The culmination of seven years of open-source development, GIMP has reached its milestone 3.0 release. GIMP was always powerful, but this feels more like the mature, usable release to take on the proprietary heavyweights.
I don’t want to overstate that. If it’s polish and an easy transition you’re looking for, Affinity is really still the leading rival for those wanting to unshackle themselves from Adobe subscriptions. But at the same time, I think it’s not fair to complain about GIMP’s learning curve or user interface. GIMP 3.0 has addressed the bulk of that, and its extensibility and depth make it worth a look. The price is right, but hey, ever wanted to script your image editor with Python? (Or C++, or Scheme, or … Perl, really.) Or, you know, let someone else do the Python programming and just take advantage of awesome plugins? (Even if you are considering Affinity or you’re sticking with Adobe, it’s worth keeping GIMP around – for free – for this functionality alone.)
Oh yeah, and you know what you won’t have to deal with in the interface? It won’t ask you if you want to use AI. It won’t argue with you when you try to save about whether you should use the cloud. It won’t try to sell you other products. I’d say that might even ease any “learning curve.”
Here’s what’s new:
The UI is vastly improved. I’m sure this is what was holding a lot of us back. The new update is GTK3-based, looks better on every OS, and finally scales properly on high-density displays. There’s CSS theme support, too, so I expect we’ll see some user-contributed looks to make it better still.
Non-destructive layer effects. If the UI didn’t stop you, this might have. You can still “Merge Filters” if you want, but now you can try what-if scenarios with filters far more easily. (GIMP’s GEGL filter mechanism is also awesome.)
Search GEGL filters. The / shortcut brings up search quickly and – these days, given how cluttered certain other image editor menus have become, I love this quick-type feature.
Expanded color space management, including with GEGL libraries.
Multiple-select layers, channel, and paths. You also get Layer locks and Layer sets – all in all, the layer workflow is far more usable, and even compares well with competitors.
Tablet and drawing support. You can also draw and automatically expand the layer, and tablets are better supported with the new UI. (I’m curious to try an iPad with this, too – via Sidecar. Of course, GIMP will also happily work outside Apple ecosystems, etc., via GTK3 and Linux tablet support.)
Right-to-left language support works properly across the UI.
I have really not followed this one, but you’ll find extensive Wayland display support on Linux. It’s the X11 successor; the official documentation and FAQ explain more.
And one more thing… not sold on why you should use GIMP yet? How about archaic file support, including Amiga graphics formats and Mac and Windows icons?
Check the full GIMP 3.0 Release Notes for more.
But this feels like a breakthrough moment for the editor. Remember when Blender was too hard to use, had a UI no one understood, and was dismissed as being just for the Linux crowd and people who weren’t serious enough to pay license fees? I sure do. Now it’s, you know, winning Oscars and sending Disney home empty-handed.
GIMP isn’t quite there yet, but it’s got enough depth to be a no-brainer to keep around if you do any image work – and it might well replace Photoshop for many people.
It feels creative and expansive again – like a tool you actually want to explore, especially once you add some plug-ins. And bizarrely, its flexibility and power could mean even more reason to dump Adobe, since it fills in any gaps the various Photoshop alternatives; there’s no sense that you ever run into things GIMP can’t do.
I’ll be curious to hear how you use it. But it’s nice to feel that sense of curiosity about something as mundane as an image/photo editor again.
Feature image mine; all other images courtesy gimp.org.
I’ve been using XnConvert for some quick conversion tasks, too; it’s free as in beer and on all three OSes. But GIMP’s scripting and depth goes far further – and for more (and for server tasks), there’s the open-source ImageMagick. It also has powerful collage features as I used on our recent 2024 year-end review.
I will go and sit for a while with the horrible, sinking feeling I have that somehow this is going to launch me into an Amiga rabbit hole. But there are worse things, aren’t there?