GIMP - GIMP 3.0 Release Notes (2025)

Introduction¶

After seven years of active development, we are proud to announce the next major release of GIMP – GIMP 3.0! While the original focus was on updating to a newer GUI library, this release is packed with many new features, enhancements, and usability improvements. While we can’t cover every single change from 2.10, we want to highlight some of the biggest ones as you start exploring thisrelease.

Updated GTK3 user interface¶

One of the main goals of this release was to upgrade our GUI library to GTK3. This was an intensive effort that involved changing every aspect of the code for our user interface. The benefits of this workinclude:

• Much better UI scaling on HiDPI screens, a common concern for users of GIMP2.10.

• Much better support for tablet input.

• The theme system now uses CSS, which we hope will allow for users to more easily develop their own customthemes.

• GIMP 3.0 now runs natively on Wayland (though you can still run it on X11 aswell)!

• A lot of important bugfixes which could not be backported to the GTK2 library we wereusing.

Non-destructive layer effects¶

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 filterinstead.

NDE filters can also be saved to XCF and reloaded for further editing. This means that if someone sends you anXCF project with NDE filters, you can make further adjustments on the image and text effects. You can alsosave and load XCF using third-party filters, although they will be discarded ifyou don’t have those filtersinstalled.

GEGL filters can now also be found directly with the / search keyboard shortcut. This applies to third-party filters as well, which makes it easier to locate the right effect for yourproject.

Finally GEGL operations (the infrastructure underlying filters in GIMP)are now even better integrated with GIMP thanks to new metadata allowinga filter to register into menus without wrapping code in GIMP. This isparticularly useful for third-party developers wishing to writefilters.

Some people might be pleased to know that a spiritual successor of thelegacy Logos feature has appeared in recent versionsof GEGL underthe name “GEGLStyles”:

Color space management¶

Thanks to better integration with the babl and GEGL libraries, GIMP now has more extensive support for RGB color spaces beyond sRGB. For example, if you load an image with an AdobeRGB color profile, that information will be retained in all aspects of GIMP – allowing you to make whatever edits you need without losing color space information. This update also lays the groundwork for future CMYK and LAB image colormodes.

This improved support of anyRGB spaces now spans across variousdialogs, such as the Colors dockable window, the Foreground andBackground selection dialog, the Color Picker info window, and more,better showing which space a color is shownin.

Color simulation and soft-proofing has also been improved in a variety of ways. Internally, we have portedmore of it to useour babl color library, keeping the color processing consistent throughout GIMP.We have also consolidated soft-proofing options in a pop-over menu at the bottom-right corner of the statusbar. If a CMYK profile is already attached to the image, you can click the icon to toggle soft-proofing onor off. You can also right-click the icon to quickly change the color profile, rendering intent,black point compensation, and other relevantoptions.

Welcome Dialogue¶

GIMP 3.0 now displays an optional Welcome Dialogue on start. This feature provides quick access to create or load new images to begin editing via the Createsection.

The Personalize section makes it easy to quickly change several preference settings suchas:

• Symbolic, Color, or Legacy iconstyles
• Light, Gray, and Dark variants of the UItheme
• Using Tool Groups to condense icons in thetoolbox
• Merging the menutoolbars

Usability Improvements¶

This release contains a lot of much requested updates to the GIMP user experience. A few of the most noticeable onesinclude:

Layers, Channels, and Paths¶

• It is now possible to have multiple selected layers, channels, and paths! Previously users needed to manually click link icons in order to affect multiple layers. Now you can use standard shortcuts to select multiple items atonce.

• Layer locks have been moved from the dockable header to a pop-over menu that you can access nextto each layer’s visibility icon. This allows you to more easily see the lock status of each item, especiallynow that you can have multiple layers, channels, or paths selected atonce.

• You can now organize layers with the new layer set feature. You can also search for layers by name,making it easier to find layers within a largeproject.

• The New Image and New Layer dialogs have a new “Middle Gray (CIELAB)” filloption.

Off-Canvas Editing¶

• Paint tools can now automatically expand the width and height of a layer as you draw! You can select “Expand Layers” in the tool options to enable drawing past the current boundaries oflayers.

• More features such as guides and auto-expanding layers can be used to work in the off-canvasspace!

User Interface¶

• GIMP’s interface further incorporates Right-to-Left language layouts in various widgets anddialogues.

• We now better respect reduce motion and animation OS settings across the interface. Several animationsand “easter eggs” no longer display based on your system settings. We implemented these fixes after feedbackfrom users that these animations could cause motion sickness and other issues for certainpeople.

• Many Legacy icons have been converted to SVG, allowing for cleaner scaling when the icon theme size is increased. New icons have also been created to better distinguish certain actions, like the multiple zoomoptions on the Navigationdockable.

• The title bar on Windows now adapts to dark mode if you use a dark variant theme. You can also chooseto merge the title bar with the menu to reduce the space it takes up on thescreen.

• Number range sliders have been updated to be larger and easier to grab. Due to GTK3, they also now use+ and - icons rather than the more ambigious ^ and v icons.

  See Also

  The White Lotus Season 3, Episode 6 Release Date & Time

• A long-standing bug on macOS caused the UI text to become garbled for some users. This has been fixed thanksto an update to the Pango library bundled with GIMP3.0!

Workflow and Short-Cuts¶

• 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 thatworkflow.

• The search menu results now show the menu location for each action. If you’ve ever wondered where aparticular filter or feature was located before, now you can quickly discover them! We’ve also added a help buttonto the action search, making it easier to learn more about how to use eachfeature.

• Brush dynamics can now be turned off via the “Enable Dynamics” checkbox in tool options, rather than having to search forthe “Dynamics Off” option in thelist.

• You can now customize the actions performed with right or middle clicks (or any other buttons, except the primary button which is reserved for tools)in Edit > Preferences > Canvas Interaction > Modifiers. For instance, you want to change your brush size with a right click rather than displaying the menu? You can do it! You want to disable Canvas Rotation because you don’t use this feature? It’s possible too! You want to activate your favorite filter on Alt + middle click? Noproblem!

• On Wayland, you can also map tablet buttons to different actions as well. This update gives moreoptions for tablet users to customize their workflow and easily apply important actions without switchinginputdevices.

• 2 New Snapping options appeared inthe View menu:

  • “Snap to Bounding Boxes“: allows on-canvas snapping to either layer borders orcenter.
  • “Snap to Equidistance“: allows to snap a layer to be at the same distance from a second one that this second one is to a third one, either horizontally orvertically.

Improved file format support¶

GIMP 3.0 brings support for many new file formats. Icon creators can now import and export macOS ICNS icons and Windows CUR and ANI cursors. Amiga enthusiasts can now load images from a number of ILBM/IFF formats.Newer formats like QOI and JPEG XL are also now supported, and import support for older formats like DCX, PAM, and WBMP allow for accessing archivedimages.

Existing formats also received important updates. We’ve improved compatibility for importing and exporting PSD project files. JPEGs and TIFFs with Photoshop-specific metadata such as clipping paths, guides, and layers can now be loaded as well. Game developers can now import DDS textures with modern BC7 compression. GIMP also supports importing and exporting CMYK JPEGs, TIFFs, PSDs, and JPEG XL.

In addition to images, a number of new palette formats can now be imported into GIMP. This includes proprietary formats like Adobe Color Book (ACB) and Adobe Swatch Exchange (ASE), as well as the open source Swatchbooker palette. As a result of the color space invasion, we’ve also improved support for loading palettes in the CIE Lab colormodel.

Note that these are just a few of the many updates to file format support in GIMP3.0.

Better Text Support¶

GIMP 3.0’s internal text engine has a number of great improvements. Fonts are more accurately stored anddisplayed to users; this allows us to better distinguish fonts in the same family rather than just showingthem with a different ID number. This also allows users to better see the font’s true bold or italic,rather than just using the faux version. Furthermore, we’ve improved font loading and backwards compatibility.Additionally, as part of the color space invasion we now support text colors with floating point precision rather than just 8bit.

The updated Text Tool now has options for non-destructive text outlines. You can specify the outline width, style, and color or pattern type right from the tool options. You can also apply NDE filters such as GEGL Styles to create outlines as well. Furthermore, you can now hide or show the on-canvas text editor - this should help when editing text while zoomedin.

New Logo¶

Wilber went to the stylist and got a freshrelooking!

This new version was designed by the film director and designer AryeomHan, under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International,with the help of the rest of the GIMPteam.

All past versions of Wilber are still available fromour gimp-datarepository,including the original version created by Tuomas Kuosmanen(tigert).

GIMP 3.0 includes a new experimental selection tool, Paint Select. This tool allows you to use a brushto progressively select an object or area in an image. While it is a very nice feature, it still has somestability issues. Therefore, it is not visible by default - you will need to enable it in thePlayground section of the Preferences Dialog to test it out. You can access this section by running GIMP 3.0withthe --show-playground flag.

API updates¶

Since this is a major version release, we’re taking the opportunity to update our public API for scripts and plug-ins. This allows us to give third-party developers access to new features like operating on multiple layers at once and using GEGL filters directly. It also lets us clean up and remove duplicate or obsoletefunctions.

Plug-in developers can also automatically create a UI with thenew GimpProcedureDialog API.You just specify the function parameters, and when you create and run the dialog, the options will begenerated for you. You can of course customize the type of widget created for each parameter, adjust thelayer, or even add your own custom widgets. You can see all the options on our API reference page.

We also support more languages for developing scripts and plug-ins for GIMP. In addition to C and Script-fu’sTinyScheme, you can also run scripts and plug-ins written withJavascript, Lua (though this binding was marked as experimentalbecause of instabilities), and Vala on platforms that build GIMP tosupport these languages. We’ve also switched from GIMP 2.10’s Python-futo use standard Python 3 for 3.0. You can see examples of plug-insin each language by checking out our demoplug-ins.

Unfortunately, these improvements break compatibility with GIMP 2.10 plug-ins and scripts, so some of your favorite plug-ins may not work just yet. Since the API is now stable for all GIMP 3.x releases, we hope developers will begin porting their plug-ins and scripts in earnest (some popular add-ons like Resynthesizer and G’MIC have already done so)! On our new developer site, we’ve begun creating tutorials to make this porting process easier – feel free to share with the developers of your favoritescripts.

Under-the-hood changes¶

Much work has been done over the course of GIMP 3.0’s development to improve our build processes. A bigchange was switching from autotools to Meson for compiling. This has resulted in a major speed-up whenbuilding GIMP, allowing for quicker testing anddevelopment.

We have also improved multi-threading and thread safety in several key areas. The changes are most noticablein the XCF code which resulted in much faster saving, and in the painting code which improved performance andstability.

Our public API for plug-ins is now based onthe GObject-Introspectioninfrastructure, which means that more languages than listed above (inthe “API updates” section) can actually be used (thoughnot all bindings have been tested and some are quiteunstable).

Some most needed work has been done on making OpenCL implementationsmore robust though it is still disabled by default since GIMP2.10.22.We hope to be able to soon make experimental builds for wider testing inorder to eventually bring back hardwareacceleration.

Translations¶

Out of the 85 languages which GIMP is available in, 47 translations were updated: Asturian, Basque, Belarusian, Brazilian Portuguese, British English, Bulgarian, Catalan, Central Kurdish, Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Czech, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kabyle, Kazakh, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian Nynorsk, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Serbian (Latin), Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian,Vietnamese.

Next Steps on the Roadmap¶

GIMP 3.0’s development has been a long journey for developers and the community alike. We want to speed up this process. Going forward, we will only introduce new features during minor releases (such as GIMP 3.2), and 3.0.x releases will be reserved for bugfixes (as it used to be until GIMP 2.8 series; the 2.10 series was an exception when we added features even in micro pointreleases).

However, we also intend for minor releases to be much more frequent. Rather than having another 6+ years development schedule for GIMP 3.2, we plan to release it within a year of 3.0. As a result, it will include less features, but those features will be available to users much sooner. We’ve already set up several “feature groups” in our post-3.0 roadmap – each of which might become a new GIMP 3.x release. Several features already have initial code developed and posted for review, and we’re looking forward to discussing those more in future newsposts!

During 3.0’s development, we also began work on a community UX Design group. We’ve already implemented several suggestions based on user feedback, and now that 3.0 has been released, we’re looking forward to expanding the scope of that effort. We know many people have strong opinions of GIMP’s UI, and we want to make good, well-reasoned decisions about UX improvements in the future. We encourage you to contribute your voice to the discussion so that there’s input from a wider range ofusers!

You can download GIMP 3.0 from our Downloads page. We have a few new packages in addition to our Windows, macOS, and Linux flatpak options. For Windows, you can also download GIMP from the Microsoft Store. This will enable auto-updates whenever we release a new version. For Linux, we now have an AppImage if you prefer that overflatpak.

We deeply appreciate everyone who has reviewed the development builds of GIMP 3.0 and reported bugs, issues, and regressions over the years. We’ve managed to fix a lot of bugs in GIMP as a result! However, we are well aware that many more people will be experiencing GIMP 3.0 for the first time now that it is the stable release, and we expect that you may find some lingering bugs that we missed. Please report any issue you encounter to our bug tracker – that helps us know there’s a problem so we can fix it. You’re also welcome to post requests for new features or enhancements for futureversions!

GIMP is a community project, and it relies on support from users like you to continue to grow. There are many ways toparticipate!

• If you’re a developer, we always welcome more code contributions – we’ve even marked some reports for “Newcomers” to help you ease into thecodebase.
• As mentioned earlier, we’re also looking for more feedback from designers to help create a better userexperience.
• Other ways to directly assist with GIMP’s development include updating translations (contact directly the team coordinator for your language), writing user documentation, and creating new tutorials to assist people with using GIMP.
• You may also donate to support the existing teammembers.

Working on GIMP itself is not the only way to participate of course. We’re always happy to see people sharing how they use GIMP to create artistic, scientific, or even just funimages!