional&#x2F;light user of image editing software and Gimp has been my go-to for years now.<p>I really appreciate all the work you&#x27;ve put into small UX details and performance over the past 3-5 years. It shows.

&gt; Making pro-quality text got easier, too. Style your text, apply outlines, shadows, bevels, and more<p>Those... are not &quot;pro-quality&quot; things but cheap gimmicks.<p>Good that they&#x27;re introducing non-destructive editing! I&#x27;ve long moved to DarkTable for photo editing. Photo editing never seemed like GIMP&#x27;s goal.

I got so used to GIMP back in my Ubuntu Linux days that I don’t bother installing Photoshop or other image editor on my Mac.<p>Besides, Adobe is an ugly company with shady billing&#x2F;retention tactics…

I too have been using the wonderful GIMP for years. The BIMP (Batch Image Manipulation Plugin for GIMP) is super useful in batch processing a large number of images in GIMP.

Oh yes... yes... yes. I hate to be enthusiastic about this for a lame reason... but I can&#x27;t believe the bloated labyrinthine expensive hellscape of Photoshop. With the myriad extra software one needs to install just to make it work. Thank YOUUUUUUU!!!!<p>&gt; This is the end result of seven years of hard work by volunteer developers, designers, artists, and community members<p>Gratitude!

It blows my mind that the cockroach db founders started this 29 years ago.<p>Amazing to see this release.

&gt; Copying and pasting now creates a new layer by default rather than a “floating selection”, which many users found confusing. Floating layers can still be created with the “Paste as Floating Data” option for those who prefer that workflow.<p>Oh thank god

I opened GIMP once. I won&#x27;t do it again until somebody compares a UI update to Blender&#x27;s big one. 2.9?

&gt; Making pro-quality text got easier, too. Style your text, apply outlines, shadows, bevels, and more, and you can still edit your text, change font and size, and even tweak the style settings.<p>I remember wanting this 2015 .. finally.

I was so eager to get non destructive editing on Linux that I downloaded it and compiled it from source when it was still in beta. That is the biggest game changer of 3.0 if you ask me.

Oh wow they have Apple Silicon builds now. The last I tried they were woefully slow. This is great news. For all it&#x27;s flaws it&#x27;s been a really useful application over the years and I do miss it now that I&#x27;m on the M-series Macs. But now I know I don&#x27;t have to.

Non-destructive editing sounds great!

I thought I&#x27;d never see the day! At long last, I&#x27;ll be able to use non-destructive editing.<p>Hopefully they&#x27;ll adopt a more sane release strategy going forward.

I&#x27;ve been a Photoshop user for over 2 decades. I install GIMP every few years to test to see how far it has progressed. This Ui took me back to the 1990s (almost Windows 3.0). I wish the shortcuts were similar to Photoshop so the transition for people who don&#x27;t want to pay for Photoshop would be easier. For free software, I can&#x27;t complain. I am certain so many unpaid hours were poured into it.

They should start a Kickstarter campaign to introduce a complete UX overhaul. I want to pay for it. I want to have an intuitive way to do stuff.

&gt; Updated graphical toolkit (GTK3) for modern desktop usage.<p>Are distros going to drop GTK2 now?

Can we fix this link? Surely they don&#x27;t want a staging server out there<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gimp.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;2025&#x2F;03&#x2F;16&#x2F;gimp-3-0-released&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gimp.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;2025&#x2F;03&#x2F;16&#x2F;gimp-3-0-released&#x2F;</a>

Honestly, I&#x27;ve never really understood the hate towards the GIMP UI. Maybe it&#x27;s because I&#x27;m a programmer so I&#x27;d probably end up creating a UI like it, but generally things are where I&#x27;d expect them to be. Sure, there&#x27;s a learning curve but it&#x27;s not that steep, and I do have to google how to do things sometimes but then I have to do that in blender too

I hope ArsTechnica brings back their long form gimp reviews for this release. I know they stopped doing them but it seems like this release is pretty special

I just opened this up on macOS and the very first thing I noticed is that the bold font rendering in the UI looks like shit. The letters are all squished into each other. Is this just something weird with my system? GIMP 3.0 has been in testing for long enough that it&#x27;s hard to believe this is a widespread issue that wouldn&#x27;t have been found and fixed before release.

Anyone know how to get the Resynthesizer plugin working in Gimp? It works in version 2, but I can&#x27;t get it working in version 3.

How do GIMP&#x27;s selection tools stack up against Photoshop these days? I&#x27;m not an expert in either, but a long time ago I remember struggling to select a person in a photo in GIMP. And then my friend demo&#x27;d the new-at-the-time subject selection tool that made it trivial.

For several years I struggled to learn GIMP and other FOSS creative tools. That was until I finally stopped my Adobe subscription and had no choice to learn. AI has made the process much easier too, no need to read documentation or look at a video to find the tool or technique.

Congrats to GIMP devs and everyone involved. I love GIMP and have been using it for decades.

&gt;Making pro-quality text got easier, too. Style your text, apply outlines, shadows, bevels, and more, and you can still edit your text, change font and size, and even tweak the style settings.<p>Life changing. Worth relearning a workflow just for this, no contest.

Gotta love these guys for keeping at it for 26 years. Much much love

When I heard that version 2 was 21 years old. I felt old like when you hear that the Matrix movie is 26 years old.

gimp is a bit complicated for casual use for common and simple needs, wish there is a much simplified version.<p>would be even nicer if there is one click passport mode, picture improvement mode, etc, something like what mobile phone photo apps provide.

It has a nice start-image with sunset and stylizised clouds.<p>Can anybody tell or guess how those clouds were created? I&#x27;ve been looking for such an effect for some time now, basically emphasizing edges and contours.

Yeah! Non-destructive editing is huge. I learned graphics editing with Paint Shop Pro back in the day and easily transitioned to Gimp successfully in the late 90s. Been using it exclusively for twenty years and slowly but surely (haha) keeps getting better.<p>The new widgets are kinda nice too. They&#x27;ve had the RCs in Fedora for a while.<p>(If you&#x27;re here to shit on gimp because it doesn&#x27;t work like adobe, please take it outside, or slashdot.)

I wonder if you can move text properly now? It&#x27;s always been that you have to click on the black part of the letter and it&#x27;s really fiddly to get a pixel perfect click.

Can it draw basic stuff like circles, arrows, and lines now?

GIMP UX is terrible, sorry. One of the worst UX I used.

Any tips for someone who’s been using photoshop for 20 years? Last time I tried gimp it was brutal even with the compatibility key bindings enabled.

I hope they keep the ball rolling and we get a similar renaissance like what we had with Blender.

I think the big features in the future for gimp are going to be AI related image features.... I&#x27;m not sure why they didn&#x27;t mention any of that but that&#x27;s the obvious thing for me would be AI related image manipulation using prompt guided AI... for example passing the image into llama3.2-vision would be a step in the right direction

CMYK Support?

Does somebody know if there are any AI features in GIMP?

Oh, good. The toilet paper template is still there.

GIMP needs a badass new logo for the new version.

Can you draw arrows easily yet?

Did they add a circle option ?

Does it support saving jpeg and PNG files yet? I mean open jpeg, change something, press Ctrl+s, done.

Nice, now we can have plugins again thanks to having a stabilized API.

Does the UI still suck?

gimp is dead. long live krita

New gimp just dropped.

I&#x27;m really tired of shelling out $90&#x2F;month for Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat...

Needs a new user interface and a new name. Krita is not as excruciating as the gimp.

GTK 3 was released in 2011. The upgrade took 14 years.<p>GTK 4 was released in 2020.<p>I hearby declare the GIMP &#x2F; GTK 4 challenge: use AI to migrate GIMP from GTK 3 to GTK 4. The prize: a drawing of a seven legged spider.

When will we get DL stuff in Gimp? E.g. diffusion, superresolution, etc.

GIMP is such a joke. Really one of the worst examples of &quot;FOSS&quot; corruption. Touted as a flagship, moribund and useless.

Gimp is amazing and like Blender has replaced my use of proprietary tools in the area of 2D and 3D editing.<p>My wishlist for GIMP 4 is to see AI tooling integrated by default:<p>- Image generation that will do completions based on prompts on arbitrary areas. Something like this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.adobe.com&#x2F;ca&#x2F;products&#x2F;photoshop&#x2F;generative-fill.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.adobe.com&#x2F;ca&#x2F;products&#x2F;photoshop&#x2F;generative-fill....</a><p>- AI super-resolution. There are a lot of options now that can dramatically improve sharpness, akin to Topaz Gigapixel: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.topazlabs.com&#x2F;gigapixel" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.topazlabs.com&#x2F;gigapixel</a><p>- Meta&#x27;s segment anything integrated so that there is no need to painstakenly select objects. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;segment-anything.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;segment-anything.com</a> (Does it support sub-pixel fuzzy selections?). It would also label everything in the model, which leads to...<p>- Built-in model context protocol (MCP) support to allow for automated control by agentic AI. (See what is possible with Blender: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=DqgKuLYUv00" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=DqgKuLYUv00</a>)<p>Of course it should only download the models the first time someone needs them.