After several weeks of bugfixes and polishing, we’re ready to share our second release candidate for GIMP 3.2! As the GIMP team continues to close issues, the release of 3.2 gets nearer, with many new features, bug fixes and performance improvements. Please do continue to report problems you find to help us make GIMP as good as possible! * Release Highlights * Removing Restrictions * Paths * Paint Select Tool * Start-up time * UX/UI * Minor Updates * Minor Fixes * Security * Build Process * GEGL and babl * Release stats * Around GIMP * Books * Downloading GIMP 3.2 RC2 * What’s next _Second release candidate splash screen by Mark McCaughrean - GIMP 3.2 RC2_ # Release Highlights¶ While there are no major new features in this release, we do want to highlight some of the more impactful fixes and some minor updates. The full changelog can be read in our code repository. You may also notice that we got a second splash screen image, also created and contributed by astronomer **Mark McCaughrean**. It is a shot of the same area of space as for the first splash image candidate, the “Trapezium Cluster & inner Orion Nebula”, again captured with the James Webb Space Telescope, but this time in the short-wavelength channel. The final 3.2 splash image shall be one of these two variants! ## Removing Restrictions¶ In GIMP 2.10, you could not export an image unless you had a layer selected due to a limitation of our export API. Due to the improvements in GIMP 3.0, this is no longer required. Therefore, we’ve removed the code that prevents you from choosing the Save or Export options in the menu when there’s no layer selected. Similarly, the Clipboard Brush and Clipboard Pattern previously had a size limit of 1024 pixels. This was because that was the largest safe value for 32 bit computers to handle. Since most users now have 64 bit computers, we’ve increased the limit to 8192 pixels for the 64 bit builds. This means artists can make and use much larger temporary brushes and patterns as they work. ## Paths¶ GIMP has supported importing SVGs as paths for a long time. However, some SVG paths were shown incorrectly due to our import code being based on an older version of librsvg. Based on suggestions and assistance from **Federico Mena Quintero** , one of the lead developers of the library, we updated our code to better handle different types of SVG paths. ## Paint Select Tool¶ The Paint Select tool has been in the test Playground section of GIMP since it was first developed by **Thomas Manni** in 2020. Recently, **Jehan** has begun reviewing it (and the Foreground Selection tool) as part of the planning for the GIMP 3.4 roadmap. He’s made a number of improvements already, both to the UI and to the tool’s performance. _Improving speed and feedback of experimental Paint Select tool - GIMP 3.2.0 RC2_ ## Start-up time¶ We’ve received reports that GIMP takes a while to load for users with a large number of fonts. This includes our resident typographer, **Liam Quin**. They worked with **Idriss Fekir** to test a change to our font loading code that noticeably speeds up our loading time. This is an area we continue to work on, so if you notice any regressions, please let us know! ## UX/UI¶ * **Ondřej Míchal** and **Jehan** have improved spacing between buttons in the Transform tool overlays to make it easier to click the right one. * Notifications have been added to the Filter merge-down button when users try to merge down a filter on a non-raster layer. * **Gabriele Barbero** fixed the wording on our Keyboard Shortcuts dialog to more clearly explain how to change a shortcut. * Minor fixes have been made to the theme to prevent issues on certain platforms. ## Minor Updates¶ * **Jehan** finished the stylus barrel rotation implementation in our earlier Mypaint Brush 2 port, connecting it to the Wheel value already recognized by GIMP. Note that very few styluses actually provide this feature, so it likely won’t impact your workflow unless you have one of the rare ones. * Thanks to **Alx Sa** , our PSD importer now loads legacy Outer Glow layer effects. The filter information was already loaded in the PSD plug-in during GIMP 3.0’s development, it just was not rendered before. * A long outstanding patch by **Niels De Graef** was finally merged to include a Bash completion file in GIMP. This feature shows the list of available options when pressing Tab in the command line. On a related note, the `--show-debug-menu` option is now visible in the command line `--help` option as well. ## Minor Fixes¶ * **Anders Jonsson** noticed that our default PostScript unit was changed from `millimeters` in GIMP 2.10 to `inches` in GIMP 3.0, without the size being adjusted to match. He fixed the default setting to load images at the right size. * **Jacob Boerema** fixed a bug for plug-in developers, where plug-ins set to be always available would not be usable when there was an open image with no layers added. * **Jehan** and **Gabriele Barbero** corrected a mistake made during vector layer development that caused the offsets not to be visible in the Layer Attributes dialog. * We now prevent loading XCF files as link layers when it will create an infinite loading cycle (if the linked XCF itself loads the initial XCF, at any level). # Security¶ **Alx Sa** and **Gabriele Barbero** have implemented fixes for the following Zero Day Initiative reported issues on some of our image plug-ins: * ZDI-CAN-28311 * ZDI-CAN-28273 * ZDI-CAN-28158 # Build Process¶ Thanks to **Jehan** ‘s work, babl and GEGL can now be compiled as relocatable! This is especially useful for builds where the build prefix is not the same as the runtime prefix. As a result, two bugs were fixed on the AppImage package: the GEGL filters are now fully localized and the third-party GEGL filters can now be found and used on those environments. He also fixed a bug that affected not only the AppImage but other environments too: the language list sometimes was not being displayed translated in the Preferences dialog. Now, when building GIMP, it will instruct packagers to prevent that. A user named **Kruthers** contributed a fix for a long-standing bug on AppImage: the inability to run CLI commands that point to relative paths. Thanks to their fix, the AppImage is now even more on par with a regular installation of GIMP. **Bruno** re-implemented support for building GIMP on Windows with the MSVC compiler, which is now possible due to the existence of the `clang-cl` wrapper (we used to have direct MSVC support, without a wrapper, but it stopped working). As a result, we now have build logs about correct Windows API usage etc. But note that _we will not distribute MSVC binaries_, because, after all, they mostly depend on MSYS2 due to vcpkg design which has much fewer features. In short, MSYS2 is still the recommended way to build GIMP on Windows. # GEGL and babl¶ **Øyvind KolÃ¥s** has released new updates to babl and GEGL, the underlying color management engines for GIMP. As noted above, _babl_ 0.1.118 and _GEGL_ 0.4.66 have been updated to be compiled as relocatable. In addition, a number of contributors have done some code clean-up and build process updates to GEGL. # Release stats¶ Since GIMP 3.2.0 RC1, in the main GIMP repository: * 40 reports were closed as FIXED. * 24 merge requests were merged. * 201 commits were pushed. * 13 translations were updated: Basque, Chinese (China), Danish, Georgian, Greek, Italian, Lithuanian, Norwegian Nynorsk, Slovenian, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian. 23 people contributed changes or fixes to GIMP 3.2.0 RC2 codebase (order is determined by number of commits; some people are in several groups): * 10 developers to core code: Jehan, Alx Sa, Bruno Lopes, Øyvind KolÃ¥s, Anders Jonsson, Gabriele Barbero, Idriss Fekir, Jacob Boerema, Ondřej Míchal, Sabri Ãœnal. * 6 developers to plug-ins or modules: Bruno Lopes, Alx Sa, Ondřej Míchal, Gabriele Barbero, Anders Jonsson, lloyd konneker. * 13 translators: Sabri Ünal, Aefgh Threenine, Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Yuri Chornoivan, Anders Jonsson, Asier Saratsua Garmendia, Martin, Ekaterine Papava, luming zh, Alan Mortensen, Marco Ciampa, dimspingos, Aurimas ÄŒernius. * 2 theme designers: Alx Sa, Jehan. * 5 build, packaging or CI contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Jernej Simončič, Niels De Graef, Øyvind KolÃ¥s. * 2 contributors on other types of resources: Jehan, Niels De Graef. * The gimp-data submodule had 3 commits by 1 contributor: Jehan. * The splash images for the 3.2 series were authored by Mark McCaughrean under license Creative Commons By-SA 2.0. Contributions on other repositories in the GIMPverse (order is determined by number of commits): * Our UX tracker had 1 reports closed as FIXED (and many more incrementally worked on). * babl 0.1.118 is made of 36 commits by 5 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Øyvind KolÃ¥s, Jehan, Jacob Boerema, Joe Da Silva. * GEGL 0.4.66 is made of 62 commits by 11 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Øyvind KolÃ¥s, Jehan, Sabri Ünal, Alfred Wingate, Ondřej Míchal, Alan Mortensen, Alexander Alexandrov Shopov, Jeremy Bícha, Marco Ciampa, Ulf Martin Prill. * ctx had 40 commits since 3.2.0 RC1 release by 1 contributor: Øyvind KolÃ¥s. * The `gimp-macos-build` (macOS packaging scripts) release had 3 commits by 1 contributor: Lukas Oberhuber. * The flatpak release had 6 commits by 1 contributor: Bruno. * Our main website (what you are reading right now) had 27 commits by 4 contributors: Jehan, Bruno Lopes, Alx Sa, Sabri Ãœnal. * Our developer website had 25 commits by 2 contributors: Jehan, Bruno Lopes. * Our 3.0 documentation had 24 commits by 6 contributors: Sabri Ünal, Jacob Boerema, Anders Jonsson, Matthew Leach, Richard Gitschlag, lloyd konneker. Let’s not forget to thank all the people who help us triaging in Gitlab, report bugs and discuss possible improvements with us. Our community is deeply thankful as well to the internet warriors who manage our various discussion channels or social network accounts such as Ville Pätsi, Liam Quin, Michael Schumacher and Sevenix! _Note: considering the number of parts in GIMP and around, and how we get statistics through `git` scripting, errors may slip inside these stats. Feel free to tell us if we missed or mis-categorized some contributors or contributions._ # Around GIMP¶ ## Books¶ **Sabri Ünal** has been hard at work updating our books page. In addition to historial books about prior versions of GIMP, we now have listings for several GIMP 3 books. If you know of any books on GIMP that we’re missing, please let us know! _Note_ : We are not interested in listing or promoting books that are generated from GenAI. Please check if the book was authored by a person before submitting. Thanks! # Downloading GIMP 3.2 RC2¶ You will find all our official builds on GIMP official website (gimp.org): * Linux AppImages for x86 and ARM (64-bit) * Linux Flatpaks for x86 and ARM (64-bit) * Linux Snaps for x86 and ARM (64-bit) * Universal Windows installer for x86 (32 and 64-bit) and for ARM (64-bit) * Microsoft Store for x86 and ARM (64-bit) * macOS DMG packages for Intel/x86 and Apple/ARM hardware (64-bit) Other packages made by third-parties are obviously expected to follow (Linux or *BSD distributions’ packages, etc). There is no development release for the manual, but you can continue to use the existing GIMP 3.0 documentation. # What’s next¶ This is nearly it! We are so close to GIMP 3.2 release that we can feel it in the air. When I first introduced the new accelerated release policy, I was both confident and wary of falling short. In the end, I’m quite satisfied; it really worked out well for this first iteration. ðŸ˜„ Considering how few reports of major issues we had during this RC1, this might be the last release candidate, though only the coming period will tell. Sometimes people, mistaking us for a corporation, ask us about quality assurance policy or the like. Well we are not a company, we are a community and our QA is the world, it’s me, you, anyone. Therefore we **really really** enjoin everyone to test this development version and report any issue you find, especially if it feels like it should be a blocker issue. Among the few things which come to mind, I had to touch and reorganize our XCF-loading code for detecting link layer cycles; and as you may imagine, this is a very sensitive area of our codebase. So we welcome massive testing in file loading and link layer creation during this RC2 phase, in order to detect any regression! And of course, any deep testing, especially of the new link and vector layers, but also of any other major feature you are often using will be very appreciated. We want to avoid both releasing broken new features, and adding regressions to existing features. Don’t forget you can donate and personally fund GIMP developers, as a way to give back and accelerate the development of GIMP. Community commitment helps the project to grow stronger! Wouldn’t it be fitting with the coming holiday season? ðŸŽðŸŽ„🤗 In the meantime, we’ll continue to work hard for delivering GIMP 3.2.0 soon, and wish you all a very nice holiday season and a lot of fun and joy with family and friends! ðŸ¥³ðŸ¾ðŸ¥° *[CLI]: Command Line Interface *[QA]: Quality Assurance

We’re thrilled to share our first release candidate for GIMP 3.2! It represents a major step in our roadmap, and months of hard work by contributors. We look forward to your feedback as we move towards the stable release of GIMP 3.2! Note that this is still a development snapshot, not yet a final release: please do report any problems or crashes you find. * New Splash Screen * Release Highlights * Link and Vector Layer Updates * Text Editor * Swap Tools shortcut * Non-destructive filters * UX/UI Improvements * Plug-ins * SVG * PDF * PVR * Compression * API * Security * Additional Changes * Dark mode on Windows installer * Release stats * Around GIMP * GIMP developer website refreshed * Downloading GIMP 3.2 RC1 * What’s next # New Splash Screen¶ _New release candidate splash screen by Mark McCaughrean - GIMP 3.2 RC1_ Our super cool 3.2 release candidate splash screen was created by astronomer **Mark McCaughrean**! It shows the Orion Nebula at infrared wavelengths made using the James Webb Space Telescope, and is one of his many photographs of space, processed in GIMP as an important tool in his workflow. As with our previous splash artist Sevenix, we will have an interview with him detailing his design process and motivation that we hope to share in the near future. # Release Highlights¶ This news post will cover some of the main updates since our last development release. If you haven’t already tested out GIMP 3.1.2 and 3.1.4, we encourage you to read over the prior news posts to see the other new features and fixes. As always, the full changelog can be seen in the NEWS section of our repo. ## Link and Vector Layer Updates¶ We’ve made a number of bugfixes and improvements to the new link and vector layers, thanks to your feedback from GIMP 3.1.4. **Jehan** in particular has been focused on internal updates and UI improvements for both features. The “Rasterize” and “Revert Rasterize” operations have been made much clearer, allowing for easy changes between different states. These changes apply to text layers as well, since they are a type of vector layer too. We discovered that link layer monitoring was not working on Windows due to a bug in the GLib library. **Jehan** has submitted an upstream patch with a proper fix, but for now we have a temporary workaround so that this feature works on Windows. ## Text Editor¶ **Gabriele Barbero** has continued his work on the text editor from his Google Summer of Code project. One major aspect has finally been merged - the ability to move the on-canvas editor across the screen! This allows you to move it out of the way while working on close-up text, without having to hide it in the tool options. You can also click the reset button on the editor to place it back in its original position. _On-Canvas text editor UI can now be dragged - GIMP 3.2.0 RC1_ **Idriss Fekir** has continued their work on making text editing more robust. They’ve updated the internal code to support text rendering even on very large dimensions. Also, a new patch by **Lleu Yang** lets you use Shift + Ctrl + V in the on-canvas editor to paste unformatted text. This follows a previous update that added a shortcut for Bold, Italics, and Underline styling. ## Swap Tools shortcut¶ **Jehan** revived one of his older projects and added support for swapping between your current tool and the previous one you used. By default, you can press `Shift` + `X` to switch back and forth between your paintbrush and eraser while drawing. Of course, you can also change the shortcut with the `Edit` -> `Keyboard Shortcuts` dialog. This new feature also allows us to help with a common point of confusion. Internally, GIMP considers filters to be a tool just like the rotate or airbrush tools. This means that when you’re applying a Brightness-Contrast filter to your image, you’re actually “switching” to the Brightness-Contrast tool. Thanks to **Jehan** ‘s update, we now automatically switch back to your prior tool once the filter is applied, which we believe is more in-line with what users expect to happen. ## Non-destructive filters¶ We continue to update our non-destructive filter code. One request we’ve received a few times is for “adjustment layers” - layers where you can apply a filter and have it affect all layers below it. We do not have this as an official concept since it would be a GUI duplicate of layer effect, yet you can now simulate adjustment layers with layer groups! Set an empty layer group to “Pass through” and then apply filters to it - since Pass through groups cover all layers below, by definition, this is basically the same as what is commonly called adjustment layers. Furthermore, you can add a mask to the layer group and adjust the render to only cover certain areas. ## UX/UI Improvements¶ We continue to work with users and designers on our UX repo to improve GIMP’s user experience. While a lot of smaller adjustments have been made since 3.1.4, there’s also been several larger updates. * GIMP was first created with a multi-window interface, with each image shown in a separate window. You could drag and drop a file onto the floating toolbox to open it as a new image. Single Window mode introduced an image tab bar to show all of your open images. We have now connected that tab bar to the drag and drop code, so you can easily open multiple images by dragging them over to the image tab bar and releasing! * **Ondřej Míchal** has been on a mission to replace many of our Spin Entry widgets with the newer Spin Scale. * You can now drag and drop color swatches from the Color History. This was always intended, but previously did not work because the color history buttons grabbed focus instead of the color history swatch. * **Gabriele Barbero** further improved our macOS port by restoring missing features to the App Menu. Now macOS users have options to hide GIMP, hide other applications, and to check the related services. Additionally, the macOS “Quit” command is now connected to our closing code, which will reduce the chance of losing unsaved data on exit. * The Document History dockable is now multi-selection aware. You can select multiple image previews and either open or remove all of them at once. * **Denis Rangelov** developed a new design for our image toggle buttons (seen in places such as the `Mode` section of the Move and Selection tools). This redesign more clearly groups the buttons together visually, so you know that they’re toggle buttons and that only one can be selected at a time. * When typing hex colors in the Color Selector dialog, the selected color will automatically update as soon as you enter a valid text. This removes the need to press Enter whenever you type a new color. ## Plug-ins¶ Support for a few new image formats have been added, and updates to existing formats have been made during the last stretch of our 3.2 RC1 development. ### SVG¶ With the addition of vector layers in GIMP, we can now export SVG as actual vectors. Our new exporter allows raster layers to be optionally embedded as either PNGs or JPEG. We hope this will encourage further workflow collaboration with Inkscape, a fantastic vector graphics editing program that we highly recommend! Note that currently our SVG _import_ plug-in still rasterizes the imported vectors. We are looking into ways of fixing this (it would likely require to change our dependency library to read SVG) - if you’d like to help, please reach out! ### PDF¶ Similarly, the PDF plug-in now exports vector layers as actual vectors. This means that those layers can be further edited in other vector graphics software. The “Fill with Background Color” option has also been extended to work on all layers of a multi-layer PDF, instead of just the first one. ### PVR¶ We’ve added support for importing PowerVR (PVR) texture files. This format is most commonly used for SEGA Dreamcast games and mods. ### Compression¶ We had a long-standing request to support importing hgt.zip images, which were recorded by NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM). As a side effect, we now support loading any supported image that’s compressed by our standard compression algorithms (previously this was only officially used by our compressed XCF project files). ## API¶ * One of the major updates in GIMP 3.0 for plug-in developers was the auto-generated GUIs - you can easily make a dialog with widgets just by defining your input variables! However, a few datatypes were not implemented in the original release. For GIMP 3.2, we’ve added `GimpImage` and `GimpItem` widgets to `GimpProcedureDialog`. The new widgets look similar to the existing layer and channel widgets. * Work on the SVG export feature required us to add many additional public API commands for text, vector, and link layers. You can see the full list in our NEWS section under API, or by checking the Procedure Browser under the Help menu in GIMP itself. ## Security¶ The Zero Day Initiative regularly reviews applications to find potential vulnerabilities and report them. **Jacob Boerema** and other contributors have responded to and fixed the following reports: * ZDI-CAN-27684 * ZDI-CAN-27863 * ZDI-CAN-27878 * ZDI-CAN-27836 * ZDI-CAN-27823 * ZDI-CAN-28376 * ZDI-CAN-28248 ## Additional Changes¶ * **Sabri Ünal** and **Luzpaz** have been reviewing our GUI and standardizing capitalization and grammar of the user interface. * **Aruius** fixed a bug where some full-color brushes were not mirrored properly when Symmetry modes were set. * **Bruno Lopes** reworked our console output code on Windows to work just like Linux and macOS. This means you can run GIMP from CMD or PowerShell and see all output messages there. * **Lukas Oberhuber** created a new format for our color drag and drop code. We previously used `application/x-color` when our color code was sRGB only. Now that we pass the colorspace information as well, this is not sufficient. While it only caused visible problems on macOS (to our knowledge), it’s good to use the proper standard for all platforms. ## Dark mode on Windows installer¶ Our `.exe` installer is now gorgeous when you run it on Windows 10/11 with Dark Mode enabled. This is not only due to the new splash screen, which is used on the Installer too, but also thanks to the triaging work done by **Jernej Simončič** and **Bruno Lopes** in tandem with Inno Setup developers on the Inno Setup 6.6.0 development cycle. That Inno Setup version we use on 3.2.0-RC1 and subsequent installers supports automatic Dark Mode natively. While very few changes were done to our GIMP packaging scripts, we can’t stop praising the incredible work done by **Martijn Laan** , main Inno Setup developer, on Google Groups after our small feedback. Just run the `.exe` and give it a try. # Release stats¶ Since GIMP 3.1.4, in the main GIMP repository: * 78 reports were closed as FIXED. * 80 merge requests were merged. * 645 commits were pushed. * 17 translations were updated: Basque, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (China), Danish, Dutch, Georgian, Hungarian, Italian, Kabyle, Lithuanian, Norwegian Nynorsk, Romanian, Russian, Slovenian, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian. 42 people contributed changes or fixes to GIMP 3.2.0 RC1 codebase (order is determined by number of commits; some people are in several groups): * 18 developers to core code: Jehan, Alx Sa, Gabriele Barbero, Bruno Lopes, Jacob Boerema, Idriss Fekir, Sabri Ünal, luzpaz, Øyvind KolÃ¥s, Cheesequake, Estecka, Gabriele, James Addison, Lukas Oberhuber, Ondřej Míchal, aruius, cheesequake, megakite. * 11 developers to plug-ins or modules: Alx Sa, Jehan, Ondřej Míchal, Sabri Ünal, Jacob Boerema, Anders Jonsson, Bruno Lopes, Dr. David Alan Gilbert, Gabriele Barbero, Lukas Oberhuber, lillolollo. * 23 translators: Martin, luming zh, Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Marco Ciampa, Ekaterine Papava, Sabri Ünal, Yuri Chornoivan, Nathan Follens, Alan Mortensen, DiGro, Emin Tufan Çetin, Luming Zh, Aleksandr Prokudin, Asier Saratsua Garmendia, Aurimas Černius, Balázs Úr, Cristian Secară, Aefgh Threenine, Alevtina Karashokova, Anders Jonsson, Athmane MOKRAOUI, Balázs Meskó, Juliano de Souza Camargo. * 3 theme designers: Alx Sa, Ondřej Míchal, luzpaz. * 6 build, packaging or CI contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Alx Sa, Øyvind KolÃ¥s, Rico Tzschichholz, luzpaz. * 6 contributors on other types of resources: Jehan, Bruno Lopes, Gabriele Barbero, Sabri Ünal, luzpaz, megakite. * The gimp-data submodule had 6 commits by 1 contributor: Jehan. * 2 image creators: Jehan, Bruno Lopes. * The splash image for the 3.2 series was authored by Mark McCaughrean under license Creative Commons By-SA 2.0. Contributions on other repositories in the GIMPverse (order is determined by number of commits): * Our UX tracker had 13 reports closed as FIXED. * ctx had 32 commits since 3.0.6 release by 1 contributors: Øyvind KolÃ¥s. * The `gimp-macos-build` (macOS packaging scripts) release had 16 commits by 1 contributors: Lukas Oberhuber. * The flatpak release had 21 commits by 1 contributor (and CI bots): Bruno Lopes. * Our main website (what you are reading right now) had 159 commits by 7 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Alx Sa, Guillaume Turri, Jacob Kauffmann, Petr Vorel, gturri. * Our developer website had 190 commits by 3 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Anders Jonsson. * Our 3.0 documentation had 251 commits by 14 contributors: Sabri Ünal, Jacob Boerema, Marco Ciampa, Alevtina Karashokova, Matthew Leach, Nathan Follens, Anders Jonsson, Andre Klapper, Bruno Lopes, Richard Gitschlag, Dick Groskamp, Kristjan ESPERANTO, Kristjan SCHMIDT, jtux270. Let’s not forget to thank all the people who help us triaging in Gitlab, report bugs and discuss possible improvements with us. Our community is deeply thankful as well to the internet warriors who manage our various discussion channels or social network accounts such as Ville Pätsi, Liam Quin, Michael Schumacher and Sevenix! _Note: considering the number of parts in GIMP and around, and how we get statistics through `git` scripting, errors may slip inside these stats. Feel free to tell us if we missed or mis-categorized some contributors or contributions._ # Around GIMP¶ ## GIMP developer website refreshed¶ As we noted on our previous news about GIMP Developer website, the GIMP Developer website has been completely rewritten to use modern web technologies so it is easier to maintain (and to look prettier). But due to the enormous amount of content to be migrated and the limited human resources we have, the process took longer than expected. Now, finally, thanks to **Bruno Lopes** , who has been working on reviewing the dozens of pages of the Developer website to be kept up to date (and recently has been commiting changes to address its UI), we believe that you can navigate the site more easily. This new theme, called “Hextra”, allows us to have a search bar and the much requested navigation menu. It also adds a link `Edit this page on GitLab →` to every page, so you can contribute fixes more directly. You will notice that it looks a bit like the main GIMP website, and that’s because we modified it to follow the same visual identity designed by Pat David, making use of the same color palette and fonts. # Downloading GIMP 3.2 RC1¶ You will find all our official builds on GIMP official website (gimp.org): * Linux AppImages for x86 and ARM (64-bit) * Linux Flatpaks for x86 and ARM (64-bit) * Linux Snaps for x86 and ARM (64-bit) * Universal Windows installer for x86 (32 and 64-bit) and for ARM (64-bit) * Microsoft Store for x86 and ARM (64-bit) * macOS DMG packages for Intel/x86 and Apple/ARM hardware (64-bit) Other packages made by third-parties are obviously expected to follow (Linux or *BSD distributions’ packages, etc). There is no development release for the manual, but you can continue to use the existing GIMP 3.0 documentation. _Notes_ : * The Microsoft Store release may be delayed as we wait for the certification process to finish. * macOS packages should be uploaded shortly. # What’s next¶ We had mentioned our accelerated release policy when releasing GIMP 3.0.0. Well I’m not sure if many people actually thought we’d manage to stick to the schedule! Yet here we are, barely 8 months after GIMP 3.0.0 release, and already publishing our first 3.2.0 release candidate! Now we still haven’t released actual GIMP 3.2.0 yet, of course. But this RC is our milestone for freezing features (and strings, hence giving time for translators to do their thing! Awesome work by all of them across the world, by the way! 🤗) so we are now focusing on fixing bugs and possibly some minor UX improvements (more on the side of papercuts rather than anything implying major UI changes). That also means that we are really looking forward your issue reports! If there was any time for you to get your voice heard and tell us of any issues we may have missed before we publish the next stable minor version, that would be now! Don’t forget you can donate and personally fund GIMP developers, as a way to give back and accelerate the development of GIMP. Community commitment helps the project to grow stronger!

GIMP is Free and Libre Open Source Software, but none of it is possible without the people who create with and contribute to it. Our project maintainer **Jehan** was interested in interviewing the volunteers who make GIMP what it is, and sharing their stories so you can learn more about the awesome people behind GIMP! Early interviews with co-maintainer Michael Natterer and Michael Schumacher were published shortly after the first Wilber Week. Unfortunately, the rest of the interviews from that event have never seen the light of day - until now! The interview in this article is about **Simon Budig** , a core GIMP code contributor and advocate. It is especially fitting to share his interview now, as Simon was behind the rewrite of the Path Tool infrastructure that powers the new Vector Layer feature in the upcoming GIMP 3.2. This interview took place on February 4th, 2017. In addition to **Jehan** and **Simon** , **Michael Schumacher** and **Thomas Manni** were also involved and asked questions. Thanks also to **Alx Sa** for transcribing the audio recording after all these years, an ungrateful task but without which we could not publish these! _Simon Budig, byDarix, CC BY-NC-ND - 2019_ _Jehan: Hello Simon. Can you introduce yourself, in general and in relation to GIMP?_ **Simon** : Hello, I’m Simon Budig, and I’ve been involved in GIMP since 1998 or something like that. A little bit earlier maybe if you count the non-official contributions. _Jehan: What are “non-official” contributions?_ **Simon** : Ah, giving talks about GIMP without being affiliated with the project. But my first patch, I looked it up yesterday, was in April ‘98. _Jehan: What was  it?_ **Simon** : It was a fix for the layers dialog regarding the spacing of the widgets. So, you have this box and the spacing between the widgets was basically inconsistent. _Jehan: Okay! I know you ’ve worked on a lot of important features in GIMP. Can you share a little about them, like the vector tool?_ **Simon** : Yes, I think the vector tool is probably the most important one. It was basically a complete rewrite of the vector tool, getting new infrastructure for vector data, which by the way, is more flexible than we actually use. It’s probably a little bit over-complicated from looking back at the code, and there’s stuff I would do different today – but it works. _Jehan: Could you explain a little  more?_ **Simon** : The vector infrastructure was designed to allow different stroke types. A stroke is putting down the pen, following the path, and releasing the pen. So it was designed to be able to handle different stroke types, but the only stroke type we have now is the Bezier, so you have points connected by Bezier curves and their handles. There’s been a lot of thinking going on about if, for example, you’d like to have rectangle strokes - how would it work to have a rectangle on the canvas? The tool must query where to put the control nodes and the anchor nodes and stuff like this. Ideally, it should be possible to have different kinds [of strokes], but it failed due to UI considerations – how would the user choose what kind of stroke to create? The obvious implementation for a lot of this kind of thing would lead to very unconventional user interactions for manipulating the content – it would be a little bit weird. _Prototypical “rectangle stroke” object in the path tool, by Simon, from 2004_ [**Editors note** : _Simon clarifies, that he was trying to implement a path tool working within the constraints of the tool infrastructure at that time (2002-2004). He was trying to abstract away from the specific shape to be manipulated. This would have had weird consequences for the user interactions, see for example the screenshot of a prototypical rectangle stroke type above. He at some point scrapped this idea._] _Jehan: It ’s quite different from Inkscape‘s SVG vectors. So I guess it’s a different concept from most other software? For instance, if I’m in Inkscape and I make a vector shape I have a concept of a stroke, a fill, and everything. In GIMP you just have a vector that you can stroke separately but it’s not attached to the vector. You can not move the vector for instance and have the fill or stroke follow it._ **Simon** : Yeah, this basically has to do with what I had to start with. The old vector tool was the same, so it didn’t have fill properties or stroke properties. So, at that point I didn’t see the need to, or I wasn’t confident enough to just throw all of this away and introduce a completely new concept of having objects within the layer stack. This was something that was just over my head. We had a Google Summer of Code project regarding vector layers that was supposed to implement this, but this is something that hasn’t been finished. _Original vector layer GSoC project by Hendrik Boom, mentored by Simon Budig (copyright unsure) - 2006_ **Editor ’s note**: _This work is finally done and you can experiment with a first pre-stable version in[development release GIMP 3.1.4. This will be part of the stable release GIMP 3.2._] And the other thing is that the use of the path tool is quite different than for example in Inkscape. Because Inkscape has a path manipulation tool, which has tons of different buttons and possibilities to do a rectangular select on the nodes and stuff like this, which we don’t have in GIMP. So this would be quite a lot of work to get this aligned to a traditional tool. But on the other hand, what one of the main purposes of the rewrite was to get it more close in this direction because the old path tool was quite different and quite strange. _Jehan: The old tool, that was not by  you._ **Simon** : Right, the old one I threw it away basically. _Jehan: Okay, so what are you working on now? Or do you want to work on  something?_ **Simon** : I don’t find the time or energy to work on GIMP as much as I would like, so I’m hesitant with starting bigger projects in GIMP because I’m not sure I can finish them properly. So what I’m mainly doing is lurking around and try to help people there. Yeah. But other than that, my contributions to GIMP are limited and I prefer small-scale things to work on. For example, I’ve been working on the Warp operation in GEGL to make it more similar to what I-Warp has been doing. _Jehan: To  what?_ **Simon** : I-Warp [plug-in]. There was a difference in the math which was quite noticeable in some parts and it still has issues. I am not sure if I can resolve this. So I like small, isolated problems. _Jehan: Do you use GIMP?_ **Simon** : I do! But mostly for small scale things like doing diagrams of something. Regarding the use of graphics tools I also like Inkscape a lot. Somehow this whole vector thing triggers the right point in my mind so I like dealing with vectors. But what’s happening right now in GIMP with this GEGL integration and further expansion of the layer nodes is quite interesting as well. So yeah, I like GIMP. Again, I use it for not very artistic stuff but I do use it sometimes. But I’m not the GIMP expert. _Jehan: Your company also does some stuff sometimes, like taking care of  stickers._ **Simon** : Maybe I should explain a little bit. The main work we do in our company is embedded Linux work. We specialize in embedded Linux and we do custom software development for a wide range of embedded devices. Sometimes there’s really crazy things we’re working on. And sometimes in the process of this there’s a use for GIMP. For example, if you create a boot splash and you want to put some basic stuff, some text, some logos together and it needs to be in 320 by 240 and it needs to be 16 bit RGB565 and stuff like this so that the boot loader can handle it – it’s easy [in GIMP]. But a minor part of the company is that we have a history of doing merchandising for a variety of free and open source projects. It’s kind of connected to big events in Germany like the LinuxTag or the – I forgot the name – FrOSCon is one of the conference. So sometimes a colleague of mine has a booth there and sells all kinds of interesting merchandising stuff for different projects. And this is where I help her by preparing designs for the items. For example, if you have some random bitmap and you want to do T-Shirts, the T-Shirts maybe should be silk-screen printed. Then the bitmap is not very suitable because silk-screen printing is done with a low number of very specific colors and you need to create vector shapes. This is something I do with Inkscape for example. Other things can be done with GIMP, if you do some stuff that is printed digitally you can hand in a bitmap. I’m very much a fan of using the right tool for the job, and this sometimes also means that I invent the right tool for a specific job. _Jehan: As free  software?_ **Simon** : They usually get developed to a point where they solve the problem. So, I know how to use them, but nobody else can! For example, I made a tool for one of the LinuxTag T-Shirts. We wanted to have a nebula effect in the background, and silk-screen printing and shades of gray don’t mix well. So I wanted to emulate this by having a very specific dot pattern that kind of relates to the nebula pattern but also is discrete dots printed on the shirts. Not being happy with the bog standard newsprint style patterns, I wrote a Python script to have wavy patterns. So I write a pattern script that generated Postscript output and this Postscript output then got further processed with a mix of various things – it’s been a while since I did this. Reworking the official LinuxTag 2003 artwork by Michael Kleinhenz into a silk-screen printed t-shirt, incorporating gnome feet in this process - no known license **Editor ’s note**: _Simon found one of his old scripts which provided PostScript and Skencil outputs, and shared it with us:[dotgenerator.py._] _Jehan: You ’ve also shown us various creative stuff you do. So maybe you don’t have a professional artist background, but you do a lot of artistic stuff._ **Simon** : Yeah this is something I need to get use to, to be confident in calling the stuff I do art. My professional background is actually in mathematics. So I have a diploma in mathematics. Then I kind of got back onto the slippery slope of computer science. And I worked in the CS department of the university, in the algorithm program, so I helped teaching students about algorithms and solving them. But also algorithms with graphics side-effects. For example, one thing I was working on was a tool to visualize an algorithm for creating the Voronoi diagram. I guess I won’t expand on that right now, but the thing is, there is really beautiful stuff that comes out of that. Discovering this is a lot of fun. _Voronoi diagram of dotted glyph outlines, Simon Budig, CC BY-NC-ND_ _Schumaml: Getting back to your involvement with the vector tool, how sophisticated do you think vector editing in GIMP should be? Like should it rival Inkscape?_ **Simon** : Personally I think there are certainly a lot of things that can be improved. One thing that is obvious is vector shapes. Vector shapes would be a big improvement. [Especially] if you have them in a mask, like an oval shape that’s defined as an oval shape and used as a mask. I also think that it would be useful if the vector tool would get revamped a little bit to be more discoverable, because a lot of people are struggling with discovering all the functionality that is there. When I designed this in 2003 or something, I wanted it to be usable for someone who has learned to deal with it. I still think it does this – it’s a little bit doubtful if I fully succeeded with this. It’s a lot better than the tool was before, but other than that – there’s so much functionality in the tool which is hard to present in the user interface. So we have this weird [situation], where there’s lots of key combinations and modifiers that you have to use to get certain functionality and stuff like this. Inkscape solves this by having a tool specific toolbar. But this also means you constantly go back and forth between different tools. _Jehan: So you can have both. It ’s discoverable for new people but experts can use the modifiers._ **Simon** : Maybe that’s kind of the problem. Because I always saw the buttons so I didn’t know about the existence of having modifiers for changing tool functions. _Jehan: I don ’t know if Inkscape has this, but in GIMP that could be the solution._ **Simon** : If Inkscape has that I don’t know, but the toolbar might prevent me from discovering this. So actually in Inkscape it’s quite annoying – when I do vector editing I do it in a very analytic manner because that’s how my mind is wired. So I want to have the nodes and specific shapes and sometimes I do stuff like – for example, you have the elongated oval thing and you want to make it two half circles. So I would have to click here, remove segments, reconnect the points in a different way, so it’s quite a lot of work to do this. I would have to show it. But yeah, it’s a little bit weird because you need a lot of clicks for seemingly a simple operation. Maybe when you have shapes composed of multiple strokes and you want to change the structure of this, you have to frequently remove the segments between two nodes and then create a new segment between two other nodes, this is quite a lot of mouse work in Inkscape. _Schumaml: Because of the UI?_ **Simon** : Yeah, because the buttons are on the top and I need to decipher the icons again and again because they’re quite similar actually. And I realize it’s a hard problem because it’s not easy to make it clear what is there. But on the other hand they’ve done some improvements recently so more stuff is working as you’d expect it to work. But yeah, you originally asked where GIMP should go with its vector functionality. I don’t think that it’s necessary to compete with Inkscape regarding this feature. In my personal opinion, we don’t need a spiral tool, we don’t need a star tool, and stuff like this is something where I say “ _No that ’s not necessary”_. It’s useful for Inkscape, artists can do a lot of great stuff with this kind of thing. But then what we should focus on is basically having good integration with Inkscape. So that artwork from Inkscape can be imported into GIMP, maybe not lose all of the information, keeping as much as possible. But then if you look at, for example, the SVG specification that Inkscape is built around, there is a ton of stuff in there! And I don’t think we want all of that. _Jehan: What would be interesting as another feature would be not to build them, but being able to import them and keep them as vector. Like, you implement enough to be able to import them as vectors, even though you could not build them as vectors in GIMP itself._ **Simon** : Maybe, I don’t know. _Thomas: We have a patch for the vector tool, because there is some bad rendering when you switch on/off the visibility of the active  vector._ **Simon** : Yeah, I haven’t touched the code actually for quite a few years now. In fact the code has changed, it used to be XOR based when I implemented it. **_Thomas_** : _X  what?_ **Simon** : XOR – like inverting and inverting back. But this is very nice now with Cairo. Regarding the stroke and filling there are some interesting side things, because right now we use Cairo to render strokes and render fillings, and Cairo is 8 bit only which sucks for GEGL. [**Editor ’s note**: _Cairo now has float channel support since version 1.17.2 in 2019, but not yet at time of interview._] I’m not even sure if they have a specific gamma or if they assume linear. **Editor ’s note**: _There are also discussions that we replace Cairo for vector rendering with[ctx eventually._] _Jehan: Why did you start  contributing?_ **Simon** : Why did I start contributing? Because the spacing between the widgets and the layout was inconsistent! _(Laughing)_ Polka Dots, an interactive light installation at the Urban Art Festival Siegen 2020. Concept by Simon, built in collaboration with Hackspace and FabLab Siegen, Photo by Simon Budig, CC BY-NC-ND _Jehan: Why do you stick around? Will you continue to be a  contributor?_ **Simon** : Well, maybe in 20 years, no! I don’t know, I’m stubborn. And I’m still interested in all of this. I still like what GIMP is doing. I still think my input can help. Well, in the mean time, I did acquire a few additional hobbies, so GIMP has to share my attention with other hobbies. But I still feel attached to the project, I made a lot of friends there, I like the people. It’s more about the people I guess. _Palm tree installation. Concept by Simon, built by the Hackspace Siegen, first installment at the Chaos Communication Congress 2018. Photo by Simon Budig, CC BY-NC-ND_ _Jehan: Questions, anyone? Maybe we ’re finished._ **Simon** : Well, the food is not there right? It is? Okay, so let’s stop there and if any other questions pop-up we can talk later. [**Editors note** : _Food arrived at the event. Everybody is distracted by food._  ðŸ˜‹] * * * A few links to know more about this core developer: * The Hackspace Simon co-founded in Siegen, Germany * The company Simon works for

We announce a new packaging format for Linux being deployed directly from our CI (Continuous Integration) system: `.snap`. This is a result of **Bruno** ‘s effort on expanding GIMP availability through multiple _de facto_ standard and distro-agnostic packaging formats. ### Overcoming technical peculiarities¶ Snap packages are created using “snapcraft”, a tool that largely relies on a container technology developed by Canonical called “lxd”. However, all Linux runners on GNOME GitLab instance already run Docker for containerization. So, we needed to adjust our scripts to make use of, `--destructive-mode` option so we can use `snapcraft-rocks` Docker image to build GIMP then create the snap package reliably and fast on our CI. These scripts are available under our Git repository and **work locally** as well, so anyone can build GIMP snap package. ### Collaboration with Snapcrafters¶ Before the package being now available directly and officially, it used to be maintained unofficially by the downstream project called “Snapcrafters”. As announced in GIMP 3.1.4 news, they **kindly agreed to transfer the ownership** of the snap package. This delicate process took fruitful months and we are very grateful for their help and for dedication on all these years, specially **Jon Seager** who handled most of the administrative stuff. ### `gimp-plugins` plug interface for developers¶ The snap used to have some third-party plugins bundled on it. And, as outlined in our current packaging principles, official GIMP packages are “vanilla” (without additional code which is not from babl, gegl or GIMP source). Instead, we asked and **Will French** developed a plug interface called `gimp-plugins`. It **works similary to our existing “org.gimp.GIMP.Plugin” Flatpak extension point** and to MSIX modification packages, allowing to install plugins without breaking the Snap `strict` confinement. So, the two existing plugins can be installed following the steps provided in their respective repositories: * GMIC snap * OpenVINO snap We have written a how-to about Snap plugins on GIMP developer website. We hope that this will encourage more developers to package their plugins properly for Snap. ### Download the Snap¶ GIMP 3.0.6 was co-produced by us and Snapcrafters and it is the first version available as an official snap package on the `latest/stable` channel. Future versions will be **deployed automatically on the release day**. You can install it today on the download page: https://gimp.org/downloads. Like the Flatpak, and MSIX (MS Store), we also provide a development counterpart, for the users who want to test the latest features and help us making GIMP better. It is available on `preview/stable` channel. _NOTE : Due to a bug on App Center, you may need to use manual commands to install the preview snap._ Don’t forget you can donate and personally fund GIMP developers, as a way to give back and accelerate the development of GIMP code and packages.

We are happy to announce the third micro-release GIMP 3.0.6. During our development of GIMP 3.2 we’ve found and fixed a number of bugs and regressions. We have backported many of those bugfixes to this stable release, so you don’t have to wait for the upcoming 3.2 release candidate to receive them! * Release Highlights * Improve usability of sliders * Workaround for Windows language-specific crashes * Fix for Text Outline crashes * Better transparency handling with filters and transforms * Theme colors for Brush, Font, and Palette * Updated non-destructive filter code * Palette import updates * Printing improvements for flatpak * Improvements for macOS * Improved security for image imports * Build process improved * Assorted fixes * GEGL and babl * Release Stats * Around GIMP * Team News * Download Mirrors * Downloading GIMP 3.0.6 * What’s Next # Release Highlights¶ Micro releases like 3.0.6 are focused on fixing bugs and regressions. Many of these have already been announced in our 3.1.2 and 3.1.4 news posts. However, we wanted to highlight some of the most commonly reported issues so that you are aware of the fixes. ## Improve usability of sliders¶ To quote from our 3.1.4 news post: As part of the port to GTK3, the default cursors were updated. This change led to some users experiencing the dreaded “Hand” cursor when hovering over a number slider widget. Unfortunately, the arrow cursor from GIMP 2.10 is not included on all platforms so we had to devise an alternate method. **Denis Rangelov** and **Michal VaÅ¡ut** helped us find an initial solution while we continue to work on the design. We hope the current solution will make it easier for you to see where you’re clicking! ## Workaround for Windows language-specific crashes¶ Since GIMP 3.0, we have received reports from some users that GIMP crashed for them upon opening or exporting files. We were unable to replicate the problem, until developers like **Jacob Boerema** and **Bruno Lopes** noticed a pattern - the affected users all had specific system languages like Turkish or Norwegian Bokm**Ã¥** l. They traced the bug to our metadata library, Exiv2. With the help of an Exiv2 maintainer **Kevin Backhouse** , we eventually found that the problem was caused by a bug in LLVM’s libc++, further made worse by a bug in Windows UCRT code! We have filed a report with Microsoft while **Luca Bacci** has contributed a patch to LLVM project, not merged yet. While waiting for the issues to be resolved at the source, **Bruno** has added a temporary patch to our Exiv2 build proposed by **Kevin** in order to workaround the issue. If you continue to have trouble with this bug, please let us know! ## Fix for Text Outline crashes¶ A number of users have reported crashes when trying to change the color of text outlines via the Text tool. This problem was discovered and fixed in our 3.1 development code, and is now fixed in 3.0.6 as well. ## Better transparency handling with filters and transforms¶ Certain image formats such as JPEG do not support transparency. GIMP respects those limitations when importing images, and does not automatically add transparency when opening them (unless you change this setting in Preferences). While this is important for advanced users, it can be confusing for people who are unfamiliar with image formats. In GIMP 2.10, some special-casing was done to make certain filters and transforms work “as expected” even if the layer did not have transparency. These were removed during the code clean-up done during GIMP 3.0’s development, and unfortunately not restored before release. As a result, some users had reported odd results when applying `Color to Alpha` or rotating layers without transparency. Since then, we have developed more generalized code to automatically add transparency to layers when necessary, which should prevent those problems for unsuspecting users! ## Theme colors for Brush, Font, and Palette¶ Due to how interconnected it was with other code changes, we back-ported a new feature from GIMP 3.1.2 - the ability to use theme colors for the brush, font, and palette dockables! You can read more about it in our original news post on the feature. ## Updated non-destructive filter code¶ During the 2025 Libre Graphics Meeting, our co-maintainer **Michael Natterer** spent a good deal of time reviewing, cleaning, and updating our non-destructive (NDE) filter code. These improvements have been backported to GIMP 3.0.6 to improve the stability of our filters, and to align the development and stable codebases so we can more easily resolve any remaining issues. **Jehan** made further performance improvements and clarified in the interface when filters can and can not be applied non-destructively. The code to apply NDE filters to channels was also backported. ## Palette import updates¶ We fixed a bug related to importing Adobe Color Book (.acb) palettes CMYK and LAB palettes. We also updated our Palette Import dialogue to let you filter the view by the different palette formats that GIMP currently supports (including Adobe ASE, standard CSS, and GIMP’s own GPL format). ## Printing improvements for flatpak¶ Again, to quote from our 3.1.4 news post: New contributor **Corentin Noël** developed a fix for the Image Settings tab not appearing when printing in sandboxed applications like flatpak or snap. Due to restrictions, the tab will be created as a secondary dialogue instead - allowing you to edit those settings once again. This patch is a more future-proof version of an earlier attempt by **BZZZZ** creatively bypassing the sandbox portal. We appreciate the work of both contributors to fix this problem! This proposed solution is not ideal, UX-wise, compared to the original tab, but it is necessary because the portal print dialog is hardly usable without these settings. ## Improvements for macOS¶ Our two main macOS contributors **Lukas Oberhuber** and **Gabriele Barbero** have worked to fix some important issues with our macOS build. One example of their efforts is fixing a crash when dragging a color to fill the canvas. This was caused by our new color management code being more strictly checked by macOS compared to Linux and Windows - we have switched to a custom `application/x-geglcolor` mimetype to prevent this issue on all our platforms. They also improved issues with multiple icons appearing in the macOS dock (such as when running a plug-in or script). For multi-window mode users, they also fixed a bug where the windows would “flash” back and forth a number of times. If you are a macOS developer and are interested in helping triage more macOS issues, we’d appreciate your support! ## Improved security for image imports¶ During development, we received reports from the Zero Day Initiative of potential security issues with some of our file import plug-ins. While these issues are very unlikely to occur with real files, developers like **Jacob Boerema** and **Alx Sa** proactively improved security for those imports. The resolved reports are: * ZDI-CAN-27793 * ZDI-CAN-27823 * ZDI-CAN-27836 * ZDI-CAN-27878 * ZDI-CAN-27863 * ZDI-CAN-27684 ## Build process improved¶ **Jehan** and **Bruno** backported all the build-related commits from the 3.1 development branch. For example, the nice automatic associations generation. Additionally, a bug that made it impossible for Python-based plug-ins to connect to the Internet on Windows and macOS is now fixed on the stable series. AppImage users will also have a more reliable package from now on. The PS/EPS plug-in was restored to work on AppImage. Also, **Bruno** worked to make the AppImage based on Debian 13 `trixie`, which fixed many bugs at once, such as crashing at the file dialog when there is a .json file, some PyGObject limitations, incorrect colored subpixel rendering by Cairo and crashes when exporting JPEG 2000 images. Similarly, the Flatpak manifest was updated to use the latest GNOME 49 runtime. So Flatpak users, you may remove the previous org.gimp.GIMP.HEIC extension if it is still installed, since GIMP now uses `org.freedesktop.Platform.codecs-extra` instead. **Jehan** , **lillolollo** , and **Jacob Boerema** have worked to remove a number of warnings produced when building GIMP. While most of these were harmless, it is good to get rid of them in order to have cleaner code and build output. ## Assorted fixes¶ There are a variety of smaller fixes in this release as well. While we can’t exhaustively cover 600+ code updates (!), here are a few more of interest. * **Gabriele Barbero** fixed a critical warning that could occur when adding a virtual device to GIMP as input. * **Cheesequake** corrected a code typo that caused the layer boundary to not update correctly when moving with the arrow keys. * **Liam Quin** prevented a potential crash that could occur if extension files were not in the right directory. * **Anders Jonsson** caught more missing translatable text, like the JPEG 2000 dialogue header. * **Ondřej Míchal** fixed a bug where file parameters were not being passed correctly in plug-ins. * **Estecka** reported and then fixed a bug where the canvas would not center properly when zooming out. (This bug also existed in GIMP 2.10 but was offset by a second bug - we fixed _that_ bug in 3.0 but not the original one, so the new problem appeared!) * **Alx Sa** made several fixes to plug-ins, such as allowing the legacy Jigsaw filter to draw on transparent layers and fixing a bug in the Recompose filter to properly combine YCbCr decomposed images again. * **Jacob Boerema** made several improvements to our metadata code, including using a more complete method to save time in `Exif.Image.DateTime` and fixing how comments are synchronized with the image when exported. # GEGL and babl¶ **Øyvind KolÃ¥s** has released new updates to _babl_ and _GEGL_ , the underlying color management engines for GIMP. **GEGL 0.4.64** contains a number of updates and fixes. **Ondřej Míchal** added OpenCL to the base `GeglOperationPointComposer3` class, which means more filters can now support acceleration using the GPU. He and **Øyvind KolÃ¥s** also worked on making the filter testing process more robust. **Jacob Boerema** fixed the ZDI-CAN-27803 vulnerability for RGBE image imports. An update was made to the `gegl:mirrors` filter to redraw correctly on large images (this improves GIMP’s Kaleidoscope filter). **Bruno Lopes** and **Jehan** contributed many build process improvements and clean-up. **babl 0.1.116** brings a number of build process updates and script clean-ups by **Bruno Lopes**. You can also now check the version of babl in the commandline with a `--v` flag thanks to **Joe Da Silva**. # Release Stats¶ Since GIMP 3.0.4, in the main GIMP repository: * 20 reports were closed as FIXED. * 10 merge requests were merged. * 817 commits were pushed. * 15 translations were updated: Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (China), Danish, Dutch, Galician, Georgian, Italian, Norwegian Nynorsk, Persian, Slovenian, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian. 38 people contributed changes or fixes to GIMP 3.0.6 codebase (order is determined by number of commits; some people are in several groups): * 18 developers to core code: Michael Natterer, Alx Sa, Jehan, Bruno Lopes, Niels De Graef, Gabriele Barbero, Jacob Boerema, Ondřej Míchal, Estecka, Cheesequake, Christoph Reiter, Joey Riches, Liam Quin (ankh/demib0y/barefootliam), Lukas Oberhuber, cheesequake, lillolollo, lloyd konneker, luzpaz. * 12 developers to plug-ins or modules: Alx Sa, Bruno Lopes, Jacob Boerema, Jehan, Anders Jonsson, lloyd konneker, Niels De Graef, Corentin Noël, Gabriele Barbero, Lukas Oberhuber, Natanael Copa, Ondřej Míchal. * 16 translators: Yuri Chornoivan, Martin, Luming Zh, Ekaterine Papava, Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Alexander Shopov, Anders Jonsson, Marco Ciampa, Asier Saratsua Garmendia, Nathan Follens, luming zh, Alan Mortensen, Danial Behzadi, Emin Tufan Çetin, Jordi Mas, Yago Raña. * 2 theme designers: Alx Sa, Niels De Graef. * 12 build, packaging or CI contributors: Bruno Lopes, Michael Natterer, Jehan, lloyd konneker, Jacob Boerema, Niels De Graef, Ondřej Míchal, Sam James, Christoph Reiter, Joey Riches, Natanael Copa, Rico Tzschichholz. * 3 contributors on other types of resources: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Joey Riches. * The gimp-data submodule had 22 commits by 4 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Alx Sa, Aryeom. * 3 image creators: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Aryeom. Contributions on other repositories in the GIMPverse (order is determined by number of commits): * ctx had 7 commits since 3.1.4 release by 1 contributor: Øyvind KolÃ¥s. * The `gimp-macos-build` (macOS packaging scripts) release had 10 commits by 1 contributor: Lukas Oberhuber. * The flatpak release had 38 commits by 2 contributors (and bots): Bruno Lopes, Ondřej Míchal. * Our main website (what you are reading right now) had 103 commits by 4 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Alx Sa, Guillaume Turri. * Our developer website had 51 commits by 3 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Anders Jonsson. * Our 3.0 documentation has a new translation in Esperanto and had 83 commits by 11 contributors: Sabri Ünal, Jacob Boerema, Marco Ciampa, Alevtina Karashokova, Nathan Follens, Bruno Lopes, Anders Jonsson, Andre Klapper, Kristjan Schmidt, Matthew Leach, jtux270. Let’s not forget to thank all the people who help us triaging in Gitlab, report bugs and discuss possible improvements with us. Our community is deeply thankful as well to the internet warriors who manage our various discussion channels or social network accounts such as Ville Pätsi, Liam Quin, Michael Schumacher and Sevenix! _Note: considering the number of parts in GIMP and around, and how we get statistics through `git` scripting, errors may slip inside these stats. Feel free to tell us if we missed or mis-categorized some contributors or contributions._ # Around GIMP¶ ## Team News¶ Our GSoC 2025 students **Gabriele Barbero** and **Ondřej Míchal** have been added to the Core Team in our GitLab repository! This is in response to the excellent work they have done over the summer and continued to contribute afterwards. ## Download Mirrors¶ Since the 3.0.4 news post, a new mirror have been contributed: * in Germany by Funkfreunde Landshut Mirrors are important as they help the project by sharing the load for dozens of thousands of daily downloads. Moreover by having mirrors spread across the globe, we ensure that everyone can have fast download access to GIMP. # Downloading GIMP 3.0.6¶ You will find all our official builds on GIMP official website (gimp.org): * Linux AppImages for x86 and ARM (64-bit) * Linux Flatpaks for x86 and ARM (64-bit) * Linux Snaps for x86 and ARM (64-bit) * Universal Windows installer for x86 (32 and 64-bit) and for ARM (64-bit) * Microsoft Store for x86 and ARM (64-bit) * macOS DMG packages for Intel/x86 and Apple/ARM hardware (64-bit) Other packages made by third-parties are obviously expected to follow (Linux or *BSD distributions’ packages, etc). # What’s Next¶ While the bulk of the work is ongoing on the main development branch (for upcoming GIMP 3.2), we felt this new stable 3.0 release was really needed, as more bug fixes accumulated. We highly recommend to update GIMP to this latest version for production work. In the meantime, for more adventurous creators, curious people, and in particular anyone who would like to be a part in the creation of a better creative software, we also encourage you to try out our GIMP 3.1.4 development version (experimental release for the future GIMP 3.2) and report bugs or suggest User Experience improvements. GIMP is first and foremost a Community, Free Software. What happens in it is what we all make of it. By contributing, you make it your software! ðŸ¤— In any case, our accelerated release schedule seems to be going pretty well so far, and we are pretty happy of how GIMP 3.2 is taking shape! Don’t forget you can donate and personally fund GIMP developers, as a way to give back and accelerate the development of GIMP. Community commitment helps the project to grow stronger!

We’re happy to announce the release of GIMP 3.1.4! This release contains initial implementations of our two main GIMP 3.2 roadmap items: link layers and vector layers. It also contains a number of other nice new features, bugfixes, and internal improvements. We’re excited to share these with you and get your feedback in preparation for the GIMP 3.2 release candidate. _New development splash screen by Aryeom and Michael Schumacher - GIMP 3.1.4_ Note that a development release is not ready for production use. It might crash. If it didn’t have problems it would be 3.2 already. So please do test, but understand this is a feature release for early adopters and for the more adventurous! * Non-Destructive Layers * Link Layers * Vector Layers * GEGL Filter Browser * MyPaint Brushes 2 * Text tool * Plug-ins * HRZ * JPEG 2000 * PAA Textures * Seattle Filmworks * TIFF * UX/UI * Additional Fixes * Internal Changes * PDB * Build Process * Nightly Snap * Nightly aarch64 Flatpak * Release stats * Team news * Downloading GIMP 3.1.4 * What’s next We’ll highlight some of the major features and fixes below. For more details, you can check out our NEWS Changelog. ## Non-Destructive Layers¶ This release contains initial implementations of our two GIMP 3.2 roadmap features, link layers and vector layers. We are especially requesting feedback on the stability and user experience of these new layer types - we will continue to polish these features in preparation for the first GIMP 3.2 release candidate. ### Link Layers¶ Link layers allow you to link external image files as a layer in your project. For instance, you might add an SVG image file as a link layer, make changes to it in Inkscape, and see it instantly updated inside GIMP! You can also non-destructively scale and rotate the link layer without impacting the quality of the original image. **Jehan** initially developed the concept back in 2020, but it was put on hold in order to finish developing GIMP 3.0. It’s now ready for testing in GIMP 3.1.4! _Editing a GIMP SVG Link Layer with Inkscape, by Jehan - GIMP 3.1.4_ To access this feature, go to the `File` menu and choose `Open as Link Layer...`. This will let you select an image to link from your file directory. Once linked, you can apply transforms and non-destructive filters as you like. You can replace the linked image by double-clicking the icon in the layer dockable or right-clicking and choosing “Edit Layer Attributes”. To convert it to a normal raster layer, you can right-click and choose “Discard Link Information”. Among the planned changes, we want to add the ability to select a layer to show from a linked file, instead of always showing the full image. This would allow to link another XCF file selectively. Note that this is an _initial_ UI/UX design - we look forward to your feedback so we can continue to improve it! ### Vector Layers¶ Vector layers allow you to create a shape and set its fill and stroke properties. You can then change the shape path, swap out different color settings, and transform the layer non-destructively, without losing any sharpness! The code for vector layers began as a Google Summer of Code project by **Hendrik Boom** all the way back in 2006. Since then, it has been updated and ported by a number of developers including **Martin Nordholts** , **Gilles Rochefort** , **Michael Natterer** , and **Jacob Boerema**. **CMYK Student** continued this legacy and now this feature is implemented in GIMP 3.1.4 after initial design feedback by **Aryeom** , **Reju** , and **Denis Rangelov**! _Flower (created with early Vector Layers) by Reju - GIMP 3.1.4_ To create a vector layer, use the Path tool to draw a path. Click the `Create vector layer` button to generate a vector layer associated with that path. From here, you can continue to edit the path - the vector layer will automatically update. Once you have a vector layer selected, you can edit fill and stroke settings via the Path tool (or by double-clicking the thumbnail in the layer dock). The transform tools can also be used to non-destructively rotate, scale, and otherwise contort the vector layer. As with link layers, you can also convert the layer to a regular raster layer by right-clicking on the layer in the layer dock and choosing “Discard Vector Information”. _Wilber (created with vector layers)by Reju - GIMP 3.1.4_ Note that this is an _initial_ UI/UX design - we look forward to your feedback so we can continue to improve it! ## GEGL Filter Browser¶ Our GSoC student **Ondřej Míchal** has added, as part of their summer project, the GEGL Filter Browser! This tool shows, similarly to the existing Procedure Browser, a list of all GEGL operations (i.e., filters) and information related to their use. _A screenshot of the new GEGL Filter Browser._ This browser is not just another alternative to the GEGL website or the `gegl` command-line utility. GEGL is extensible and users can register into it new operations. GIMP is also one of these users! GEGL’s website only shows information about operations shipped by GEGL, the `gegl` utility can also show operations installed by users but does not show operations registered by GIMP at runtime. The new browser is capable of showing **all** of these operations! We hope this browser will make it easier for plug-in developers to discover filters they would like to use with the `gimp-drawable-filter-* ()` API for non-destructive editing introduced in GIMP 3.0 and help them in using them. The new browser can be accessed under the Help menu or by using the `/` to search for “GEGL Filter Browser”. ## MyPaint Brushes 2¶ We have updated our MyPaint code to support the version 2 brushes. This update allows the MyPaint brush engine to take your canvas zoom and rotation into account when painting, to better simulate real brush strokes. GIMP now comes with over 20 new brushes from the `Dieterle` set bundled with MyPaint Brushes 2. Some of these include the much requested _arrow brush_ and a _Posterizer brush_ inspired by GIMP’s own Posterize filter. Of course, you can also add your own MyPaint brushes to use. _Examples of the new MyPaint Brushes - GIMP 3.1.4_ In addition to the MyPaint version 2 port, we’ve also added a new `Gain` slider in the MyPaint Brush tool. This controls how much pressure the brush engines thinks you’re applying when painting. This should be useful if you’re painting with a mouse and want to simulate pressing the brush harder or softer - it can also be helpful for tablet users who want to offset their own stylus pressure. As a note for software packagers, GIMP now depends on `mypaint-brushes-2.0` instead of `mypaint-brushes-1.0`. In our official builds, we also apply a patch that fixes warnings for libmypaint due to typos in some of the version 2 brush properties. ## Text tool¶ Another of our GSoC students **Gabriele Barbero** has been working on a number of updates to the text tool. We recently merged some of their first improvements! Now in the on-canvas editor, you can use `Ctrl` + `B` to **bold** , `Ctrl` + `I` to _italicize_ , and `Ctrl` + `U` to _underline_ text. We hope to merge more of their updates in the next development release, which we detail in the Teams News section below. Additionally, the outline color now shows a live preview as you’re changing it in the color selection dialogue, instead of only updating once you confirm your choice. ## Plug-ins¶ ### HRZ¶ HRZ is an older format for storing SSTV signals, exactly 256x240 8-bit RGB images. In older versions of GIMP there was a separate plug-in that supported importing this format, but it was removed. We have restored import support as part of our general raw data plug-in. ### JPEG 2000¶ We now support importing _signed_ JPEG 2000 images. Most image formats store pixels with positive values. However, JPEG 2000 is used in several scientific operations where they might want to visualize negative values as well. Thanks to **Allan Barklie** for both pointing out the problem and sharing sample images to test with! ### PAA Textures¶ GIMP can now import non-DXT PAA textures. This texture format is used in games created by Bohemia Interactive Studio. ### Seattle Filmworks¶ From the 70s to the early 2000s, you could mail Seattle Filmworks your photo film and they’d digitize it in their proprietary image format. They made several versions, mostly based on a mangled form of JPEG. We’ve added support for importing the `SFW93A` and `SFW94A` versions of the Seattle Filmworks format. Special thanks to **Loren Amelang** for sharing additional sample images and notes. ### TIFF¶ We have further improved our support for TIFFs created with Sketchbook. In addition to the layer support added in 3.0 RC1, we now load layer visibility, blending modes, and color tags. Group layers are also loaded, along with which layer was selected. ## UX/UI¶ We continue to discuss, review, and implement user experience improvements. As always, we extend an invitation for you to contribute as part of the UX repo! * Our GSoC student **Gabriele Barbero** improved our support for showing the correct time format based on your system settings. If you have your time set to a 12 hour system, the time will be shown this way on the “Up to date as of…” section of the About Dialog instead of always using a 24 hour format. * **Reju** developed a new design for the Animation Playback plug-in. The layout now resembles the standard interface seen in video software like VLC Player. In addition, the progress bar is now a slider widget, which allows you to easily slide to a specific frame rather than repeatedly clicking the frame advance buttons. * **Gabriele Barbero** has updated our macOS code to support the System Colors theme. Now GIMP will adapt to match the macOS dark mode setting if you have your color scheme set to “System Colors”. * During 3.0 RC development, we added support for turning off animations based on OS settings. We extended this support to also control the sliding animations seen when switching pages in the Welcome and Preferences dialogues. * While many users find the Welcome Dialog’s Create tab to be a convenient feature, it did prevent the New Image and Open Image keyboard shortcuts from working unless it was turned off on start. Thanks to **Gabriele Barbero** , you can now have the best of both worlds - the Welcome Dialog will respond to those keyboard shortcuts! * A small but often requested change is that the color selector no longer shows decimals when set to `0...255` mode. This makes it clearer when you’re in that mode compared to `0...100%`, and that you’re entering a whole number for the color instead of a percentage. * Many of GIMP’s “size entry” fields allow you to enter mathematical expressions such as `3 * 92cm` to calculate values. **Gabriele Barbero** extended this feature to our Configure Grid dialogue and Monitor Resolution settings in Preferences. ## Additional Fixes¶ * **Jehan** made further fixes to our code to import user configurations from older versions of GIMP to 3.2 (and the 3.1 development releases) * On Windows with the display scaled more than 200%, the crosshair cursor was in the wrong place compared to where the mouse pointer actually was. This was due to changes in how scaling is handled in GTK3. This bug should be fixed now. Thanks to **Lance Evans** for pointing it out in their review of GIMP 3.0! * New contributer **Corentin Noël** developed a fix for the Image Settings tab not appearing when printing in sandboxed applications like flatpak or snap. Due to restrictions, the tab will be created as a secondary dialogue instead - allowing you to edit those settings once again. This patch is a more future-proof version of an earlier attempt by **BZZZZ** creatively bypassing the sandbox portal. We appreciate the work of both contributers to fix this problem! This proposed solution is not ideal, UX-wise, compared to the original tab, but it is necessary because the portal print dialog is hardly usable without these settings. * The experimental Seamless Clone tool was broken when we updated our code to handle copy and pasting multiple layers. This has been fixed, so you can now test out the tool again by enabling it in Preferences. However, the tool itself is still quite slow, so it remains in the experimental Playground until further work can be done on it. * We received a report that the “Import Raw Data” dialogue was too tall for some screens. We converted it to a two-column dialogue to reduce the height and better ensure everything’s visible on all screens. * As part of the port to GTK3, the default cursors were updated. This change led to some users experiencing the dreaded “Hand” cursor when hovering over a number slider widget. Unfortunately, the arrow cursor from GIMP 2.10 is not included on all platforms so we had to devise an alternate method. **Denis Rangelov** and **Michal VaÅ¡ut** helped us find an initial solution while we continue to work on the design. We hope the current solution will make it easier for you to see where you’re clicking! * **Jacob Boerema** has added a new preference option to “Update metadata automatically”. When turned off, GIMP will no longer update comments or historical metadata such as creation time or software. This allows you to keep that metadata undisturbed even if you edit the image in GIMP. Note that image-related metadata such as thumbnails will still be updated, though you can control whether that is included in the final image on export. * **Anders Jonsson** continues their important work of finding and marking areas of the GUI as translatable. These fixes may not be immediately apparent for all languages, but his work makes it possible for those to be translated. If you’re interested in helping with translation, find your language and look for the `GIMP and Friends` section to contribute. ## Internal Changes¶ Our co-maintainer **Michael Natterer** has been hard at work reviewing and improving our internal code. While less visible than some of the other changes listed above, this work is very important to GIMP’s stability and ease to work with. A few highlights: * Reorganizing our layer search code so it can be used with other items like channels and paths in the future. * Finishing our internal renaming process from `GimpVectors` to `GimpPath`, for consistency and to reduce confusion with the new Vector Layers code structures. * Reviewing and removing unnecessary or outdated test cases and code warnings. * Restructuring our internal `GimpControllerManager` and `GimpContainerView` APIs. _Mitch working hard during Wilber Week 2025 - GIMP 3.1.4_ Several of his changes are also laying the foundation for a future port to GTK4! These include moving code away from `GtkTreeView` which will be deprecated in future GTK versions, and converting to using `GtkListBox`. You can try out some of the future changes by enabling `Use GtkListBox for simple lists` in the Playground section of Preferences. Please report any bugs or performance issues you encounter! **Jehan** has also created a new `GIMP_WARNING_API_BREAK()` macro. We use this in areas where we identify potential improvements that would break the public API. These will throw warnings when we start future development of GIMP 4, so that we know to re-examine those parts of the code to fix them. ## PDB¶ For plug-in developers, we’ve added some new public API features. You can now change the paintbrush fade length and repeat settings with `gimp-context-set-paint-fade-length` and `gimp-context-set-paint-fade-repeat`. These functions work best in scripts when `gimp-context-set-emulate-brush-dynamics` is used to enable emulating brush dynamics. The `gimp-file-save` API now also updates the image’s associated saved or exported file, so that changes are reflected in the GUI’s titlebar as well as future operations. We’ve also added some initial public API for creating vector layers. You can use `gimp-vector-layer-new` to create a vector layer, `gimp-vector-layer-refresh` to update the view after adjusting the path, and `gimp-vector-layer-discard` to convert it to a raster layer. We will add more functions in future releases to adjust the fill and stroke settings. ## Build Process¶ On GIMP 3.1.4 development cycle, **Bruno Lopes** focused their attention on Linux (again) by adding two new official nightly builds: ### Nightly Snap¶ The biggest addition to our CI recently is a new Snap package available for aarch64 and x86_64. `.snap`, although mainly used on Ubuntu, is a distro-independent packaging format for Linux that allows users to install and keep GIMP updated in a separate environment, similar to AppImage and Flatpak. We believe that it is always good to provide more universal and established packaging options, especially considering how diverse the Linux community is. Please note that, right now, **it is not available on the Snap Store yet**. We are still talking with the Snapcrafters developers to pass over the ownership of the GIMP store entry so we can maintain it. You can track our progress on their tracker. When that happens, we will be able to publish unstable and stable releases on the Snap Store on the same day we release the other official packages. Until then, you can install the nightly Snap by following these instructions ### Nightly aarch64 Flatpak¶ We have had nightly flatpak builds for x86_64 architecture for several years, but didn’t had for aarch64 (only for releases on flathub). Now we will be distributing on our CI and on GNOME nightly repository aarch64 builds as well. Unfortunately, the future availability of these nightly builds is way less certain since GNOME GitLab have only one working runner for this purpose and this runner is sponsored by Open Source Lab, which is in a delicate situation. So, we always welcome runner sponsors ## Release stats¶ Since GIMP 3.1.2, in the main GIMP repository: * 79 reports were closed as FIXED. * 73 merge requests were merged. * 687 commits were pushed. * 16 translations were updated: Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (China), Dutch, Georgian, German, Italian, Norwegian Nynorsk, Romanian, Russian, Slovenian, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian. 30 people contributed changes or fixes to GIMP 3.1.4 codebase (order is determined by number of commits; some people are in several groups): * 13 developers to core code: Michael Natterer, Jehan, Alx Sa, Jacob Boerema, Gabriele Barbero, Ondřej Míchal, Niels De Graef, Bruno Lopes, lillolollo, Anders Jonsson, Henk Boom, Joey Riches, Liam Quin. * 10 developers to plug-ins or modules: Alx Sa, Jacob Boerema, Jehan, Anders Jonsson, Ondřej Míchal, Michael Natterer, Niels De Graef, Bruno Lopes, Corentin Noël, lillolollo. * 18 translators: Yuri Chornoivan, Martin, Luming Zh, Ekaterine Papava, Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Marco Ciampa, Cristian Secară, Anders Jonsson, Asier Saratsua Garmendia, Alexander Alexandrov Shopov, Jordi Mas, Aefgh Threenine, Aleksandr Prokudin, Alexander Shopov, Asier Sarasua Garmendia, Emin Tufan Çetin, Nathan Follens, Philipp Kiemle. * 3 theme designers: Alx Sa, Niels De Graef, Ondřej Míchal. * 4 contributors on other types of resources: Jehan, Michael Natterer, Gabriele Barbero, Henk Boom. * 9 build, packaging or CI contributors: Bruno Lopes, Michael Natterer, Jehan, Alx Sa, Joey Riches, Niels De Graef, Jacob Boerema, Ondřej Míchal, Henk Boom. Contributions on other repositories in the GIMPverse (order is determined by number of commits): * Our UX tracker had 6 reports closed as FIXED. * ctx had 172 commits since 3.1.2 release by 1 contributor: Øyvind KolÃ¥s. * `gimp-data` had 11 commits by 3 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Aryeom. * The `gimp-test-images` (unit testing repository) repository had 4 commits by 1 contributor: Jacob Boerema. * The `gimp-macos-build` (macOS packaging scripts) release had 15 commits by 3 contributors: Lukas Oberhuber, Bruno Lopes, Gabriele Barbero. * The flatpak release had 14 commits by 1 contributor, aided with 2 bots: Bruno Lopes, * Our main website (what you are reading right now) had 67 commits by 5 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Alx Sa, Ondřej Míchal, gturri. * Our developer website had 36 commits by 3 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Petr Vorel. * Our 3.0 documentation had 84 commits by 13 contributors: Marco Ciampa, Alevtina Karashokova, Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Nathan Follens, Jacob Boerema, Matthew Leach, Jordi Mas, Andre Klapper, Anders Jonsson, Andrei Rybak, Dick Groskamp, Julia Dronova, Yuri Chornoivan. Let’s not forget to thank all the people who help us triaging in Gitlab, report bugs and discuss possible improvements with us. Our community is deeply thankful as well to the internet warriors who manage our various discussion channels or social network accounts such as Ville Pätsi, Liam Quin, Michael Schumacher and Sevenix! _Note: considering the number of parts in GIMP and around, and how we get statistics through `git` scripting, errors may slip inside these stats. Feel free to tell us if we missed or mis-categorized some contributors or contributions._ ## Team news¶ Our GSoC students continue to make excellent progress on their projects! * **Ondřej Míchal** has already completed their core work on the GEGL Filter Browser (as noted above). Their next steps include collecting and reacting to user feedback, adding usage examples to both the new GEGL Filter Browser and Procedure Browser, and explore how the, now 3, developer browsers can be potentially merged in the future into a single point of reference for developers. You can read Ondřej’s final report for GSoC on his blog. * **Gabriele Barbero** has been working with mentor **Liam Quin** on several “almost-there” merge requests for improvements to the text tool! These include being able to move the on-canvas editor, see live previews of selected text color changes, and an overhaul of the text tool’s layout. You can read more about their work in their status report. Outside of GSoC, they’ve also been busy contributing some needed fixes for our macOS support. * **Shivam** has continued their work with mentor **Jehan** to build our Extensions infrastructure. When finished, this system will allow you to easily download, install (or uninstall), and use plug-ins, brushes, themes, and other custom features of GIMP without having to dig through folders and files. We look forward to sharing more details in a future update! Also we recently came back from our Wilber Week event, which is an irregular team meeting. Twelve contributors were present. This year, the week was themed around the 30 years of GIMP (depending on how we look at it, GIMP may be already 30 year old — if we consider the first references to an unnamed project in emails — or will soon be, on November 21, if we consider the first release), as can be seen with the splash image. So I guess: 🥳 Happy birthday GIMP! 🎂 Happiness to Wilber and the whole community! ðŸ¥‚🤗 ## Downloading GIMP 3.1.4¶ You will find all our official builds on GIMP official website (gimp.org): * Linux AppImages for x86 and ARM (64-bit) * Linux flatpaks for x86 and ARM (64-bit) * Universal Windows installer for x86 (32 and 64-bit) and for ARM (64-bit) * Microsoft Store package for x86 and ARM (64-bit) * ~~macOS DMG packages for Intel hardware~~ * macOS DMG packages for Apple Silicon hardware Other packages made by third-parties are obviously expected to follow (Linux or *BSD distributions’ packages, etc). _Note_ : we don’t provide a macOS package for Intel processor at release time because of last-minute issues. The package may come back soon… or not. Which is also a good occasion to remind that we always welcome new testers! 🤗 Our macOS packages have nearly nobody testing it apart our (awesome!) packager, **Lukas Oberhuber**. 👉 If anyone wishes to be a tester (for macOS or any other OS/package), reach out by opening an issue here telling us for which operating systems, architectures and packages you wish to contribute testing before a release. There is no development release for the manual, but you can continue to use the existing GIMP 3.0 documentation. ## What’s next¶ Now that we’ve implemented initial versions of the two main roadmap items, we will begin shifting our focus to developing the first GIMP 3.2 release candidate. This is in keeping with our new release policy - smaller, faster development cycles that get new features out to you all sooner! Note that we definitely expect bugs and UX issues at this stage of the development of GIMP 3.2. We are releasing an early version containing in particular the two major features of GIMP 3.2 (link and vector layers) in order to get early feedback and suggestions to make the best possible implementation when we will release these as a stable version. Our designers are aware that their usability is not always ideal currently; we expect to get there with your help. User testing and feedback is crucial - we want to hear from you. Help us find bugs and polish the user experience, so we can make the best version of GIMP 3.2 we can! Don’t forget you can donate and personally fund GIMP developers, as a way to give back and accelerate the development of GIMP. Community commitment helps the project to grow stronger! You can suggest changes or report bugs by following the link to report a bug near the bottom of www.gimp.org. *[UI/UX]: User Interface/User Experience *[SSTV]: Slow-scan Television

A few years ago, we had started a series of interviews (mitch and schumaml). More were planned, but things don’t always go as planned. Well let’s try again! Today we are interviewing Sevenix, the digital artist who contributed the very cool splash screen image (which appears when starting GIMP) for the GIMP 3.0 series. This interview was held asynchronously and remotely with questions from myself, Liam Quin and Alx Sa. _GIMP 3.0 splash screen by Sevenix — CC by-sa 4.0 International_ _Wilber ( GIMP team): Hello Sevenix! Could you introduce yourself?_ **Sevenix:** Hello! My name is Fredrik Persson and I’m a programmer located in Sweden in my late thirties. I like music, movies and video games with the latter being one of my major points of artistic inspiration. Most of my drawings, even if not necessarily related to a specific game, take a lot of inspirations from the games I enjoy. One game in specific was actually the reason I got into digital artwork at all. _Fredrik Persson (a.k.a. Sevenix) — all rights reserved_ _W: You use GIMP for illustrations. Is this a hobby? Do you use GIMP for a living?_ **S:** I use GIMP for a lot of things but my main use would probably be creating illustrations, or digital artwork, yes. Ever since I was little I enjoyed drawing vast landscapes and simply filling them to the brim with little details. I use GIMP as a hobby, and while I have taken commission works earlier, I tend to not these days. The way I work is rather slow and heavily dependent on my inspiration over several months. Taking on projects that are not based on my own inspiration as well as demanding deadlines, it was simply not an enjoyable experience for me. _W: Could you talk a bit about your workflow  please?_ **S:** Funny thing, most who read this would probably expect me to be good at drawing, but truth is, I’m really not. I would consider myself below mediocre when it comes to real life drawing. I’ve always had the will and compulsion to draw, but I was never really any good at it. As such, I belong to a rather small minority who produce my artwork, not with a drawing tablet and pen, but with keyboard and mouse. _W: You work with fairly large images - what sizes are typical, and do you need to do anything special in your workflow to handle  them?_ **S:** Since I work with digital art, my main focus has always been to create wallpapers for desktops. As such I started off making regular 16:9 images in 1920x1080 pixels (HD) which during the later years I have increased to 3840x2160 (UHD). That being said, this resolution and aspect ratio is only my final aim. Sometimes websites etc. will use some different aspect ratio which I would have to adhere to, and I found it easier to create my work with this in mind from the start, rather than try to add more to the image afterwards. Print on Demand sites like Displate for example create prints in a 1.4:1 ratio. So, the first parts of all my work is to create an image that would fit a Displate 1.4:1 print. My next step is to immediately make sure to add guides or framing to make sure I do most of my detail work inside the areas which will later become the 16:9 wallpaper. This way I get a resulting image that is a 16:9 wallpaper, but with the option to extend the image to a 1.4:1 without having to create anything new. _W: You told us that you only use a mouse (no graphics tablet). Why is  that?_ **S:** One of the major advantages with digital work compared to conventional is that you can undo steps. Whenever I need to draw a line or arc, I can literally have infinite amount of attempts to get it just right. I try once and see if I’m happy with the result, if not, I do a quick Undo and try again. I mentioned that I’m bad at actual drawing and ever since I came to accept that I’ve started considering the work I do less of “drawing”, and more of “Brute Forcing Pixels”. I believe using a graphic tablet could be great if you like it and it’s a skill you already have, but I equally believe that achieving a similar skill and familiarity with a mouse isn’t much harder. I suppose an answer to this question in it’s simplest form would be: I do my work with keyboard and mouse, because it’s how I learned to do it and it’s what I feel comfortable with. _W: Your art uses a rather specific art style, could you tell us a bit about  it?_ **S:** I can try. The way I got into actual art was trying to replicate the art of the game Fallen London. They use rather simple shapes, fog and lights. Creating more of a Silhouette of their objects rather than actually drawing them. They also tend to use images with very few colors, which is also something I’ve taken with me. This way I was able to create expansive landscapes by placing layer after layer on top of each other. This results in an image that is hard to describe digitally but when people ask I tend to describe it as a Digital Paper Diorama, which I find very apt. The way I tend to work consists of really just a few techniques, repeated for each of my “layers” 1. I Create a new Layer Group and name it with a number. This layer group will contain everything I need for one segment of my image. 2. I draw my silhouetted landscape on a layer in this group, this is my Base layer. 3. I add a linear gradient ontop of the base layer and make it apply to only the layer below it by setting the clipping option of the layer to Clip to Background. 4. I add another layer group inside the layer group. This one I name “Lights”. It consists of a base layer as well which are the shapes. but in order to easily be able to change the color of these lights I make another layer ontop of it and naming it Color, similarly setting it to only apply to the Lights layer below it. Once I feel satisfied with this layer I duplicate it and run a Gaussian Blur on it, making it create a glow bloom on the light sources. I replicate this Group Layer structure for each of the “layers” I need in my images. I usually end up with around 10 to 20 of these groups in my images. And while the above list is the base of them, many become more advanced as I need things added. _Illustration by Sevenix demonstrating his layer organization — all rights reserved_ What’s important to me with this structure is the fact that it’s very easy to go back to it and edit it. At any point in my workflow I want to be able to determine that “This part here on layer 3 doesn’t really work with this great tree placement on layer 13”. At those points I don’t want there to be anything to stop me from going back to Layer 3 and change it to how I need it to be. As I see it, the more non-destructive editing I do, the less I become tied down to decisions I made 10 hours back in my workflow. This does create some rather large files, but as long as my computer can handle it I feel it’s a crucial part of my workflow. Just for an example, the latest piece I did was a piece related to Remedy Entertainments Alan Wake games. The whole project took some 15h of work time and ended up with some 170 individual layers. _W: Is there any of your illustrations that hold a special place in your  mind?_ **S:** There are many, I could pick a lot out of my early work that were the point where I felt like I was actually happy with my results, and eager to show them off. But instead I will pick a piece I named Land of the Cherry Blossoms. _“ Land of the Cherry Blossoms”, illustration by Sevenix (used during 3.0 release candidates) — CC by-sa 4.0 International_ This was probably the first real piece I did that was not simply based on other works. Up to this point I had made most my work by trying to replicate styles, testing out techniques and basing it on already existing lore. This piece was the first time I made something that felt like it was me putting something on the canvas that was all me. There are a lot of inspirations in this piece of course. A classic Japanese setting in pink with Sakura trees are in no way mind-bending. But it was mine, straight out of my head, and piled on with all the thousands of small details I like adding to my work. This was also one of my first pieces to become really popular on Print on Demand sites, providing me with visions of a potential future where I could actually do this for a job. All of this. The positive feedback, the actual small amounts of money it brought in, not to mention the joy I felt with creating it, really put this piece as one of the most impactful of my digital artist career. _W: What do you think of the latest GIMP 3 series?_ **S:** I really like it! There were some issues in the very earliest releases but they were fixed fast and I now moved over to using 3.0 for my regular, daily work. It looks much more modern to start, but what really wins me over are some long awaited features such as non-destructive editing. _W: Any specific feature in 3.0 that caught you by  surprise?_ **S:** Multi-layer selection. When I first heard about it being added to GIMP I had no idea how perfectly it would fit into my workflow. The ability to save selections allow me to easily select all of my “color” layers of the color I want to replace, then simply fill them all with my new color. In the old workflow I had to change one layer first, then click every other layer one by one, repeating the same action on each of them. Even providing I was happy with the end result, this was still some 20 or 30 actions I had to do manually. In 3.0 I can do all that in just 4 actions! _W: What are your favorite features or main reasons why you appreciate GIMP?_ **S:** I enjoy the fact that it is open source and free. I say that as someone who would never have gotten into image editing or digital art unless I would have been able to simply download it and start trying. _W: What are the features you really wished GIMP had, or things you’d like to see improved or changed?_ I’ve been using the 2.10 version since I started with digital art, and as such there was always the continuous rumors about a 3.0 version arriving sometime in the far future. It wasn’t till I actually got into the GIMP community that I realized that the 3.0 version really didn’t seem that far off at all. Ever since then I’ve followed the development and believe it or not, just about everything I wished for seems to be implemented in 3.0. Multi-layer select, Non-destructive editing. Just such a simple thing as the decision to change the default Paste functionality from the very beginner hostile Paste as Floating Layer was great. There are of course things that still can improve, and definitely things I could see myself using if they were implemented. And if you forced me to mention one I think it would be something similar to Adobes Smart Objects. Being able to add another GIMP image into your current GIMP image. _W: Apart from contributing to the project with illustrations, you also help with moderation on Discord. Could you talk about  it?_ **S:** I was very happy when I found the Discord. GIMP is an advanced program and in that it can be very hard to navigate when you are new. Joining the community on Discord allowed me access to a quick way to throw out “stupid” questions whenever I got stuck. Issues that would usually provide me with enough frustration to simply stand up and walk away from my computer suddenly just took a quick question in a chat channel, a cool head, and some patience. As for the moderation. I’m a person who enjoy finding things I like doing. And as I get better at them, I really enjoy helping others find that same joy. In GIMP, most of the time when you get stuck it’s usually because of 2 or 3 common issues. Maybe you got a checkbox active that you shouldn’t. Maybe you accidentally set your layer to 0% opacity. Maybe you happened to set the Mode of your brush to Screen. In either of those cases, you learn each time you figure it out. And with some help that goes much faster. As soon as I had gotten stuck enough times, I was able to help answer literally half the questions that were asked in the Discord channel. And people were always so appreciative. Most of the times those that get help there also end up posting the results of their work a bit later, and it’s awesome to know we were part of making that happen. I say We because I’m in no way alone in this. While I was later promoted to a moderation role in the discord, the moderation itself has always been quite easy. What really impressed me is how popular the Discord server has become. These days it’s frequented by so many people that you hardly got a chance to answer questions unless you literally pounce at them the moment they appear. My work as a moderator is a very easy one, all thanks to the absolute amazing community in there that crave to help others, improve their own work, or show off their latest creative works. _W: Any closing remarks for this  interview?_ **S:** Thanks for picking me for this. As I mentioned earlier, I love talking about and sharing my passions. Combining not only Digital Art but the general history and development of GIMP into the same interview could literally have me talking for ages. * * * A few links to know more about this artist: * Sevenix’ DeviantArt page * Buying prints from Sevenix * * * **Bonus** : here is the alternative banner version of the GIMP 3.0 splash image, also contributed by Sevenix for irregular promotion of the software on the Microsoft Store (it is designed so that it can be cropped for various form factors and with space left on the left for the software’s name and some additional text): _Microsoft Store banner for GIMP 3.0.0 by Sevenix — CC by-sa 4.0 International_

In keeping with our new release schedule, we’re proud to announce GIMP 3.1.2, the first development version of what will become GIMP 3.2! This release contains a number of new features that we’ve been working on in-between bugfixes for GIMP 3.0. We’re looking forward to your testing and feedback as we continue adjusting and tweaking the code and design of them. _New development splash screen by Ville Pätsi - GIMP 3.1.2_ Our new development splash screen was created by **Ville Pätsi** and commemorates our recent visit to the 2025 Libre Graphics Meeting Note that a development release is not ready for production use. It might crash. If it didn’t have problems it would be 3.2 already. So please do test, but understand this is a feature release for early adopters and for the more adventurous! * Theme colors for Brush, Font, and Palette * Auto-match Windows and Linux OS theme * New Paint Mode: Overwrite * New Text Outline Option * Non-destructive editing * CMYK * File format support * ART Raw Loader * Krita Palette * Photoshop Patterns * Photoshop Curves and Levels presets * PSD/PSB * APNG * OpenEXR * JPEG 2000 * Playstation TIM * OpenRaster * Over The Air Bitmap * Jeff’s Image Format * AVCI and HEJ2 * UX/UI * Notable bug and regression fixes * Unique Color Count * Additional Fixes * Plug-in/Script Developers * Build Process * Release stats * Team news * Around GIMP * Downloading GIMP 3.1.2 * What’s next ## Theme colors for Brush, Font, and Palette¶ Brush previews in GIMP are printed on a white background. For grayscale brushes, we use black to represent the brush stroke. Since the Brush dockable displays many brush previews side by side, it can create a distractingly bright section if you’re using the Dark or Gray themes, especially in grid mode. We now have a toggle to make brush previews rendered with the theme foreground and background colors instead. This means that in dark mode, the brush background will be a darker color while the brush itself will be lighter. The fonts dockable also has this toggle, and palette displays will automatically use the theme colors. Note that this is a cosmetic change only and does not affect how you create brushes. Default Colors | Theme Colors ---|--- | _Brush preview before and after theme color toggle - GIMP 3.1.2_ ## Auto-match Windows and Linux OS theme¶ GIMP defaults to the Dark mode version of our Default theme on first load. Thanks to the hard work of several contributors (**Hari Rana** , **Niels De Graef** , **Isopod** , and **Jehan**), we know have an additional “ _System Colors_ ” color scheme so that GIMP matches your current OS theme preferences on Windows and Linux (provided your OS supports the portal). GIMP’s theme will also automatically update if you change your system preference. You can of course still explicitly set a color scheme in Preferences or the Welcome Dialog if you’d prefer to use a scheme that’s different from your OS. _Screenshot of Welcome Dialogue with System Colors theme - GIMP 3.1.2_ If you’re a macOS developer and are interested in adding support for this feature on your platform, please reach out! ## New Paint Mode: Overwrite¶ New contributor **Woynert** implemented a new paint blend mode called _Overwrite_. It allows you to directly replace the pixels over the area you paint, without blending the transparency values of the brush and the existing pixels in that area. _Example of how Overwrite blending mode works - GIMP 3.1.2_ This new mode is particularly useful for pixel art, when you want to overwrite your target opacity over the source opacity, and is mostly targetted at the Pencil tool. With the brush tool or other paint tools, some interpolation of opacity and color will still happen for softer transitions as this is what is usually expected with these tools. For these non-pencil use cases, we are still tweaking the algorithm and we welcome feedback. For the pencil tool use cases though, the sharp _overwrite_ of color and alpha is pretty much what is expected from this mode. Note also that this new mode is only available as a paint mode (in particular, you won’t find it in the list of layer modes or effect modes). ## New Text Outline Option¶ There’s a new setting in the text tool to control the direction of the text outline. You can have the text outline grow inward, outward, or in both directions! _Screenshot of new Outline Direction option in the text tool - GIMP 3.1.2_ ## Non-destructive editing¶ Co-Maintainer **Michael Natterer** spent several days during the Libre Graphics Meeting, going over the non-destructive filter code in order to clean it up and refactor it. While this is mostly behind-the-scenes work, this should reduce bugs and make future development and maintenance much easier. Building on this work, GIMP now supports adding non-destructive filters to channels! The Channels dockable now shows the same `Fx` column as the Layers dockable, so you can edit, rearrange, delete, and merge filters on channels just like you can with layers. ## CMYK¶ The CMYK Color Selector now calculates and displays the Total Ink Coverage of the selected color. This is useful when printing, as depending on the printing system and the media used, there may be a limit on how much ink can be applied. _Screenshot of CMYK Color Selector showing Total Ink Coverage - GIMP 3.1.2_ ## File format support¶ We have added support for several new formats and improved some existing ones. Are there image formats you need? Let us know and we can investigate whether we can add them. ### ART Raw Loader¶ We’re adding support for using _ART_ (_AnotherRawTherapee_) as a Camera Raw loader in GIMP, in addition to our existing support for _darktable_ and _RawTherapee_. If you have ART already installed, GIMP should automatically recognize it and use it to load Camera Raw format images for further editing. If that doesn’t work for you, please reach out and let us know! ### Krita Palette¶ By request, we’ve added a new option to export to _Krita_‘s `.kpl` palette format from GIMP. You can do this by choosing `Export as` from the menu in the Palette dockable. ### Photoshop Patterns¶ **Jacob Boerema** has added support for importing Photoshop patterns! You can put Adobe `.pat` files in the GIMP pattern folder and automatically load them in the same way as GIMP’s own `.pat` files. We have tested this feature with RGB and grayscale Photoshop patterns, but if you run into any issues with your patterns, please let us know (and include the pattern file)! ### Photoshop Curves and Levels presets¶ You can now use presets from Photoshop’s Curves and Levels filters in GIMP’s Curves and Levels filters! When you use these filters, choose `Import Current Settings from File...` from the Preset menu and select your `.acv` or `.alv` preset respectively. If your preset doesn’t work with those filters, please let us know (and include the preset files)! _Screenshot of Curves filter with Photoshop .acv preset loaded (image by Daniel Squires, CC0) - GIMP 3.1.2_ ### PSD/PSB¶ **Alx Sa** has implemented initial support for exporting PSBs, Photoshop Large format. It is very similar to PSDs - the main difference is that you can export images up to _300,000_ pixels wide and tall instead of PSD’s 30,000 limit. Thanks to **Ville Pätsi** for their initial testing. If you work with very large images (or PSBs in general), we’d appreciate your testing and feedback! Also, our PSD/PSB importer now recognizes legacy Drop Shadow and Inner Shadow non-destructive filters. These will be converted to GIMP’s non-destructive Dropshadow filter so you can edit and adjust them after opening the image. ### APNG¶ GIMP can now import APNG animations. People building or packaging GIMP should note that we used the standard `libpng` for this, not a patched version, so no changes are needed. ### OpenEXR¶ We’ve now added support for loading multi-layer OpenEXR images. For instance, if you export a multi-view image from other software such as _Blender_, all views should show up in GIMP as individual layers. ### JPEG 2000¶ We have had import support for JPEG 2000 images for many years. **Steve Williams** of Advance Software implemented an export plug-in for their own use and shared a GIMP 3 compatible version with us. We have merged it into the existing JPEG 2000 loader, so now you can both import and export JPEG 2000 images! _Screenshot of JPEG 2000 export dialogue (image by Robb Hannawacker, CC0) - GIMP 3.1.2_ ### Playstation TIM¶ **Andrew Kieschnick** originally developed a GIMP 2 plug-in to load and export Sony Playstation 1 `TIM` textures and images. We have updated the code to be compatible with GIMP 3 and incorporated it as a standard image plug-in. ### OpenRaster¶ OpenRaster is a file format intended to help share layered images between graphics editors (such _Krita_ , _MyPaint_, and _Scribus_). In addition to the standard format (which GIMP already supports), there are two official extensions to remember which layers were selected and which ones were content locked. GIMP now supports exporting and importing both. ### Over The Air Bitmap¶ We’ve added import support for Nokia’s historical black and white Over-the-Air Bitmap format. (Hey, ImageMagick supports it too!) ### Jeff’s Image Format¶ As promised in our April news post, we have added import support for the GIF variant known as Jeff’s Image Format (`.jif`). ### AVCI and HEJ2¶ **Daniel Novomeský** has added support for importing Advanced Video Coding (AVCI) still images. They’ve also added support for exporting HEJ2 images, which is an HEIF file that contains a JPEG 2000 image. ## UX/UI¶ **Denis Rangelov** , **Reju** , **Michal VaÅ¡ut** , and other designers have been working on a number of UX/UI updates for GIMP 3.2 in the UX repository. While the larger changes are still being designed and reviewed, we have been implementing several of their quality of life fixes: * We found several instances where the Foreground Selection algorithm would run when switching to another tool, even if no selection had been made yet. This caused an unnecessary lag, so we adjusted the algorithm to avoid running in those cases. * A few more areas where the system theme could conflict with GIMP’s theme were found and fixed. In fact, a few of these glitches were found while taking screenshots for this news post! * The Palette dockable now automatically selects the next swatch when you delete a previous one, allowing you to quickly delete several swatches by just clicking the Delete button repeatedly. * The state of the “Merge Filter” checkbox for non-destructive filters should no longer be affected if you apply a filter that currently has to be destructive, like Lens Blur. In prior versions, applying a destructive filter would always enable the checkbox for other filters, even if you had turned it off before. * “Lock pixels” now generates an undo step in undo history, just like “Lock Position” and other locks. ## Notable bug and regression fixes¶ ### Unique Color Count¶ The **Color Cube Analysis** plug-in was removed from GIMP 3, as most of its functionality already exists in the Histogram dockable. We say _most_ , because one feature was missed - the display of how many unique colors the image has. Thankfully, Google Summer of Code student **Gabriele Barbero** has reimplemented this feature! You can enable it by checking “Compute unique colors” in the Histogram dockable. The count will update live as you edit the image. _Screenshot of Histogram Editor with unique colors count highlighted - GIMP 3.1.2_ ### Additional Fixes¶ Some image formats do not allow images to have transparent sections. This can be confusing if you’re not familiar with all the details of the image you imported, especially when rotating or applying a filter with transparency such as `Color to Alpha`. We now detect if a filter or transformation would require transparency, and automatically add an alpha channel to the layer to prevent unexpected distortions. **Jacob Boerema** implemented a fix for ZDI-CAN-25082, which potentially affected loading certain DDS images on a 32-bit machine. In the 3.0.4 news post, we implemented a fix for transparency padding when pasting a selection to other programs. **Cheesequake** extended this fix to also cover copy and pasting full layers to other programs. Please let us know if you notice any other related regressions! **Estecka** fixed a bug where editing filters on a hidden layer would automatically cause the layer to reappear. The legacy Jigsaw filter has been updated to work on transparent layers. While it’s not a non-destructive filter, this fix should allow you to apply it to a separate transparent layer and then use it as an overlay for your image. ## Plug-in/Script Developers¶ We’ve added a new API to create a `GimpCoordinates` widget in the auto-generated dialogue. `gimp_procedure_dialog_get_coordinates ()` will connect two numeric parameters with a chain link and a unit type dropdown. You can see an example of how it’s used in our Tile plug-in, or in our GimpUi API documentation. Due to an oversight, _unsigned_ integer parameters did not generate widgets in `GimpProcedureDialog` despite being functionally this same. This has been corrected, so now `gimp_procedure_add_uint_argument ()` will create input fields automatically just like `gimp_procedure_add_int_argument ()` does. Also, **Jehan** added a new default behavior to the `GimpChoice` parameter type. If you make one with only two options, the auto-generated dialog will display radio buttons instead of a dropdown menu. You can of course override this default with `gimp_procedure_dialog_get_widget ()`, but we think this will help save people some clicks for simple options. ## Build Process¶ **Bruno Lopes** continues their hard work to improve our build and packaging processes. A few of the highlights: * Our build system now automatically generates a list of image formats that GIMP can open on Windows. This means rather than manually maintaining (and often forgetting to update) a list, the installer and MSIX will associate all supported images as we implement them, like the ones mentioned in this news. * Our Linux builds now have a similar method of auto-generating image format associations via their mimetype too. We hope to implement this feature for macOS builds as well in a future update. * All previously non-portable build scripts of GIMP repository have been made POSIX-compliant. This means that it’s now easier to use these on platforms like BSD. Bruno has also implemented more checks in our CI pipelines to prevent non-portable code from being reintroduced in the future. Even though most of these utility scripts will not be used on daily basis by packagers (we ported the important `.sh` scripts used by Meson to `.py` scripts since GIMP 3.0.4 development cycle), this makes our builds truly cross-platform. ## Release stats¶ Since GIMP 3.0.4, in the main GIMP repository: * 42 reports were closed as FIXED. * 55 merge requests were merged. * 302 commits were pushed. * 12 translations were updated: Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (China), Dutch, Galician, Georgian, Norwegian Nynorsk, Persian, Slovenian, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian. 29 people contributed changes or fixes to GIMP 3.1.2 codebase (order is determined by number of commits; some people are in several groups): * 14 developers to core code: Jehan, Michael Natterer, Alx Sa, Jacob Boerema, Bruno Lopes, Christoph Reiter, Estecka, Gabriele Barbero, Hari Rana, Ondřej Míchal, Philip Zander, cheesequake, lloyd konneker, woynert. * 9 developers to plug-ins or modules: Alx Sa, Bruno Lopes, Jehan, lloyd konneker, Jacob Boerema, Advance Software, Anders Jonsson, Daniel Novomeský, Natanael Copa. * 12 translators: Luming Zh, Martin, Yuri Chornoivan, Ekaterine Papava, Alexander Shopov, Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Nathan Follens, Anders Jonsson, Danial Behzadi, Emin Tufan Çetin, Jordi Mas, Yago Raña. * 1 theme designers: Alx Sa. * 2 contributors on other types of resources: Jehan, Bruno Lopes. * 11 build, packaging or CI contributors: Bruno Lopes, Alx Sa, lloyd konneker, Jehan, Advance Software, Christoph Reiter, Michael Natterer, Natanael Copa, Sam James, woynert, Ondřej Míchal Contributions on other repositories in the GIMPverse (order is determined by number of commits): * Our UX tracker had 3 reports closed as FIXED. * ctx had 186 commits since 3.0.4 release by 1 contributor: Øyvind KolÃ¥s. * `gimp-data` had 10 commits by 4 contributors: Jehan, Bruno Lopes, Ville Pätsi, Alx Sa. * The `gimp-test-images` (unit testing repository) repository had 2 commits by 1 contributor: Jacob Boerema. * The `gimp-macos-build` (macOS packaging scripts) release had 18 commits by 2 contributors: Lukas Oberhuber, Bruno Lopes. * The flatpak release had 7 commits by 2 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan. * Our main website (what you are reading right now) had 26 commits by 3 contributors: Alx Sa, Jehan, Bruno Lopes. * Our developer website had 20 commits by 3 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Lloyd Konneker, Jehan. * Our 3.0 documentation had 40 commits by 9 contributors: Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Alevtina Karashokova, Nathan Follens, Jacob Boerema, Alx Sa, Matthew Leach, Alevtina, Anders Jonsson, Yuri Chornoivan. Let’s not forget to thank all the people who help us triaging in Gitlab, report bugs and discuss possible improvements with us. Our community is deeply thankful as well to the internet warriors who manage our various discussion channels or social network accounts such as Ville Pätsi, Liam Quin, Michael Schumacher and Sevenix! _Note: considering the number of parts in GIMP and around, and how we get statistics through `git` scripting, errors may slip inside these stats. Feel free to tell us if we missed or mis-categorized some contributors or contributions._ ## Team news¶ Our Google Summer of Code students are making great progress with their summer projects! **Gabriele Barbero** is making some much-requested improvements to our on-canvas text editor. In their test branch, they’ve made the style editor moveable, and each text layer remembers its editor’s position when you switch between them. With a little more polish and bug-testing, this feature should show up in a future 3.1 development release! **Ondřej Míchal** has created a GEGL Filter Browser prototype in their own test branch. This involved a lot of research, as there any a number of edge cases and formats to account for. When finished, this feature will be very useful for script and plug-in developers, especially with the new filter API that lets them create and apply any effect available in GIMP! **Shivam** is working on a website to list and display third-party GIMP extensions (the rebirth of the GIMP registry that older creators may have known). A first version of the script to generate extensions’ web pages from their metadata has already been merged. ## Around GIMP¶ We printed stickers of the new Wilber logos for the 2025 Libre Graphics Meeting. _Photo of Wilber stickers from Libre Graphics Meeting (taken bymL)_ You can use this file if you’d like to print your own Wilber stickers. You can also request reimbursement if you’re planning to print enough to hand out at a local event or GIMP User Group meeting. Note that we are still working out the procedure for these requests, but we encourage you to reach out and discuss your idea. ## Downloading GIMP 3.1.2¶ You will find all our official builds on GIMP official website (gimp.org): * Linux AppImages for x86 and ARM (64-bit) * Linux flatpaks for x86 and ARM (64-bit) * Universal Windows installer for x86 (32 and 64-bit) and for ARM (64-bit) * Microsoft Store package for x86 and ARM (64-bit) * macOS DMG packages for Intel hardware * macOS DMG packages for Apple Silicon hardware Other packages made by third-parties are obviously expected to follow (Linux or *BSD distributions’ packages, etc.). There is no development release for the manual, but you can continue to use the existing GIMP 3.0 documentation from GIMP 3.1. ## What’s next¶ This first development release contains many new features we’ve been working on during 3.0 development. Our main focus for GIMP 3.2 on the roadmap is developing two new types of non-destructive layers - linked layers and vector layers. We hope to share more information about these in future news posts. This faster pace release schedule also proves to be quite stimulating and relies on years of infrastructure and procedure preparations. So far, it looks like it works quite well! While we remind that this is a development version and therefore we advise against using it for production, we also really welcome feedback and bug reports. At every first stable release in a new series, too many bugs are discovered. GIMP is a community, first and foremost. The software will improve because many people participate! Now that we are starting the development releases for a brand new stable series, we are really relying on everyone so that the upcoming GIMP 3.2 can be as stable and good as possible. Don’t forget you can donate and personally fund GIMP developers, as a way to give back and accelerate the development of GIMP. Community commitment helps the project to grow stronger!

Two months after releasing GIMP 3.0, we are delighted to announce the second micro-release, GIMP 3.0.4. This addresses bugs and also incorporates some of the fabulous and helpful feedback we have received. * Release Highlights * General Bugfixes * Regressions * UI/UX * Build * AppImage * Smaller and smarter Windows installer * GEGL and babl * Release Stats * Around GIMP * Team News * GSoC * Download Mirrors * Downloading GIMP 3.0.4 * What’s Next # Release Highlights¶ Micro releases like 3.0.4 are focused on fixing bugs and regressions, so there are no major new features to announce (though we continue to work on those! Just on separate feature branches for GIMP 3.2). However, we want to tell you about some major fixes that may have impacted your workflow. ## General Bugfixes¶ There was a bug with pasting selections from GIMP into other programs, where the pasted section was padded to the original image size. This is now fixed thanks to work from **Anders Jonsson** , **Aruius** , and **Alx Sa**. If you notice any regressions or other issues after this fix, please let us know! There were several types of crash reported to us, related to changing or turning off the main monitor. **Jacob Boerema** and **Jehan** worked together to diagnose this issue and make several necessary fixes. However, if you continue to have problems related to this, let us know so we can continue to work on it. **Idriss Fekir** and **Liam Quin** , our resident font experts, have been busy making improvements to our text systems. In addition to general bug fixes with text layers, they’ve also greatly improved font loading speed on start-up. If you have a large number of fonts on your computer, GIMP should start much faster now! Non-destructive filters received a number of bugfixes and improvements as well. The name of the filter is once again displayed in the undo history when added to an image. In addition, individual filter edits are now tracked in the undo history, thanks to work by **Jehan** and **Alx Sa**. We also resolved a few crashes, and we fixed some visual glitches when rotating layers with active non-destructive filters. A few other small fixes of note: * New contributor **Gabriele Barbero** fixed a bug where the Help button on the About Dialog didn’t load the help page correctly. * New contributor **Integral** fixed a bug on KDE Wayland where the default Wayland icon was shown instead of our Wilber icon. * The `ZDI-CAN-26752` bug for .ICO imports is now fixed. _Screenshot of GIMP splash screen with correct Wilber icon on KDE Wayland, by Integral - GIMP 3.0.4_ ## Regressions¶ **Akkana Peck** noticed that the Window Hint option in Preferences no longer allowed floating windows to stay in front of the main image window in multi-window mode. She found and implemented a fix using the updated GTK3 API. _Screenshot of Preferences Dialog with ‘Hint for docks and toolbox’ option highlighted - GIMP 3.0.4_ The space bar once again respects the action setting in Canvas Interactions. This means instead of always panning, you can set it to switch to the Move Tool instead - or even set it to do nothing at all! The `Difference Cloud` filter once again has a GUI to let you adjust its settings. This actually fixes a regression from the port to GEGL in **GIMP 2.8**, so it’s a long-standing update! _Difference Cloud filter GUI - GIMP 3.0.4_ A few other small fixes of note: * The Plug-in Browser should now show all plug-ins again. * New contributor **Aruius** resolved a bug where the Sample Points display didn’t update when the image’s precision changed. * The Screenshot plug-in once again uses radio buttons rather than a drop-down menu for its options, reducing the number of clicks needed to change settings. * **Rupert Weber** fixed a bug on Linux where BMP format warnings didn’t display in some cases. _Create Screenshot plug-in GUI - GIMP 3.0.4_ ## UI/UX¶ Since this is a “bugfix” release, we didn’t want to make too many disruptive UI changes. However, **Reju** has identified and designed a few smaller updates to help make GIMP’s UI more consistent. * The MyPaint Brush tools options UI has been redesigned to match the layout of other painting tools. * The generic “Force” slider does not impact the Pencil Tool. This option is now hidden in that tool’s options rather than just marked inactive, to be less confusing. * The Device Status dock has been updated to show more clearly which input device is in use, and is closer to the GIMP 2.10 version. The Path tool now automatically closes the path when you click on the starting point in `Design` mode, rather than requiring you to hold down the `Ctrl` first. This makes the Path tool more consistent with similar tools in GIMP, as well as in other software. If you need to move the starting point, you can deselect the current end point by holding `Shift` when you click on it, and then select the starting point to move it. **Jacob Boerema** reviewed our brush size code, and found that different parts of GIMP set different limits for the maximum brush size. He defined a single maximum value and set it to be used throughout GIMP, to ensure there are no surprises when resizing your brush! A few other small fixes of note: * On Windows, floating docks in Multi-Window Mode now also have their titlebars match the theme dark mode setting. * You can now press `Enter` to connect the start and end points in Scissor Select. Pressing `Enter` a second time will create a selection as normal. ## Build¶ We received reports that GCC 15 could not build GIMP by default, due to some older areas of our codebase using now reserved keywords for variable names. **Nils Philippsen** located the problem areas and updated the relevant code to match current standards. On macOS, we now have a developer version of the .DMG as first mentioned in the 3.0.2 news post. This means that creating plug-ins for macOS will be much easier and faster than before. Thanks again to **Lukas Oberhuber** , **Peter Kaczorowski** , **Dominik Reichardt** , and other contributors for their hard work! Our resident packaging and build expert **Bruno Lopes** has been busy with more improvements to our processes. A few of these updates are listed below: ### AppImage¶ The AppImage no longer contains Debug Symbols for dependencies (with the exception of babl and GEGL). This should significantly cut down on the file size, going back to the small size it had in RC3. Instead, if you need to debug the AppImage, follow our new debugging instructions. ### Smaller and smarter Windows installer¶ To guarantee the best stability for future GIMP installations on Microsoft Windows, the installer’s **Customize mode is now restricted to “clean” installations** (a.k.a. when you first install GIMP). That’s because we need to adjust or even remove features from the .exe installer when they get too hard to maintain or become potentially broken (e.g. our custom file associations page was removed starting with GIMP 2.10.12 installer). In the Customize mode case, it was suppose to let you choose what GIMP components should installed, but unfortunately, it was not working like that at all. Back then, to allow the Customize mode between GIMP installations (e.g. when reinstalling, updating), our Windows developers needed to 1) hardcode the components files almost twice and 2) code our own utility to do recursive uninstall of some complex components. All of that extra work to barely emulate how it (automatically) works on NSIS and WIX installers. Because of this, that feature became unmaintained without us noticing for many years and was silently breaking some GIMP installations. That said, you will still be able to use that feature with the command line - but keep in mind it is not properly working. To be clear: that feature works perfectly on clean installs and, from 3.0.4 onward, also if the installer detects a broken install (e.g. when you installed GIMP in a external SSD but lost it). We call this much requested feature: **Repair mode**. Also in the Customize mode, in addition to letting you choose what language packs are present, you can now also choose to install **plug-in development files** which work with our new plug-in tutorials. As a bonus, even if you select literally all components available in the Customize mode, GIMP 3 is still more than **300MB smaller than GIMP 2.10** 😉, that’s it. # GEGL and babl¶ GEGL version 0.4.62 brings several bug fixes to prevent crashes, courtesy of **Øyvind KolÃ¥s**. UI ranges were added by **Budhil Nigam** to some operations, which means our Fractal Trace filter now has more sensible number ranges on the slider. babl version 0.1.114 contains some fixes from **Øyvind** to ensure TRCs are stored correctly from color profiles. Internally, **Bruno Lopes** converted many scripts in both projects to use Python, making them easier to build on other platforms. # Release Stats¶ Since GIMP 3.0.2, in the main GIMP repository: * 90 reports were closed as FIXED. * 59 merge requests were merged. * 280 commits were pushed. * 15 translations were updated: British English, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (China), Danish, French, Georgian, German, Norwegian Nynorsk, Persian, Portuguese, Slovenian, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian. 32 people contributed changes or fixes to GIMP 3.0.4 codebase (order is determined by number of commits; some people are in several groups): * 14 developers to core code: Alx Sa, Jehan, Bruno Lopes, Idriss Fekir, Jacob Boerema, Gabriele Barbero, Akkana Peck, Integral, Lukas Oberhuber, Nils Philippsen, aruius, Lloyd Konneker, mkmo, Øyvind KolÃ¥s. * 9 developers to plug-ins or modules: Alx Sa, Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Jacob Boerema, Anders Jonsson, Nils Philippsen, Rupert, Sabri Ünal, Lloyd Konneker. * 16 translators: Emin Tufan Çetin, Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Alexander Shopov, Anders Jonsson, Luming Zh, Martin, Yuri Chornoivan, Alan Mortensen, Andi Chandler, Dirk Stöcker, Ekaterine Papava, André Dazereix, Danial Behzadi, Hugo Carvalho, Jordi Mas i Hernandez, Philipp Kiemle. * 2 theme designers: Alx Sa, Bruno Lopes. * 7 build, packaging or CI contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Idriss Fekir, Integral, Lukas Oberhuber, lloyd konneker, Ondřej Míchal. Contributions on other repositories in the GIMPverse (order is determined by number of commits): * GEGL 0.4.62 is made of 22 commits by 7 contributors: Øyvind KolÃ¥s, Bruno Lopes, Davide Ferracin, Jehan, Liam Quin, Muhammet Kara, budhil. * babl 0.1.114 is made of 24 commits by 5 contributors: Øyvind KolÃ¥s, Bruno Lopes, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz, lillolollo, sewn. * ctx had 88 commits since 3.0.2 release by 1 contributor: Øyvind KolÃ¥s. * `gimp-data` had 8 commits by 3 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Lukas Oberhuber. * The `gimp-test-images` (unit testing repository) repository had 1 commit by 1 contributor: Jacob Boerema. * The `gimp-macos-build` (macOS packaging scripts) release had 4 commits by 1 contributor: Lukas Oberhuber. * The flatpak release had 15 commits by 3 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Ondřej Míchal, Jehan. * Our main website (what you are reading right now) had 44 commits by 4 contributors: Jehan, Alx Sa, Wiliam Souza, Bruno Lopes. * Our developer website had 63 commits by 5 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Chas Belov, Lukas Oberhuber, Denis Rangelov. * Our 3.0 documentation had 75 commits by 13 contributors: Andre Klapper, Alevtina Karashokova, Jacob Boerema, Alan Mortensen, Alx Sa, Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Alexandre Franke, Chas Belov, Jordi Mas i Hernandez, Peter Mráz, ShellWen Chen, Takayuki KUSANO, Yuri Chornoivan. Let’s not forget to thank all the people who help us triaging in Gitlab, report bugs and discuss possible improvements with us. Our community is deeply thankful as well to the internet warriors who manage our various discussion channels or social network accounts such as Ville Pätsi, Liam Quin, Michael Schumacher and Sevenix! _Note: considering the number of parts in GIMP and around, and how we get statistics through `git` scripting, errors may slip inside these stats. Feel free to tell us if we missed or mis-categorized some contributors or contributions._ # Around GIMP¶ ## Team News¶ **Reju** , an active contributor to the UX design repository, has been recently granted “reporter” status. We appreciate their hard work developing designs and discussing UX improvements with developers and the community! ## GSoC¶ We are once again participating in the Google Summer of Code internship program. We have three great project proposals from our summer students: * **Ondřej Míchal** is working on a redesign of our developer reference system in GIMP. They already have some early work done on a GEGL Filter Browser, which will be very helpful for plug-in creators looking to use the new Filter API. * **Gabriele Barbero** will be developing further improvements to the text tool, building on past work by former GSoC students and current contributor **Idriss Fekir**. * **Shivam Shekhar Soy** will be working on our online extensions repository. This is another step on our roadmap to allow you to easily download and install new extensions to GIMP, replacing the beloved GIMP Plug-in Registry. ## Download Mirrors¶ Since the 3.0.2 news post, two new mirrors have been contributed: * in Finland by OSSPlanet * in the Netherlands by Niranjan Fartare Mirrors are important as they help the project by sharing the load for dozens of thousands of daily downloads. Moreover by having mirrors spread across the globe, we ensure that everyone can have fast download access to GIMP. # Downloading GIMP 3.0.4¶ You will find all our official builds on GIMP official website (gimp.org): * Linux AppImages for x86 and ARM (64-bit) * Linux Flatpaks for x86 and ARM (64-bit) * Universal Windows installer for x86 (32 and 64-bit) and for ARM (64-bit) * Microsoft Store for x86 and ARM (64-bit) * macOS DMG packages for Intel hardware * macOS DMG packages for Apple Silicon hardware Other packages made by third-parties are obviously expected to follow (Linux or *BSD distributions’ packages, etc). _Note_ : The Microsoft Store release may be delayed as we wait for the certification process to finish. # What’s Next¶ Since GIMP 3.0.0 release, we focused on bug fixing. As could be expected after a 7-year development marathon, various issues have slipped through our testing and we had to deal with these. Though perfection doesn’t exist and we’ll continue to work on bug fixes, we believe we are in a saner state now, and therefore we are now going to enter a “Merge Window” period where we will allow new features and breaking changes in the code again. In other words, we are starting to move onto active GIMP 3.2 preparation! ðŸ˜± We won’t spoil 🤫 too much our feature list, also because it is possible that some of the features we are planning don’t make it (though development has already started in feature branches). But we can already tell you that we feel that GIMP 3.2 will be pretty awesome too, despite being much smaller than GIMP 3.0 was! To be continued… Don’t forget you can donate and personally fund GIMP developers, as a way to give back and accelerate the development of GIMP. Community commitment helps the project to grow stronger! *[TRC]: Tone Reproduction Curve

Hi! I’m one of the contributor for GIMP’s development. You might be familiar with my work on moving “About GIMP” to the bottom of the help menu and other vitally important improvements to GIMP. GIMP 3.0 was a big release, and we’ve gotten a lot of feedback from users since then. While **Jehan** is busy with bug fixes, code review, and administrative work, he’s asked me to take over certain duties to ease the burden on him. Therefore, I am proud to announce a new priority for **GIMP 3.2**: **File Format support**! It’s true that GIMP already supports a wide range of images such as the very useful Esm Software PIX format. However, there are so many more types of images in the world that I believe GIMP should support. Supporting all image formats - no matter how supposedly _“ obscure”_ - is **crucial** to maintaining access to our shared digital culture. The first format in this new campaign is **Jeff ’s Image Format**! _Example JIF image from Jeff’s website, converted with GIMP - authorship and copyright unsure_ **Jeff ’s Image Format** is a variation of the GIF standard, created in the late 1990s. It was intended to get around potential legal issues with the patented **LZW compression** used in GIFs, by using a **LZ77 -derived compression** instead. The format is otherwise nearly identical to GIF (save for the `JIFF99a` magic number), making it an easy target for import support in GIMP. Furthermore, it helps you to be right no matter _how_ you pronounce **GIF**! While you’ll have to wait until GIMP 3.2 to experience importing JIF images, you can check out the merge request for Jeff’s Image Format support in GIMP to tide yourself over until that glorious day! If you have any sample images you’d like to contribute, please share on the issue tracker. I am so proud to lead this new initiative for GIMP, and I believe it will take us (and open source image editing in general) in an exciting new direction. I look forward to this journey with you all! _(At least until Jehan gets back and sees that I ’ve posted this)_ _Example Animated JIF image from Jeff’s website, converted with GIMP - authorship and copyright unsure_

We are happy to announce the first micro release for GIMP 3.0! * Bugfix Release * macOS Plug-in Development * Windows Installer updates * GEGL * Release Stats * Download Mirrors * Downloading GIMP 3.0.2 * What’s Next # Bugfix Release¶ As we noted in the 3.0 release notes, we are returning to our pre-2.10 development process of only adding new features on minor releases. This allows us to respond more quickly to problems and bugs found by users. Furthermore it’s a good opportunity to show off our streamlined release procedure, allowing us to make much faster releases in the v3 series than we used to be able to do with GIMP 2.10. The initial release of GIMP 3.0 was great, and we deeply appreciate all the positive comments as well as the constructive feedback from new and existing users! You helped us uncover a number of bugs and regressions, and GIMP 3.0.2 provides fixes for several of them. **Here is a summary of the  fixes:** * macOS and flatpak users reported a crash when selecting a brush with the view set to Icon Grid. This was tricky to solve as it did not crash on every OS, but **Jehan** and **Øyvind KolÃ¥s** worked together to implement a fix. * Some packaging changes resulted in a few missed features, such as Python plug-ins and the auto-update check not running on Windows and some display filters and color selectors not appearing on macOS. **Bruno Lopes** and **Lukas Oberhuber** diagnosed and fixed these in revisions to 3.0, and these updates are included in the 3.0.2 release. * Different system themes had styles which our Default theme did not override, causing some UI glitches or odd coloring. **Denis Rangelov** worked to develop CSS rules to prevent these problems regardless of what system you’re on. **Lukas Oberhuber** fixed some additional macOS-specific issues with flyout menus on tool groups. * A patch to improve tablet support has been temporarily reverted. While it fixed an issue with detecting the eraser tip of some stylus, it seemed to cause a different issue with pressure sensivity on other tablets. We will review this patch and update it in a future release to fix the eraser bug without causing the other side effects. * Additional fixes were implemented throughout GIMP by **Jehan** , **Jacob Boerema** , **Alx Sa** , **Idriss Fekir** , **Wyatt Radkiewicz** , and **Anders Jonsson**. We are continuing to review reports of bugs, UI glitches, and regressions, and are working on solutions for those. However, we believe GIMP 3.0.2 fixes some immediate problems for users, and we hope it makes using GIMP 3.0 a little smoother. Please continue to report any issues or feature request you have to our issue tracker so we’re aware of them! # macOS Plug-in Development¶ **Lukas Oberhuber** , **Peter Kaczorowski** , **Dominik Reichardt** , and others have been hard at work creating a new plug-in development package for macOS. Traditionally it has been difficult to develop GIMP plug-ins on macOS, so this is a great improvement! We’ll be updating our developer website soon with more information. For now, you can read the discussion on the tracking issue. # Windows Installer updates¶ **Bruno Lopes** has implemented more improvements to our Windows installer. It now sets up a Restore Point for system-wide installs. Also, if you uninstall GIMP via the installer, it will now prompt about removing your configurations. This allows you to make a truly clean uninstall and reinstall of GIMP if you installed as a normal user (not as an admin). # GEGL¶ GEGL received a small bugfix update as well. 0.4.58 includes a fix for Dither being applied to negative pixel coordinates, as well as additional translation updates. # Release Stats¶ Since GIMP 3.0.0, in the main GIMP repository: * 13 reports were closed as FIXED. * 15 merge requests were merged. * 54 commits were pushed. * 10 translations were updated: Bulgarian, Chinese (China), Dutch, Georgian, Icelandic, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian. 20 people contributed changes or fixes to GIMP 3.0.2 codebase (order is determined by number of commits; some people are in several groups): * 7 developers to core code: Alx Sa, Jehan, Anders Jonsson, Denis Rangelov, Idriss Fekir, Jacob Boerema, Øyvind KolÃ¥s. * 6 developers to plug-ins or modules: Alx Sa, Jacob Boerema, Jehan, Jethro Beekman, Lukas Oberhuber, Wyatt Radkiewicz. * 10 translators: Luming Zh, Martin, Rodrigo Lledó, Yuri Chornoivan, Alexander Shopov, Anders Jonsson, Ekaterine Papava, Muhammet Kara, Nathan Follens, Sveinn í Felli. * 1 Theme designer: Alx Sa. * 1 Icon designer: Denis Rangelov. * 3 build, packaging or CI contributors: Bruno, Lukas Oberhuber, Jehan. Contributions on other repositories in the GIMPverse (order is determined by number of commits): * GEGL 0.4.58 is made of 6 commits by 2 contributors: Øyvind KolÃ¥s, Kolbjørn Stuestøl. * ctx had 2 commits since 3.0.0 release by 1 contributor: Øyvind KolÃ¥s. * `gimp-data` had 2 commits by 2 contributors: Denis Rangelov, Jehan. * The `gimp-macos-build` (macOS packaging scripts) release had 13 commits by 2 contributors: Lukas Oberhuber, Bruno Lopes. * The flatpak release had 2 commits by 1 contributor: Bruno Lopes. * Our main website (what you are reading right now) had 50 commits by 5 contributors: Jehan, Bruno Lopes, Alx Sa, Michael Schumacher, lillolollo. * Our developer website had 18 commits by 3 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Lukas Oberhuber. * Our 3.0 documentation had 22 commits by 8 contributors: Alan Mortensen, Andre Klapper, Jacob Boerema, Jordi Mas, Nathan Follens, Marco Ciampa, Tim Sabsch, Xavier Brochard. Let’s not forget to thank all the people who help us triaging in Gitlab, report bugs and discuss possible improvements with us. Our community is deeply thankful as well to the internet warriors who manage our various discussion channels or social network accounts such as Ville Pätsi, Liam Quin, Michael Schumacher and Sevenix! _Note: considering the number of parts in GIMP and around, and how we get statistics through `git` scripting, errors may slip inside these stats. Feel free to tell us if we missed or mis-categorized some contributors or contributions._ # Download Mirrors¶ Since the 3.0 news post, two new mirrors have been contributed by **Shrirang Kahale** : * Delhi, India * Mumbai, India Mirrors are important as they help the project by sharing the load for dozens of thousands of daily downloads. Moreover by having mirrors spread across the globe, we ensure that everyone can have fast download access to GIMP. # Downloading GIMP 3.0.2¶ You will find all our official builds on GIMP official website (gimp.org): * Linux AppImages for x86 and ARM (64-bit) * Linux Flatpaks for x86 and ARM (64-bit) * Universal Windows installer for x86 (32 and 64-bit) and for ARM (64-bit) * Microsoft Store for x86 and ARM (64-bit) * macOS DMG packages for Intel hardware * macOS DMG packages for Apple Silicon hardware Other packages made by third-parties are obviously expected to follow (Linux or *BSD distributions’ packages, etc). # What’s Next¶ Our immediate focus is fixing initial bug reports from users for GIMP 3.0. However, we are also starting to work on new features for the next minor release, **GIMP 3.2**. We look forward to talking more about that soon, but for now, you can check the roadmap to see where we’re headed! Don’t forget you can donate and personally fund GIMP developers, as a way to give back and accelerate the development of GIMP. Community commitment helps the project to grow stronger!

At long last, the **first release of GIMP 3.0 is here**! This is the end result of seven years of hard work by volunteer developers, designers, artists, and community members (for reference, GIMP 2.10 was first published in 2018 and the initial development version of GIMP 3.0 was released in 2020). With GIMP 3.0 you can do more than ever before, more easily, more quickly! _GIMP 3.0 splash screen, by Sevenix (CC by-sa 4.0)_ While we can’t cover every single change in GIMP from 2.10, we want to highlight some of the biggest ones as you start exploring this new release. ## Highlights¶ * Need to tweak a filter you applied hours ago? New in GIMP 3.0 is non-destructive editing for most commonly-used filters. See the changes in real time with on-canvas preview. * Exchange files with more applications, including BC7 DDS files as well as better PSD export and many new formats. * Don’t know how big to make your drawing? Simply set your paint tool to expand layers automatically as needed. * 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. * Organizing your layers has become much easier with the ability to select multiple items at once, move them or transform them all together! * Color Management was again improved, as our long-term project to make GIMP an advanced image editor for all usages. * Updated graphical toolkit (GTK3) for modern desktop usage. * New Wilber logo! _New GIMP logo, Wilber, by Aryeom (CC by-sa 4.0)_ ## Learn More¶ We’ve prepared release notes to go over all the changes, improvements, new features, and more. And if you’d like even more details, you can peruse the NEWS changelog for all 2.99 and 3.0 RC releases. But to see it for yourself, you can get GIMP 3.0 directly from our Downloads page and try it out! » READ COMPLETE RELEASE NOTES Â« ## Other Releases in GIMPVerse¶ To accompany our release of GIMP 3.0.0, packagers should also be aware that we released: * babl 0.1.112 (tarball) * GEGL 0.4.56 (tarball) * GIMP Manual 3.0.0 (tarball and Windows installers) We also advise all packagers to use the latest GTK version: **GTK 3.24.49**. It contains bug fixes for major issues (ranging from crashes to input devices’ grab issues, UI glitches with interfaces in RTL languages, and more…). ## Enjoy GIMP 3.0!¶ GIMP 3.0 is a new milestone. The application is in active development and if you think this is awesome, wait until you see our plans for the future! Download GIMP 3.0.0 ## Support GIMP development¶ Don’t forget you can donate and personally fund GIMP developers, as a way to give back and accelerate the development of GIMP. Community commitment helps the project to grow stronger! [ Support us by **Donating** ](https://www.gimp.org/donating/) *[RTL]: Right-to-Left

We’re excited to share the third release candidate of GIMP 3.0 for what (we hope) is the final round of community testing before the stable version! This release follows the recent _GIMP 3 and Beyond_ talk by **Jehan** at FOSDEM 2025. * Important Bug Fixes and Changes * New GTK3 Version * Image Graph Improvements * Thread-safe Projection Changes * Private Procedures * Enhancements * Script-fu * Filter API * New named-arguments syntax * File Formats * PSD * DDS * AppImage is now Official * Miscellaneous * GEGL * Release Stats * Around GIMP * Download Mirrors * How to Cite GIMP in Research * Downloading GIMP 3.0 RC3 * What’s Next # Important Bug Fixes and Changes¶ While resolving the last few major bugs for 3.0, we’ve made some changes that we feel need more community review. While trying out this release candidate, please keep an eye out for the following: ## New GTK3 Version¶ Just in time for GIMP 3.0, a new version of GTK3 has been released! Among other changes, GTK 3.24.48 includes fixes for several bugs affecting GIMP with patches initially contributed by **Jehan** , such as a crash in Wayland when dragging layers and text glitches in certain widgets with Right-To-Left languages. We want to thank **Carlos Garnacho** and **Matthias Clasen** for their help on these respective patches. GTK 3.24.48 also adds support to the version 2 of `xdg_foreign` for Wayland (v1 stays supported as fallback). Specifically the absence of this support was causing GIMP to freeze with certain actions on KDE/Wayland, which is now fixed. As a consequence of these issues — some of them really making GIMP unstable on Wayland — we recommend packagers to update to the latest version of GTK3 when packaging our RC3. However, please let us know if you notice any regressions or other issues as a result of the new GTK3 version. ## Image Graph Improvements¶ With non-destructive editing in GIMP, users can now stack multiple filters on top of each other. These filters usually work in high bit-depth format so image information is not lost. However, each filter’s output was converted to and from the original image’s bit-depth when stacked – so if the image was only 8-bit, a great deal of information was lost in these constant conversions. **Jehan** fixed this problem by only converting to the image’s format when the filter is meant to be merged in, rather than in non-destructive stacks. Since this is a big change in how filters work, we want to have more users test this change for any possible regressions. ## Thread-safe Projection Changes¶ When changes are made to an image (such as painting), the image projection needs to be “flushed” to display new changes to the screen. Some aspects of this process were not “thread-safe”, which means that when your computer used multiple threads to speed up the work, they might conflict with each other and cause a crash. This was observed in our auto-expanding layer feature. **Jehan** fixed the function to be entirely thread-safe. However, changes to multi-threading can leave some well-hidden bugs, so more community testing would be helpful. ## Private Procedures¶ The GIMP Procedural DataBase browser shows plug-in and script developers all the functions they can access. Until now, it also showed “private” functions that are only used internally. **Jehan** added a flag to hide these functions. We initially cast too wide of a net and hid some important public functions. While we fixed these instances, we’d like more review from the community to make sure we didn’t miss any mislabeled public functions. # Enhancements¶ While we are still in major feature-freeze until the stable release of GIMP 3.0, some small and self-contained enhancements have been made to plug-ins. ## Script-fu¶ ### Filter API¶ The new `(gimp-drawable-merge-filter)` PDB call allows Script-fu writers to use labels to specify filter properties. This will give Script-fu users the same flexibility with calling and updating filters that C and Python plug-in developers have in the GIMP 3.0 API. As an example, here is a call to the `Emboss` filter: (gimp-drawable-merge-new-filter mask-emboss "gegl:emboss" 0 LAYER-MODE-REPLACE 1.0 "azimuth" 315.0 "elevation" 45.0 "depth" 7 "type" "emboss") You can see more examples in our Script repository. ### New named-arguments syntax¶ In Script-Fu, all the functions generated from plug-ins’ PDB procedure must now be called with a brand new named-argument syntax, inspired by the Racket Scheme variant. For instance, say your plug-in wants to call the Foggify plug-in, instead of calling: (python-fu-foggify RUN-NONINTERACTIVE 1 (car (gimp-image-get-layers 1)) "Clouds" '(50 4 4) 1.0 50.0) You should now call: (python-fu-foggify #:image 1 #:drawables (car (gimp-image-get-layers 1)) #:opacity 50.0 #:color '(50 4 4)) This has a few advantages: * Much more self-documented calls, especially as some plug-ins have a lot of arguments (so we could end up having functions with a dozen of integers or floats and that was very confusing). * The order of arguments doesn’t matter anymore. * You can ignore arguments when you call them with default values. * It allows to improve plug-in procedures in the future by adding new arguments without breaking existing scripts. This last point in particular is important, and orders of arguments did not matter anymore when calling PDB procedures from the C API, as well as all introspected bindings. Script-Fu was the only remaining interface we had which still cared about argument orders and numbers. This is not true anymore and is therefore a huge step towards a much more robust API for GIMP 3! ## File Formats¶ All changes to image loading plug-ins are checked with the automated testing framework built by **Jacob Boerema** to prevent regressions. ### PSD¶ In addition to bug fixes such as saving CMYK merged images properly, **Jacob Boerema** has added support for loading 16-bits-per-channel LAB PSDs. He also updated the PSD export dialog to use GIMP’s built-in metadata export features. ### DDS¶ Much-requested support for loading DDS images with BC7 support has been implemented by **CMYK Student**. **Jacob Boerema** worked to fix compatibility with DDS files exported from older versions of GIMP. ## AppImage is now Official¶ After nine months of incubation (the number is a mere coincidence 🙂), we present a “new” distribution format for Linux users: `.AppImage`. Initially we used it as an internal format for testing, as already covered in previous posts. **Bruno Lopes** ‘ efforts have allowed us to improve the build process. We now feel confident with the generated AppImage and so we aim to make it official. As an official upstream package, no fancy third party plug-ins or other arbitrary binaries that are not GIMP dependencies are added to “bloat” it. It is what some people call “vanilla” GIMP, a clean but complete GIMP for production (aka for general use). Like any packaging format, it has its own characteristics and limitations. In the case of GIMP’s AppImage, included tools such as `gimp-console*` and `gimp-debug-tool*` require prior extraction of the `.AppImage` file with `--appimage-extract` command. Also, partly due to AppImage’s design, commands that points to `$PWD` will not work. These two are the only known feature limitations so far. So, if you find any others or even bugs, please report them on our tracker. ## Miscellaneous¶ * It is now easier to load images from Google Drive and other remote or cloud platforms without having to manually select a file format to try opening it with. * Our build process now generates additional icons with the `-rtl` extension, which are automatically used with Right-to-Left languages. An example of this is the left and right arrow icons; they now face the correct direction in both language types. * Plug-in developers no longer have to make custom file chooser buttons - `GimpProcedureDialog` now automatically creates them when a File type parameter is used. You can also specify whether the button is for opening or saving files and folders. * **Rupert Weber** continued his effects in cleaning up our BMP plug-in. Additionally, he has in-progress work to add support for importing color profiles in BMPs, which will hopefully be ready in a future release. * **CMYK Student** updated the ICNS plug-in with new support for `ic05` icon types and ARGB icon formats. They also fixed a bug when loading older ICNS formats with no transparency mask. **Lukas Oberhuber** assisted with diagnosing and resolving a known bug in the ICNS format that caused our macOS icon to show garbled pixels at small sizes. # GEGL¶ The GEGL 0.4.54 release also contains some new enhancements and bugfixes. **Thomas Manni** updated the Noise Spread filter to prevent bugs when applied to empty layer groups. **Jonny Robbie** added new option and paper types to the Negative Darkroom filter, and optimized some floating point operations in GEGL as a whole. # Release Stats¶ Since GIMP 3.0 RC2, in the main GIMP repository: * 85 reports were closed as FIXED. * 56 merge requests were merged. * 335 commits were pushed. * 19 translations were updated: Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (China), Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Georgian, Italian, Norwegian Nynorsk, Persian, Portuguese, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese. 33 people contributed changes or fixes to GIMP 3.0.0 RC3 codebase (order is determined by number of commits; some people are in several groups): * 13 developers to core code: Jehan, Alx Sa, Jacob Boerema, lloyd konneker, Anders Jonsson, Thomas Manni, Bruno, Daniele Forsi, Lloyd Konneker, Lukas Oberhuber, Rupert, cheesequake, Øyvind KolÃ¥s. * 10 developers to plug-ins or modules: Alx Sa, Jacob Boerema, Jehan, Rupert, lloyd konneker, Anders Jonsson, Bruno, Daniel Novomeský, Daniele Forsi, lillolollo. * 19 translators: Alan Mortensen, Alexander Shopov, Nathan Follens, Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Hugo Carvalho, Asier Sarasua Garmendia, Ngọc Quân Trần, Jordi Mas, Marco Ciampa, Sabri Ünal, Anders Jonsson, Danial Behzadi, Ekaterine Papava, Jiri Grönroos, Jose Riha, Luming Zh, Martin, Rodrigo Lledó, Yuri Chornoivan. * 1 Theme designer: Alx Sa. * 6 build, packaging or CI contributors: Bruno, Jehan, lloyd konneker, Alx Sa, Rupert, Jacob Boerema. Contributions on other repositories in the GIMPverse (order is determined by number of commits): * GEGL 0.4.54 is made of 11 commits by 16 contributors: Øyvind KolÃ¥s, Alexander Shopov, Hugo Carvalho, JonnyRobbie, Alan Mortensen, Anders Jonsson, Asier Sarasua Garmendia, Bartłomiej Piotrowski, Jehan, Martin, Nathan Follens, Nils Philippsen, Rodrigo Lledó, Sam L, Thomas Manni, Yuri Chornoivan. * ctx had 233 commits since RC2 release by 1 contributor: Øyvind KolÃ¥s. * `gimp-data` had 6 commits by 4 contributors: Bruno, Jehan, Alx Sa, Andre Klapper. * `gimp-test-images` (new repository for image support testing) had 5 commits by 2 contributors: Jacob Boerema, Alx Sa. * The `gimp-macos-build` (macOS packaging scripts) release had 6 commits by 2 contributors: Lukas Oberhuber, Bruno. * The flatpak release had 12 commits by 3 contributors after RC2 release: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Hubert Figuière. * Our main website (what you are reading right now) had 42 commits by 6 contributors: Jehan, Alx Sa, Bruno, Jacob Boerema, Andre Klapper, Petr Vorel. * Our developer website had 18 commits by 5 contributors: Jehan, Bruno, Lukas Oberhuber, Alx Sa, Anders Jonsson. * Our 3.0 documentation had 373 commits by 13 contributors: Andre Klapper, Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Nathan Follens, Jacob Boerema, Alan Mortensen, Yuri Chornoivan, Dick Groskamp, Jordi Mas, Alevtina Karashokova, Alx Sa, Anders Jonsson, Daniele Forsi, Hugo Carvalho. Let’s not forget to thank all the people who help us triaging in Gitlab, report bugs and discuss possible improvements with us. Our community is deeply thankful as well to the internet warriors who manage our various discussion channels or social network accounts such as Ville Pätsi, Liam Quin, Michael Schumacher and Sevenix! _Note: considering the number of parts in GIMP and around, and how we get statistics through `git` scripting, errors may slip inside these stats. Feel free to tell us if we missed or mis-categorized some contributors or contributions._ # Around GIMP¶ ## Download Mirrors¶ Since the 3.0RC2 news post, two new mirrors have been contributed: * Saswata Sarkar, Gurugram, India * Hoobly Classifieds, USA Mirrors are important as they help the project by sharing the load for dozens of thousands of daily downloads. Moreover by having mirrors spread across the globe, we ensure that everyone can have fast download access to GIMP. ## How to Cite GIMP in Research¶ GIMP is often used in research, and therefore it is cited in various science publications. A researcher using GIMP for astronomical image processing approached us to know how to cite GIMP properly, even more as they say it is used to perform an important step in their algorithm. Since it seems like an interesting question, we updated our “ _Citing GIMP and Linking to Us_” page with a new “Citing GIMP in research” subsection containing the conclusion of this discussion. In particular, a `BibTex` entry, for researchers using `LaTeX` to manage their bibliography, is available on this link to simplify your work. For instance, say you use this RC3 for your research, you may cite GIMP with this entry: @software{GIMP, author = {{The GIMP Development Team}}, title = {GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), Version 3.0.0-RC3. Community, Free Software (license GPLv3)}, year = {2025}, url = {https://gimp.org/}, note = {Version 3.0.0-RC3, Free Software} } Thank you to Cameron Leahy for this piece of BibTex code! # Downloading GIMP 3.0 RC3¶ You will find all our official builds on GIMP official website (gimp.org): * Linux AppImages for x86 and ARM (64-bit) * Linux Flatpaks for x86 and ARM (64-bit) * Universal Windows installer for x86 (32 and 64-bit) and for ARM (64-bit) * MSIX package (GIMP Preview) for x86 and ARM (64-bit) * macOS DMG packages for Intel hardware * macOS DMG packages for Apple Silicon hardware Other packages made by third-parties are obviously expected to follow (Linux or *BSD distributions’ packages, etc). # What’s Next¶ We really appreciate all the community testing and feedback we’ve received during the last two release candidates! This will hopefully be the final release candidate before the stable 3.0 version. Our focus now is to finish resolving the few remaining bugs in our 3.0 milestone list, while keeping an eye out for any new reports resulting from the changes in RC3. Don’t forget you can donate and personally fund GIMP developers, as a way to give back and accelerate the development of GIMP. Community commitment helps the project to grow stronger!