GIMP Release Notes

We’re happy to announce the release of GIMP 3.2.6!

This stable release contains several months worth of patches, bug fixes, security updates, and more from new and longtime contributors.

Special thanks to Bruno Lopes, who has taken charge of backporting fixes from our development branch to the 3.2 stable branch.

General Highlights and UX Improvements

New Rotation Stylus Dynamics Input

OS and Platform Specific Improvements

New macOS Package

Security updates

For Plug-in/Script Authors and Builders

GIMP SDK

Around GIMP

GIMP 3.2 Help Manual Updates

Historical News

GEGL and babl

Release Stats

Downloading GIMP 3.2.6

What’s Next

This news posts provides an overview of the changes since GIMP 3.2.4. For a more detailed review, check out the NEWS changelog.

“Don’t squash bugs… free them!”, by Aryeom, CC BY-SA 4.0 (a poetic approach to debugging), 2019

General Highlights and UX Improvements

A number of the fixes we first mentioned in our last development update were backported to GIMP 3.2.6.

Cheesequake has added code so you can use Cut on a layer group. This will allow you to cut the same section of all layers in the group, provided they are rasterized and not locked. Jehan made further improvements to this code.

The Sample Merged option for the Color Picker tool should now include any filters applied to a single layer when selecting colors. This was originally ignored due to an older optimization used for single layer images.

Balooii made many improvements to boost performance when loading a large number of fonts. While some lag remains and will likely require us to update to GTK4, the initial GIMP start-up, typing in the text tool, and closing font lists should be much faster!

Ondřej Míchal and Jehan have begun making changes to GIMP’s codebase to support an eventual GTK4 port. This includes swapping out the deprecated gtk_widget_show () functions with gtk_widget_set_visible (), replacing direct access to GdkEvent types with getter functions, replacing GDK_WA_CURSOR flags for explicit gdk_window_set_cursor () calls, and more. Even though we are not yet planning a GTK4 port, it doesn’t hurt to start preparing for it!

New contributor Ryan McDonald and Idriss Fekir have fixed an issue where the end of a line might be hidden on the left/right side when the text layout is set to “fixed”. When loading older XCFs, the problem will still be visible, but any changes to the text layer will update it to the correct view.

Kaushik B. has fixed an issue with the Heal Tool where you might get dark smudges if you move outside the bounds of a layer that’s smaller than the image canvas.

New contributor Manu Cornet and Jehan fixed a crash that could happen in certain circumstances when pressing keys too quickly after releasing the spacebar when panning.

Brandon Henderson reduced the sensitivity of the pan gestures when using the touchpad on macOS. This should make it easier to make fine-grain adjustments while editing an image on that platform!

Richard Gitschlag has adjusted the Text Tool so that you can still select the text to edit even if it has a layer mask that partially covers it.

Jacob Boerema resolved a bug in our metadata code that prevented GIMP from loading the Licensor metadata for an image.

Alx Sa added a maximum width of tooltips, preventing options with long descriptions from filling the entire screen.

Rodrigo Lledó Milanca updated our information on the ART Camera RAW plug-ins.

Several bugs related to rasterized vector layers have been resolved. Thanks to BobsDaughter, teapot, and Richard Gitschlag for their testing and feedback!

New Rotation Stylus Dynamics Input

Jehan recently implemented a new dynamic input for painting - Rotation (also known as Barrel Rotation). This feature is prominently used in the original Wacom Art Pen and newer Wacom Art Pen 2 pens, and allows GIMP to react to how you have rotated the brush in your hand as you draw.

You can adjust this value for custom brushes in the Dynamics editor.

The MyPaint Brush tool is integrated with this feature as well, so it will automatically pass the rotation on as you paint if your stylus supports it.

OS and Platform Specific Improvements

GIMP uses GTK3, a cross-platform library for GUIs, to display its windows, widgets, and more. While it does a very good job of this, GIMP requires a lot of very complex interactions, and sometimes this can expose bugs that are only visible on certain platforms.

Bruno Lopes has been hard at work making a staggering number of platform-specific improvements to make GIMP work better. These include (but are not limited to):

• Using “Server-side Decorations” for dialogs on KDE instead of GNOME-style “Client-side Decorations”. (In other words, the buttons appear at the bottom of the dialog instead of the header bar).
• Secondary “pop-up” windows such as the resource selection and metadata editor dialogs should now appear in front of the first dialogue on Windows and macOS.
• The System theme now uses your system’s defined accent colors on Windows and macOS.
• Many improvements to proper focus setting on Windows and macOS.
• Improvements to multi-window mode operations on Windows and macOS.
• More system theme leaks caught on KDE Breeze system themes. This should help with graphical glitches in the UI.
• We now depend on winflexbison on Windows for building the Image Map plugin. This fixes an issue where Windows users couldn’t reopen their image maps, even when created with GIMP.
• Send to Email now works on MS Windows too using MAPI (works with Thunderbird and Outlook Classic).
• Windows users can now use “Open With” on multiple files on start, without creating multiple instances of GIMP. This is consistent with how Linux and other platforms operate.

Because these improvements are wide-ranging, it is possible that we missed some interactions during testing that could cause a regression. If you notice any problems in GIMP 3.2.6, please let us know!

New macOS Package

Starting with GIMP 3.2.6, the .dmg package is now created at the same time as the Linux and Windows packages. This has not been possible for many years!

We used to create binaries for macOS on a separate GitLab repository, which was mirrored to another repository on GitHub, which was connected to a proprietary CI service (CircleCI) which then was connected to a MacStadium runner. All of that with dozens and dozens of additional patches, scripts etc!

As you can see, this was extremely complicated, but it was the only way to ship macOS binaries back then.

Thanks to your donations, we were able to sponsor a MacBook Pro M5 for Bruno Lopes, who has been working since December 19, 2025 to fix that situation. As a result, GIMP can now be easily built on macOS with both MacPorts and Homebrew packages.

The macOS version of GIMP is now much more integrated with system-specific features, similar to the Linux and Windows version. A few examples:

• Titlebars on macOS now follow the dark/light mode settings of the current theme.
• Scrollbars now follow the macOS preference for whether they should be always visible or not.
• The more standard ~/Library/Caches/ location is used for storing caches of GIMP resources, fixing a bug of brushes directory not being created on macOS.
• GIMP’s number input buttons now respond to Cmd on macOS, like they do to Ctrl on other platforms. Some standard Mac shortcuts like, Ctrl + F2, Cmd + Shift + //Cmd + Ctrl + Space and Cmd + ` work as well.
• Meta and Hyper modifiers now work.
• Incorrect offsets when drag-n-dropping colors and layers/channels/paths have been fixed.
• Filters now accept negative values regardless of your system language settings.
• Plug-ins are treated as children of the main GIMP application, so they do not appear in the dock anymore.
• GIMP custom cursors are now properly set for all tools (previously, they were being overwritten by the macOS arrow).
• “GIMP”, “Windows” and “Help” menus now match the standard macOS menus with proper localization.
• Dialogs that shouldn’t be minimized (such as the search actions dialog shown with /) no longer show a minimize button on macOS.
• Remote files can be opened thanks to using the native macOS API, since GIO does not support HTTPS on this platform.
• Dashboard Backtraces are now supported using libunwind from libSystem.

In the process of implementing all these improvements, the separate macOS “developer package” was dropped. It was created due to the limitations of the previous macOS build infrastructure and became unnecessary now that it is way easier to build GIMP on macOS.

Plug-in and script developers should use the new GIMP SDK instead, or build GIMP directly.

Again, this is a brand new package. So, if you notice any problems in GIMP 3.2.6, please let us know!

Security updates

GIMP has added support for importing many different file formats over the years. In recent years, security detection tools have improved and found more and more potential exploits in open source software. Jacob Boerema and Alx Sa have been busy testing and patching these.

For reference, the following Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) have been patched in this release:

CVE-2026-18301, CVE-2026-18304, CVE-2026-18302, CVE-2026-18303, CVE-2026-18305, CVE-2026-18306, CVE-2026-18307, CVE-2026-18308, CVE-2026-18309, CVE-2026-62438, CVE-2026-62439, ZDI-CAN-29400, CVE-2026-59087, CVE-2026-59088, CVE-2026-59089, CVE-2026-66757, CVE-2026-59090, CVE-2026-59091, CVE-2026-66758, CVE-2026-66759, CVE-2026-78465, CVE-2026-78475, CVE-2026-79902, CVE-2026-80101, CVE-2026-82324, CVE-2026-82328, CVE-2026-82330, CVE-2026-82343

We want to thank Jace, Brent Hull, Tristan Madani, Florent Saudel, bb1abu, Yukihiro Nakamura, Securin Disclose, and Zero Day Initiative for their security reports and suggestions. We also want to thank Michael Catanzaro for his help in organzing these reports and requesting CVEs for them.

For Plug-in/Script Authors and Builders

Our GdkPixbuf dependency minimum version has been updated to 2.32.0 due to an issue with Glycin printing a bunch of unnecessary messages on start-up related to a deprecated to-pixdata function.

PDB commands now only show error/warning messages when run in interactive mode. For non-interactive modes, you won’t see anything printed in the console on PDB function failure. Instead, you can check the return values of the function and provide any messages you want to users.

Jehan improved our method for checking if a plug-in has been updated since the last time you opened GIMP. Now we check creation time (ctime) instead of just modified time (mtime) since it might be always 0 on certain packages like flatpak. This should mean that changes you make during development are more likely to be loaded if you’re testing on flatpak.

Kamil Burda fixed documentation for integer and double types in the Procedure Browser.

Pranav P corrected a build issue that caused a freeze on s390x systems.

GIMP SDK

You can now build C plug-ins and GEGL filters from all the official packages we distribute by using the gimptool commandline tool. That is because we now ship all required headers and libraries for compiling (in total, less than 20MB). Before now, this was possible only on flatpak and Snap. So, Bruno Lopes extended it to the AppImage, Windows and macOS packages. We call this new feature the “GIMP SDK”.

Take a look at the build instructions if you are interested.

Around GIMP

GIMP 3.2 Help Manual Updates

Jacob Boerema, maintainer of the GIMP help manual repo, has released an updated version that contains all the changes brought in GIMP 3.2. It is available online, or you can download it if you want to keep a local copy.

Historical News

Balooii has been working to restored older news posts that have been lost to the ages. You can now see almost all news posts from 2004 to 2008 on the main site now - just navigate back to that point in time in the archive.

GEGL and babl

GIMP 3.2.6 also shares a release with new versions of GEGL and babl by maintainer Øyvind Kolås!

babl 0.1.128 includes several fixes for building on macOS, initial WebAssembly support, and better checks at runtime for avx512 - all by Bruno Lopes.

GEGL 0.4.72 updates its OpenCL support to version 3.0. Ondřej Míchal worked on important stability fixes for the OpenCL code (though such code path is still disabled by default in GIMP). Jacob Boerema made several fixes to the RGBE file format import and export functions. Aruius made the GeglColor comparison functions public, for future use in better comparing comparing colors in GIMP and other software. Tal Regev added support for building GEGL using only MSVC, and Bruno Lopes added support for WebAssembly as well. Luigino Camastra added more security checks to prevent potential overflows.

More details can be found in the GEGL NEWS document!

Release Stats

Since GIMP 3.2.4, in the main GIMP repository:

• 179 reports were closed as FIXED.
• 104 merge requests were merged.
• 871 commits were pushed.
• 21 translations were updated: Belarusian, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (China), Dutch, Georgian, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Kazakh, Lithuanian, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Slovenian, Swedish, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.

58 people contributed changes or fixes to GIMP 3.2.6 codebase (order is determined by number of commits; some people are in several groups):

• 22 developers to core code: Bruno Lopes, Alx Sa, Jehan, Ondřej Míchal, balooii balooii, Richard Gitschlag, Michael Natterer, programmer-ceds, Ahmed E. Yassin, Andreas Vukman, Estecka, Idriss Fekir, Jacob Boerema, Manu Cornet, Petr Vorel, Ryan McDonald, balooii, cheesequake, kaushik_B, screem02, v4vansh, woot000.
• 14 developers to plug-ins or modules: Alx Sa, Bruno Lopes, Ondřej Míchal, Jacob Boerema, Jehan, Dimitriy Ryazantcev, lloyd konneker, balooii balooii, Frank Teklote, Harsh Verma, Michal Vašut, Mike Gorse, Richard Allen, Rodhos.
• 23 translators: Dick Groskamp, luming zh, Martin, Yuri Chornoivan, Ekaterine Papava, Rodrigo Lledó, Aefgh Threenine, Anders Jonsson, Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Baurzhan Muftakhidinov, Emin Tufan Çetin, Aurimas Aurimas Černius, Jose Riha, Марко Костић, Rafael Coelho Costa, Trần Ngọc Quân, Vasil Pupkin, Balázs Úr, Carsten Drewes, Juliano de Souza Camargo, Kjartan Maraas, Sabri Ünal, Yaron Shahrabani.
• 3 theme designers: Bruno Lopes, Alx Sa, Ondřej Míchal.
• 9 build, packaging or CI contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Jacob Boerema, Petr Vorel, Harsh Verma, Lukas Oberhuber, Ondřej Míchal, balooii balooii, lloyd konneker.
• 3 contributors on other types of resources: Jehan, Bruno Lopes, Aryeom.

The gimp-data submodule had 16 commits by 7 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Alx Sa, Anders Jonsson, Denis Rangelov, Lukas Oberhuber, balooii balooii.

• 4 image creators: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Anders Jonsson, Lukas Oberhuber.
• 1 icon designers: Denis Rangelov.
• 1 cursor designers: balooii balooii.

Contributions on other repositories in the GIMPverse (order is determined by number of commits):

• Our UX tracker had 3 reports closed as FIXED.
• babl 0.1.128 is made of 70 commits by 3 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Øyvind Kolås, Jehan.
• GEGL 0.4.72 is made of 234 commits by 28 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Ondřej Míchal, Øyvind Kolås, luming zh, Jacob Boerema, Jehan, Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Tal Regev, WarisMaqbool, Aefgh Threenine, Anders Jonsson, Martin, Yuri Chornoivan, Baurzhan Muftakhidinov, Dick Groskamp, Ekaterine Papava, Sabri Ünal, aruius, Alan Mortensen, Asier Saratsua Garmendia, Chao-Hsiung Liao, DiGro, Marco Ciampa, Rodrigo Lledó, Saikeo Kavhanxay, Thomas Manni, YOSHIDA Shigeto, Марко Костић.
• ctx had 150 commits since 3.2.4 release by 3 contributors: Øyvind Kolås, Bruno Lopes, Tal Regev.
• The gimp-test-images (unit testing repository) repository had 5 commits by 1 contributors: Jacob Boerema.
• The flatpak release had 35 commits by 3 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Erick555, Jehan.
• Our main website (what you are reading right now) had 182 commits by 7 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Alx Sa, balooii balooii, balooii, Liam Quin, Allan Day.
• Our developer website had 110 commits by 5 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Alx Sa, aruius, Ondřej Míchal.
• Our 3.0 documentation had 276 commits by 20 contributors: Jacob Boerema, Dick Groskamp, DiGro, Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Marco Ciampa, Anders Jonsson, Yuri Chornoivan, Марко Костић, Richard Gitschlag, Alx Sa, Baurzhan Muftakhidinov, Christian Kirbach, Mateusz Jastrząb, YOSHIDA Shigeto, Andre Klapper, Balázs Úr, Chas Belov, Kristjan ESPERANTO, Rodrigo Lledó, Víttor Paulo Vieira da Costa.

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 m

Downloading GIMP 3.2.6

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 and 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

Work these days has mainly and already shifted to the development series which will eventually lead to GIMP 3.4 versions. For anyone who missed it, the Development Update, August 2026 news is interesting on this aspect. In the meantime, we will obviously still continue backporting bug fixes on the 3.2 series, of which GIMP 3.2.6 is a part of.

This new version should widely improve stability, and in particular it looks like macOS users should particularly appreciate it (thank Bruno for that)! We are also extremely thankful to the new skilled contributors the project has been getting. Don’t forget that, as long as you don’t use genAI in your toolset, everyone is very welcome to participate! 🤗

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!

Original source

For the past few months, we’ve been developing all kinds of features for the future GIMP 3.4 release. We noticed recently that our changelog was getting quite long - a good problem to have!

While there’s been a lot going on internally, it’s been a while since we made a public progress report. So we want to share details on some of the new features and UX improvements that’ll be available in the first development release, GIMP 3.3.2. This won’t be an exhaustive list (we have to save at least some news for the release itself!) but hopefully it will give you some insight into the current direction and progress of GIMP’s development.

• New Project File Format
• MyPaint Brush: Spectral Blending
• Non-Destructive Editing
• PSD Support Improvements
• Native File Chooser Dialogs
• User Experience and Interface Updates
• Assorted Changes and Fixes
• What’s Next

New Project File Format

The big focus for maintainer Jehan recently has been developing a new project file format for GIMP.

XCF has been GIMP’s primary project format since 1997, and it has served many users well. Over time however, we’ve observed more and more limitations of the binary XCF format.

Among other issues, it does not easily support very large or complex projects, such as the multi-page and animation features currently planned for GIMP 3.6.

The new project file format will follow a more common “zipped XML” structure. While the technical details are still being designed and implemented, this change will allow for faster saving since we’ll only need to update parts of the file instead of the whole thing each time. It will also set the stage for much desired features such as auto-saving, which will now be much more feasible.

That said, XCF is not going away! Backwards compatibility is important to us, and we will continue to support loading XCFs in all future versions of GIMP. (For instance, we’re quite proud that a XCF file made by a small company for their logo in 1998 still renders the same way in the latest version of GIMP)

However, going forward we will only add support for saving/loading new features in the new project file format once it is finalized.

MyPaint Brush: Spectral Blending

During GIMP 3.2’s development, we upgraded to a newer version of the MyPaint brush engine. While this brought new brushes and canvas interactions to the MyPaint Brush Tool, one feature that was left out was Spectral Blending.

Spectral Blending simulates the effects of blending physical pigments in digital art. For example, blending yellow and blue will produce a green color instead of darker yellow, and blending red and yellow will create an orange mix.

Fortunately, new contributor Cassidie Grogan picked up the slack and implemented this feature. There is now a Spectral Blending checkbox in the MyPaint Brush Tool Options. If checked, the new blending method is used. You can control the strength of the blending with the Pigment slider.

Demonstration of MyPaint Spectral Blending

In addition, maintainer Michael Natterer improved the MyPaint Brush preview code to display at their full size instead of 48x48 pixels. This fixes an issue where the previews appeared blurry on larger screens.

Non-Destructive Editing

Alx Sa has continued making updates to our non-destructive filter code. To list a few:

• You can now apply filters non-destructively to Layer masks! To go along with this, the filter popover has been redesigned by Reju to show the active filters for both the layer and its mask, so you can interact with both on the same screen.
• The Gradient Tool can now be used non-destructively! If you check Editable Gradient in the Tool Options, the gradient you create will be added to the filter stack like any other effect. You can toggle its visibility, rearrange its position in the filter stack and delete it. You can also edit the gradient, which will switch back to the Gradient Tool to let you make further changes.

User interface with a live Gradient filter on the layer, and a live filter on the layer mask

Filters without dialogs (such as Invert) can now be applied non-destructively on non-raster layers such as layer groups and link, text, and vector layers.

PSD Support Improvements

Normally we list all file format updates in a combined section, but there has been so much work done on PSD support (and by so many people) that we wanted to highlight it in more detail.

First, new contributor Frank Teklote has been busy improving our compatibility with PSDs. His big project for this release was creating a PSD metadata export procedure for TIFFs and JPEGs. This complements our existing PSD metadata import procedure, meaning that if you import a JPEG with paths or a TIFF with layers (or create one in GIMP), that information can now be retained in the exported image.

Another great thing about Frank’s work is that as we continue to improve our PSD compatibility, the TIFF and JPEG export features will automatically get those updates too!

Related to that, Jacob Boerema has implemented PSD Descriptor import support. Most of our current PSD support has been based on the public Adobe specification. This document was last updated in 2019 however, and modern PSDs use a relatively undocumented text format called Descriptors to store many features.

Now that GIMP can read descriptors, we’ve begun drastically improving our PSD import support. To list just a few updates: text layers are now editable, a number of adjustment layers and modern layer styles appear as their GEGL equivalents, and solid color shapes are imported as vector layers.

This is an active area of development, including by two of our GSoC students Akascape and Waris Maqbool. We hope this work will make it easier for GIMP users to interact with existing PSD projects!

Editable PSD text layers in GIMP

Native File Chooser Dialogs

We have always used the file chooser dialog provided by the GTK GUI library for people to find, load, and save files in GIMP.

While the file chooser does the job, it often works differently than the “native” file chooser on non-GNOME platforms like Windows, macOS, and KDE. Additionally there have been some changes to the UI of this dialog in GTK3, which has inspired some strong feedback in our issue tracker!

Therefore, Alx Sa has begun porting GIMP’s file choosers to the “native” option provided in GTK3. This means that when you open or save a file, you will see your platform’s standard file chooser dialog instead of the GTK dialog (unless your platform uses that already, in which case there will be no change!)

Example of native file chooser on macOS, by Bruno Lopes

Many of the simple dialogs have already been converted. Those with more complex additional features will require some workflow redesigns, which we’re still developing.

User Experience and Interface Updates

A lot of new and existing contributors have submitted improvements to GIMP’s user interface and its user experience. We wanted to highlight their efforts, and encourage you all to continue sharing your feedback on our design issue tracker.

Designer Denis Rangelov has been hard at work updating GIMP’s UI icons. He recreated our layer lock icons to create a more consistent look.

He also took on the monumental task of converting all 78 of our cursor icons to SVG, which will allow us to scale them for higher resolution displays without losing quality!

Original Raster Cursor

Denis’s Vector Cursor

Example of original and vector cursors

There have been reported performance issues when drawing or zooming into the canvas when the canvas view was rotated. New contributor woot000 diagnosed the problem and created a fix.

Now the “checkerboard” transparency pattern no longer rotates when the canvas does, which significantly boosts performance when painting or editing. They also fixed a related issue where the checkerboard pattern would disappear when zooming into the canvas past a certain point.

Gabriele Barbero implemented a redesign of the Search Action UI which was designed by Denis Rangelov. The new layout makes the associated shortcut key more visible, and is more consistent with the menu layouts.

Bruno Lopes has been working to fix issues with pop-up dialog displays on macOS. Since traditionally we have fewer macOS developers compared to other platforms, we’re really happy to see improvements for these users!

New contributor Andreas Vukman improved our Pattern dock display. Now smaller patterns tile to fill the available space, creating a consistent preview for all patterns instead of having some patterns display with odd amounts of padding. We think it makes the dock look much nicer!

Richard Gitschlag has updated the on-canvas text editor to allow selections when you Shift+Click in the text. It should now work similar to what you can do in a word processor like LibreOffice.

In previous versions of GIMP, you imported or exported metadata from the Metadata Editor by selecting an option in a dropdown. Ahmed E. Yassin has made this process more intuitive (and more consistent with the rest of GIMP’s UI) by replacing the dropdown with two buttons instead.

Ondřej Míchal reviewed several portions of GIMP’s UI and replaced many instances of the Spin Entry widget with Spin Scale. The Spin Entry widget is difficult to use when the width is shrunk, so this change improves usability in many areas of the UI.

Assorted Changes and Fixes

Our four GSoC interns have been continuing their work since the midpoint update. Recently, Waris Maqbool‘s Sharpen filter was merged into GEGL, so it’ll be available in the next GEGL release.

New contributor Dimitriy Ryazantcev has submitted several patches for improving our Windows ICO/CUR/ANI support. They’ve already fixed the rendering for certain 32bit ICO formats and made our loading and preview algorithms better match the Windows specification.

Estecka has fixed a rendering issue when applying NDE filters on passthrough layer groups, which made the image look different depending on whether the group had child layers or not.

New contributor Petr Vorel fixed a bug where pressing Alt+0 did not open the tenth most recent image in your history.

Lloyd Konneker, our main Script-fu contributor, fixed a regression in third party scripts where the number range for certain parameters wasn’t shown in the GUI.

Jacob Boerema and Alx Sa have responded to and patched a number of security reports about potential flaws in some of our image plug-ins.

What’s Next

There’s more in-progress work that we look forward to sharing with you all soon!

There is not an official 3.3.2 development release yet, as several roadmap items are still in-progress.

If you’re feeling really adventurous and just can’t wait, you can try our “nightly” builds. Instructions are under the Automatic Development Builds header.

In the meantime, we are planning to release GIMP 3.2.6 in the coming weeks. It is a stable release so it won’t include many of the new features described here. However, it will have a number of important bug fixes and small improvements. We’ll discuss these more in the 3.2.6 release news post!

Original source

Since the release of GIMP 3.2.4, we’ve been hard at work behind the scenes. We’ve been making fixes that will be included in the upcoming 3.2.6 stable release and adding tons of new features for the first 3.4 development version. In addition, we’ve been mentoring our four Google Summer of Code (GSoC) students as they’ve been working on their projects. Since we just completed their midpoint evaluation, we wanted to share their progress with you all!

In alphabetical order:

Akascape

Project Description

Akascape started off their early work for GSoC by creating a new Vibrance filter in GEGL. This filter combines the existing Hue-Chroma and Saturation filters to more selectively adjust the less saturated sections of an image without increasing others. It was released in GEGL 0.4.68, so you can use it right now in GIMP!

Their main focus has been on improving the user experience with the Keyboard Shortcuts dialog. They plan to both improve usability while also adding new features.

In-progress updates to Keyboard Shortcut UI, by Akascape

Akascape’s in-progress work already includes several big improvements such as a category list to quickly jump to relevant shortcuts, the ability to import and export shortcut “profiles”, and efforts to make the dialog more friendly for a future GTK4 port.

In addition, Akascape did some early work on adding more adjustment layers to our PSD import plug-in, building off in-progress work by several contributors. His work would allow for importing Vibrance, Black & White, Photo Filter, and Exposure PSD adjustment layers.

Blezecon

Project Description

Blezecon has taken on the task of building the online infrastructure for a GIMP Extensions platform. Originally planned as part of GIMP 3.0, the Extensions platform would allow users to download third-party themes, brushes, plug-ins, and more via a package manager directly in GIMP. The local infrastructure has been in place for several years - this GSoC project is about developing the online submission process.

Blezecon has been working in the Extension repository and making great progress. His initial work involved cleaning up and correcting issues with the initial YAML script. He then created a comment-based approval system in the repo. This will allow community moderators to easily inspect and approve new extensions through the same interface they use for responding to issue reports and review merge requests.

Blezecon next developed a scheduler script that will monitor pending extensions, and once they have received the required approvals, automatically merge them into the Extensions repository for user access.

While infrastructure work is often not as visible to end users, Blezecon’s GSoC project is an essential effort to getting the Extensions repository up and running for future releases of GIMP!

v4vansh

Project Description

v4vansh did some early bugfixes and improvements in GIMP beforehand. He fixed a problem where the thumbnail wouldn’t update after changing image modes, and he corrected missing information in our manual page generation.

Since the start of GSoC, he has been focused on improving text handling in GIMP. His current big project is grouping fonts by family in the text widgets.

In addition to better organization (especially with the infamous Noto fonts which have hundres of variants), this patch significantly reduces lag on systems with large numbers of fonts, as v4vansh’s mentor Liam can attest. This feature is in final testing, and we hope it will be merged into the main codebase soon!

Early UI tests for OpenType fonts, by v4vansh

v4vansh has also begun experimenting with adding support for OpenType variable fonts. This would allow for much more sophisticated font and text work in GIMP. The initial work involves exploring both the functionality and the user interface to interact with it, and both will develop further as he continues to work with OpenType fonts.

Waris Maqbool

Project Description

Before GSoC began, Waris contributed some early work to GIMP. He updated our OpenEXR import code to load YUV images in color instead of in grayscale. The main focus of his project though has been with GEGL, our color processing engine.

His first project was implementing a GEGL version of the Sharpen filter. Sharpen is a simpler version of the Unsharpen Mask filter, a popular method of correcting blurry images. It was unfortunately removed from GIMP 3.0 due to it not being maintained and only working on 8 bit images.

Waris has created a GEGL filter of Sharpen by doing comparisons with the 2.10 version. The recreated Sharpen filter will be non-destructive and will have an on-canvas preview, both improvements over the original.

Handwritten calculations to recreate the Sharpen Filter, by Waris Maqbool

You can see the in-progress merge request for comparison. We’re doing some final reviews for optimization, but we expect it to be ready for a future release of GEGL and GIMP.

Waris has also begun working on a new Inner Glow filter for our PSD support improvement project. While GEGL already has an inner glow feature, it was not designed to be compatible with how it looks in Photoshop. As part of his work, he is also creating a generic curve editing widget to use for editing the PSD Inner Glow’s settings.

We unfortunately had more great GSoC applicants than we were awarded available spaces. One student in particular continued contributing, so we’d like to highlight their work as well.

Harsh Verma

Harsh has been focusing on several different areas of GIMP. His initial proposal involved improving our unit testing suite. He is currently working to implement automated UI testing for GIMP. This is a challenging task, as interacting with the UI varies across platforms. He’s already developed several tests that work on Wayland, which you can see at his in-progress merge request.

He’s also improved our contributor infrastructure that integrating CI-Fairy into our pipeline. This feature checks to make sure contributor commits follow the proper format before merging, which makes our commit history easier to read and understand.

Harsh has also been working on more user-visible changes. He recently took on a user request to add more version information to our About dialog. This follows standard practice with other software, and makes it easier for users to find information that helps us troubleshoot problems. In addition, there’s a handy Copy feature to easily grab the information for sharing. The code and UI have gone through several revisions based on developer and designer feedback, and it will likely be merged soon!

About Dialog with additional version information, by Harsh Verma

We’ve very proud of our student’s contributions so far, both in code and in community! We’re looking forward to you all getting the chance to try out their work in future development releases of GIMP, which we hope to have more information to share soon.

Original source

We received some informal reports in the Microsoft Store reviews telling us that GIMP updates were deleting user data! In particular, plug-ins, themes, brushes, user settings and other add-ons were not being kept during an update from the store.

To resolve this, the updated version of GIMP from the Microsoft Store will require Windows 11 or at least Windows Server 2022 (Windows NT Build 10.0.20348.0).

Windows 10 is still supported, but only when GIMP is installed from our .exe installer.

Note that we are no longer able to support versions of Windows older than Windows 10, and can no longer support 32-bit systems running Windows.

Installing the update will prevent future data loss during upgrades.

Technical details

This was being caused by the way MSIX (the format of apps distributed on Microsoft Store, GIMP included) is designed, which prefers sandboxed user data (like Flatpak and Snap).

We have been trying to work with this requirement when running from MSIX, but were not successful.

So, to fix this packaging limitation, we were given the special “restricted capability” unvirtualizedResources (specifically virtualization:ExcludedDirectory), to preserve user data on %AppData%\GIMP, just as the .exe installer does. This is similar to what we do on other sandbox distributions such as Flatpak and Snap.

After the update, GIMP user data will be copied on upgrades.

The update does not affect images or other resources stored outside your GIMP folder.

How to migrate the previous user data

This restricted capability is only available on Windows NT Build 10.0.20348.0 and later.

So, users with older Windows versions will need to use the .exe installer.

Note: the binaries inside the .exe installer and the .msix are exactly the same.

For users who were using the MS Store version until now and are switching to the .exe installer, here are instructions in order not to lose your configuration data from the MS Store version:

• Manually locate your config dir at %LOCALAPPDATA%\Packages\ (you may just copy-paste this string into the Windows Explorer).
• Search a folder starting with GIMP (with random numbers and letters after that) at this location.
• From there, navigating down to LocalCache\Roaming\ where you will find a folder named GIMP.
• Copy this GIMP folder into %APPDATA% (again, just copy-paste %APPDATA% into the Windows Explorer to find the correct location).

Note that maybe the folder %APPDATA%\GIMP\ already exists, in particular if you also used the .exe installer at some point. If so, it is up to you to decide whether you want to override the data already present with the ones from the MS Store GIMP.

This procedure is a one-time thing as a workaround to this exceptional issue. You won’t have to do it again in the future!

Original source

Before we travel to this year’s Libre Graphics Meeting, we wanted to share a new release of GIMP! The second update of the 3.2 series, GIMP 3.2.4 contains more bugfixes and UX updates.

General Highlights

We continue to polish GIMP 3.2 in this release. Several new contributors have provided patches this time around, which is very exciting! For more details, check out our NEWS file in our code repository.

We’ve caught more cases where tools would accidentally rasterize link, text, and vector layers. For instance, the Edit > Fill with... menu options for colors and patterns now work the same as dragging and dropping colors onto non-raster layers. The Crop Tool now behaves more consistently and does not attempt to resize vector layers.

New contributor anenasa both reported and fixed an issue with the Text Outline feature being cut off with vertical oriented text.

One for the record books - Jehan fixed a bug in our XCF code that’s existed since 1999! He’s also added code to correctly load XCFs made with and without this bug, as backwards compatibility with XCF project files is very important to us.

Sometimes a bug fix can create other, unrelated bugs. A fix we made in GIMP 3.2.2 caused some text layers to become uneditable after reloading them from an XCF file. Jehan found and fixed the new bug, so you should be able to edit both XCFs created in 3.2.2 and new ones.

Speaking of text, Gabriele Barbe has fixed an issue where rotating the canvas rather than the image could cause the on-canvas text editor to appear in the wrong place when moved.

New contributor balooii fixed a crash that could occur when selecting a non-existant filter tag in a plug-in like GFig.

Security contributors bb1abu, HanTul, Rakan Alotaib, JungWoo Park, and Bronson Yen studied our image import plug-ins and reported several possible issues. We appreciate their code review and mitigation suggestions!

Gabriele Barbe and Alx Sa implemented their suggestions for APNG, PAA, PNG, DDS, PSP, PNM, PSD, JIF, PVR, TIM, XWD, and SFW files.

The OpenRaster format stores layers as PNGs and notes their opacity in a separate settings file. Our export plug-in saved that setting but also exported the PNG with the same opacity, resulting in higher transparency when reloaded. We’ve fixed this so now layers are saved with 100% opacity, thus ensuring they reopen correctly.

New contributor Ahmed E. Yassin fixed a bug where exporting metadata in our Metadata Viewer could result in empty files.

New contributor Kaushik B fixed a bug in the Open as Layers feature where multi-layer XCF files would have their layer names changed on import.

Balooii also fixed an issue on Wayland where the tool cursor icon might disappear when moving it.

New contributor v4vansh resolved an issue where the image tab preview wouldn’t correctly update after switching between grayscale and RGB color modes.

Bruno Lopes added support for the macOS ScreenCaptureKit to our color picker feature. This allows us to use the newer API for macOS 12+.

Scanning on Windows

In GIMP 3.2.2, we dropped support for 32bit Windows builds. Unfortunately, our scanner plug-in was also lost since it required 32bit TWAIN drivers. We’ve now built a new Windows Image Acquisition (WIA) scanner plug-in to replace it. You can access it in the same place in the menu - File > Create > Scanner/Camera.

Note that because this plug-in uses a new Windows API, the scanning UI will likely look different than what you’re use to. You may also need to install new WIA-compatible drivers for your scanner to make it work correctly.

UX/UI and Performance Improvements

The Welcome Dialog now shortens long file names in the Create page to prevent the dialog window from stretching too far out. This UX feature was lost when we updated the Welcome Dialog to a new API, but it is now restored.

You can still see the full name by hovering over the image preview or name.

New contributor infinity improved performance when making selections inside a large image with Intersection Mode enabled. Their fixes allows GIMP to only consider pixels within the existing selection rather than trying to calculate across the entire image. This can lead to a significant speed-up!

Aruius raised the maximum UI image size to 8192 pixels. This should allow the Gradient Editor dock and other docks with images to expand much further on larger displays.

When moving a floating layer or selection, the “marching ants” outline is temporarily turned off. This provides a noticable boost in performance and less lag.

Script and Plug-in Developers

An oversight when updating the GimpUnit API for 3.0 caused functions that accept units of measure to not allow setting it to pixels. This has been fixed now. You can test this in functions like gimp_context_set_line_width_unit () and gimp_vector_layer_set_stroke_width_unit ().

The gimp_quit () function has now been deprecated. You can continue to use it for GIMP 3.x, but it will be removed in the eventual GIMP 4.x release. Instead, you should use a return statement with GIMP_PDB_EXECUTION_ERROR and an GError variable with an explanation of why the plug-in needed to quit.

A new gimp_resources_loaded () function has been added by Jehan. You can use this to determine if a resource (like brushes, patterns, fonts, etc) has been loaded in GIMP before trying to use it in your plug-in.

Several deprecated Script-fu functions (such as gimp-drawable-brightness-contrast and gimp-drawable-threshold) in our official scripts have been converted to using GEGL filters via the gimp-drawable-merge-new-filter API. You can check out how to use them in your own scripts by browsing our repository.

Around GIMP

Libre Graphics Meeting

The Libre Graphics Meeting takes place next week, April 22nd through the 25th. You can find more details in our last news post. If you’re planning to attend, feel free to come by and say hello!

Translation

We now have the beginnings of Laotian translation of GIMP! If you know the language and are interested in contributing translations, feel free to reach out to the translation team for more information.

New Mirror

AFRICLOUD has graciously offered to serve as a mirror for GIMP downloads. Mirrors help GIMP be available for download at high speeds wherever you are in the world.

Does your organization wish to be one of our official mirror sponsors? Create a request to become an official mirror!

Release Stats

Since GIMP 3.2.2, in the main GIMP repository:

• 45 reports were closed as FIXED.
• 21 merge requests were merged.
• 258 commits were pushed.
• 18 translations were updated: Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (China), Cornish, Czech, Danish, Esperanto, Georgian, Italian, Kazakh, Lao, Norwegian Nynorsk, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian.

30 people contributed changes or fixes to GIMP 3.2.4 codebase (order is determined by number of commits; some people are in several groups):

• 11 developers to core code: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Alx Sa, Gabriele Barbero, balooii balooii, Anders Jonsson, anenasa, aruius, infinity, kaushik_B, v4vansh.
• 6 developers to plug-ins or modules: Bruno Lopes, Alx Sa, Jehan, Ahmed E. Yassin, Gabriele Barbero, infinity.
• 19 translators: Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Alan Mortensen, Baurzhan Muftakhidinov, Marco Ciampa, Martin, Anders Jonsson, Ekaterine Papava, Jan Papež, Jose Riha, Sabri Ünal, Yuri Chornoivan, luming zh, Denis Rangelov, Flynn Peck, João Pedro Pitarelo, Kristjan ESPERANTO, Saikeo Kavhanxay, acey dot, Марко Костић.
• 3 build, packaging or CI contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Alx Sa.
• 3 contributors on other types of resources: Jehan, Bruno Lopes, Anders Jonsson.

The gimp-data submodule had 2 commits by 2 contributors: Anders Jonsson, Jehan.

Contributions on other repositories in the GIMPverse (order is determined by number of commits):

• Our UX tracker had 1 report closed as FIXED.
• ctx had 43 commits since 3.2. release by 2 contributors: Øyvind Kolås, Bruno Lopes.
• The gimp-macos-build (macOS packaging scripts) release had 5 commits by 1 contributors: Lukas Oberhuber.
• The flatpak release had 6 commits with work by 3 contributors: Bruno, Ondřej Míchal, Jehan.
• Our main website (what you are reading right now) had 45 commits by 3 contributors: Jehan, Alx Sa, Bruno Lopes.
• Our developer website had 15 commits by 3 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Richard Gitschlag.
• Our 3.0 documentation had 64 commits by 3 contributors: Марко Костић, Marco Ciampa, Kolbjørn Stuestøl.

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.

Downloading GIMP 3.2.4

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)
• Linux Snaps for x86 and ARM (64-bit)
• Universal Windows installer for x86 and 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

We still have a few bug fixes being working on, yet we are starting to feel more confident in the stability of the GIMP 3.2 series. Therefore we are on the verge of branching out development into stable and unstable branches. What does it mean? Well, that we will start to seriously work on the fancy new features planned for the GIMP 3.4 series while the 3.2 series will continue to receive only bug and security fixes, aiming for stability.

Exciting times ahead!

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!

Original source

We present the first micro-release of GIMP 3.2!

Over the last two weeks, we’ve been collecting and responding to reports from you all, and have packaged fixes for some of the most common issues in this first “bugfix” version.

General Highlights

As with any major release, there’s always a few issues that are revealed when a much larger audience starts using the new software. We appreciate your reports, and hope this latest release squashes the major new issues!

When layers with certain filters (like Drop Shadow) were added to layer groups, the layers would stop rendering. While the data itself wasn’t lost, this was obviously inconvenient! Fortunately, Jehan diagnosed the problem and fixed the layer group display.

Thanks to excellent testing and reports by teapot and Richard Gitschlag, we’ve fixed a number of issues and overlooked uses for vector layers. New contributor balooii provided several key patches towards this effort.

When importing SVG paths in the Paths dock, the Scale imported paths to fit image option did not work correctly. This issue has been resolved and now properly scales the imported path based on user preference.

A number of image import plug-ins have been made more robust, including FITS, TIM, PAA, ICNS, PVR, SFW, and JIF.

The Paintshop Pro plug-in now correctly loads the active selection shape, instead of just the rectangle around the selection. Thanks to migf1 for providing sample images to help us test and fix this.

The PSD plug-in now imports all of the channels in a Multichannel mode PSD image. New contributer Frank Teklote has been busy improving support for importing more PSD features stored in TIFFs and JPEGs (such as layers and paths).

The legacy Tile filter now properly copies over the original image’s color profile to make sure the new tiled image is in the right color space.

Bruno Lopes has enabled the Send by Email feature in the Files menu on AppImages.

New contributor v4vansh has updated the manual page generation and updated it with new information from the 3.0 releases.

As previously announced, 32-bit Windows builds are now dropped. This, combined to some cleanup on shipped data, resulted on a .exe installer more than 100MiB smaller and running faster.

UX/UI Updates

While not the focus of this release, we were able to implement a few small improvements based on user and designer feedback from our UX site.

We encourage everyone to participate in the discussion there - no coding required!

The Compute unique colors feature in the Histogram dock now recognizes if the image has an active selection, and if so, only counts the pixels in that area. This should further help pixel artists and others who need precise color counts.

When opening an image with rotation metadata, you can now click the preview image that you want to load, in addition to the Rotate or Keep Original buttons. This should make the process of choosing the initial image orientation a little clearer.

“Resource” selection buttons in plug-ins (such as fonts, brushes, gradients, and patterns) now support mnemonics! Hold the Alt key to see the underlined letter in their label, then press it to activate the button. This allows for faster keyboard navigation instead of requiring a mouse, for those users who prefer the option.

In the non-destructive filter pop-over menu, the Toggle Visibility button now adapts to the state of the filter stack. For example, if all filters are turned off individually then the button will automatically switch states so that clicking it toggles them back on (and vice versa).

New contributor Aditya Tiwari has restored the Tab shortcut label to the Hide Docks entry in the Windows menu. This had to be done in a specific way since the shortcut only applies when the canvas is active, instead of being a “global” shortcut.

Revamping macOS Build Process

Bruno Lopes have been working since December last year on modernizing our macOS infrastructure and overall macOS support.

Right now, the macOS release process is a bit manual and slow. In the future, this should be done automatically from our GitLab CI.

These new builds are part of a big investment approved by the GIMP Committee and would not be possible without your donations so far.

We would be happy for you to test them at the Automatic Development Builds section of the Development Downloads page so we don’t introduce regressions when these new builds are made official.

Around GIMP

GEGL

To supplement our release of GIMP, GEGL 0.4.70 was also released. This is mostly a bugfix release as well with core fixes to the GeglPath API, as well as fixes in the png-save and exr-save operations.

Various build improvements were performed too and some compiler warnings cleaned up.

New Mirror

Yamagata University in Japan has graciously agreed to serve as a new mirror for GIMP downloads. This makes it our second download mirror in Japan. On this note, don’t forget that mirrors are important contributors to the project too. They help sharing the load for our dozens of thousands of daily downloads and ensure that everyone can have fast downloads.

We clearly have more mirrors in some parts of the globe, and some regions would deserve to have more mirrors closeby.

If your organization wants to become an official mirror of GIMP and be mentioned in our list of mirror sponsors, you may simply create a request to be an +official mirror. 🤗

Release Stats

Since GIMP 3.2.0, in the main GIMP repository:

• 30 reports were closed as FIXED.
• 19 merge requests were merged.
• 200 commits were pushed.
• 10 translations were updated: Chinese (China), Esperanto, Finnish, Georgian, Polish, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian.
• 21 people contributed changes or fixes to GIMP 3.2.2 codebase (order is determined by number of commits; some people are in several groups):
  • 7 developers to core code: Alx Sa, Jehan, Bruno Lopes, balooii, v4vansh, Aditya Tiwari.
  • 5 developers to plug-ins or modules: Alx Sa, Bruno Lopes, Frank Teklote, Jehan, Sabri Ünal.
  • 11 translators: Марко Костић, Jiri Grönroos, Martin, Yuri Chornoivan, luming zh, Anders Jonsson, Aleksandr Prokudin, Ekaterine Papava, Kristjan ESPERANTO, Mateusz Jastrząb, Rodrigo Lledó.
  • 2 theme designers: Alx Sa, Anders Jonsson.
  • 4 build, packaging or CI contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Alfred Wingate, v4vansh.
  • 3 contributors on other types of resources: Jehan, Bruno Lopes, v4vansh.

The gimp-data submodule had 2 commits by 1 contributor: Jehan.

Contributions on other repositories in the GIMPverse (order is determined by number of commits):

• Our UX tracker had 2 reports closed as FIXED.
• ctx had 44 commits since 3.2.0 release by 1 contributor: Øyvind Kolås.
• The gimp-macos-build (macOS packaging scripts) release had 3 commits by 2 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Lukas Oberhuber.
• The flatpak release had 5 commits by 2 contributors: Bruno, Ondřej Míchal. Thanks a lot to Ondřej helping more with this package!
• Our main website (what you are reading right now) had 29 commits by 4 contributors: Jehan, Bruno Lopes, Alx Sa, Jonathan D.
• Our developer website had 18 commits by 3 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Ency.
• Our 3.0 documentation had 20 commits by 6 contributors: Jacob Boerema, Marco Ciampa, Марко Костић, Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Sabri Ünal, 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.

Downloading GIMP 3.2.2

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)
• Linux Snaps for x86 and ARM (64-bit)
• Universal Windows installer for x86 and 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).

Note: the macOS DMG packages are planned to be a bit late, because of sickness and lack of time of relevant volunteers. We hope to have them in the coming days.

What’s Next

Here we go! This is the first micro release in the GIMP 3.2 series. As often with the first version in a new series, GIMP 3.2.0 had a few annoying issues, and the most problematic of these was the bug where some layer groups would not render in specific conditions (when particular filters were used). This was the main bug warranting this early bug-fix release.

In a sense, this is still better than the start of our 3.0 series (where we had more annoying issues, though it was also quite a huge update!), yet we want to do better! This is why we’d like to remind you that GIMP is made by anyone who wants to help. We would really love to have more early testers trying to break things by actually doing deep testing with our test binaries. We should thank in particular ShiroYuki Mot and Anders Jonsson who have been tirelessly testing our releases. But that ain’t enough! If anyone wants to be added to the list of testers for future releases, please open a report on the gimp-web-devel tracker, and tell us which platforms (OS, etc.) in particular you wish to test. We will add you in our default release template, which should notify you every time we prepare a new version.

In terms of schedules, we are still mostly continuing to fix bugs but I am predicting that the bug-fixing spree should slow down soon. Then we will start working more explicitly on new fancy features. I.e. we’d start preparing GIMP 3.4 already! Stay tuned by following the news on our website!

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!

Original source

We’re happy to present the first release of GIMP 3.2!

This marks a year of design, development, and testing from volunteers and the community, as part of our plan to streamline releases after GIMP 3.0.

We’re excited for you to see the new features that version 3.2 offers!

GIMP 3.2 splash screen, by Mark McCaughrean (CC by-sa 4.0)

Highlights

Learn More

Other Related Releases

Enjoy GIMP 3.2!

Support GIMP development

Highlights

Here are some of the many highlights to look out for as you start using GIMP 3.2:

New non-destructive layers!

You can now use Link Layers to incorporate external image as part of your compositions, easily scaling, rotating, and transforming them without losing quality or sharpness. The link layer’s content is updated when the source file is modified

The Path tool can now create Vector Layers, which lets you draw shapes with adjustable fill and stroke settings.

The MyPaint Brush tool has been upgraded, adding 20 new brushes, and it now automatically adjusts to your canvas zoom and rotation for more dynamic painting.

A new Overwrite paint mode allows you to draw over existing colors without blending their transparency.

The on-canvas Text Editor has a number of workflow improvements. Among them, you can now move it as needed across the canvas and utilize many common shortcuts such as Ctrl + B for bold text and Shift + Ctrl + V for pasting unformatted text. The Text Outline feature also includes more options to control the direction of the outline.

New file format support and improvements to existing formats, such as DDS BC7 export and more layer styles imported for PSDs. Thanks to vector layers, we now also support SVG export and expanded vector options in PDF export.

A variety of UX and UI improvements, based on your feedback and our design team’s efforts.

To list a few:

• Options to make the brush thumbnails use theme colors for previews, for a nicer experience in dark themes
• Ability to drag and drop images onto the image tab to open in GIMP
• Keyboard shortcut support for the Shear and Flip tools
• New System color scheme that automatically matches GIMP’s theme color scheme to the one you set for your OS

The CMYK color selector now shows the Total Ink Coverage for your color, helping you adjust during soft-proofing based on your printer’s ink coverage limit.

For script and plug-in developers, a new GEGL Filter browser has been added to make it easier to find non-destructive filters to use.

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 3.1 and 3.2 development releases.

But to see it for yourself, you can get GIMP 3.2 directly from our Downloads page and try it out!

» READ COMPLETE RELEASE NOTES «

Other Related Releases

To accompany our release of GIMP 3.2, packagers should be aware that we also released:

• babl 0.1.124 (tarball)
• GEGL 0.4.68 (tarball)

We do not have a ready-to-release documentation for this version 3.2 yet. We recommend you to continue using the 3.0 online documentation for the time being.

Our contributors are working hard on enhancing the documentation. Any help is welcome on our gimp-help project to speed up the process!

Enjoy GIMP 3.2!

GIMP 3.2 builds on the foundation we created in GIMP 3.0, providing great new features and setting the stage for even more awesome things in future versions!

Download GIMP 3.2

Note: packages on stores may take a bit longer to reach you as they may be in review.

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

Original source

We’re excited to release the third release candidate of GIMP version 3.2! It contains a number of bug fixes and final polishes as we prepare the first stable release of GIMP 3.2.

Third release candidate splash screen by Mark McCaughrean - CC BY-SA 4.0 - GIMP 3.2 RC3

Release Highlights

• New Splash Screen
• Non-Raster Layers
• Color Operations
• UX / UI Improvements
• File Formats
  • DDS
  • JPEG2000
  • OpenEXR
  • Procreate Swatches
  • Swatchbooker Palettes
  • XMC
  • WebP
• Bug Fixes and Improvements
• Fancier .dmg and Windows installer; and sturdier .appimage
• API
• Security
• Around GIMP
  • Website
  • Translations
  • Team News
  • Google Summer of code
• Release Stats
• Downloading GIMP 3.2 RC3
• What’s next

Release Highlights

This release represents the completion of nearly a year’s worth of development and design work, as well as our GIMP 3.2 roadmap.

The complete changelog can be found in our NEWS section of the repository.

We hope for this to be the final release candidate before the first stable release, so we ask for your help in testing and reporting any remaining bugs you encounter.

New Splash Screen

Dr. Mark McCaughrean has graciously created a third splash screen for this release (see image at the top) based on his processed photograph of the “Dragon Jet” HH288 protostellar outflow system.

We are deeply grateful to Dr. McCaughrean for the three splash screens he has created for the 3.2 release candidates. It will be tough decision to select the one to use for the final GIMP 3.2!

Non-Raster Layers

GIMP 3.2 has three kinds of “non-raster” layers - the new link and vector layers in addition to the existing text layers. A lot of behind-the-scenes work has been done by Jehan to standardize how all of these layer types handle “destructive” actions, such as painting and merging down layer masks. You should now be better protected from accidentally altering these layers destructively, unless you intentionally rasterize them (and if you change your mind, you can easily revert that process to restore the original layer).

As a result of this work, we also have a small new feature. Previously, you could drag and drop a color swatch on a text layer to change its color. Alx Sa extended this behavior to vector layers - now you can drag either a color or pattern swatch to change its fill!

Color Operations

As part of Jehan‘s continued work to improve GIMP’s color correctness, the Levels, Curves, Equalize, and White Balance filters now default to Linear precision while allowing for other color precision modes to be set. This fixes several inconsistencies in how these filters operate in both the GUI and via scripting.

UX / UI Improvements

We’ve refined the logic of when the Welcome Dialog appears on start. If you intentionally open GIMP with an image (either by dragging and dropping it or opening via the command line), the Welcome Dialog will no long appear in front of the image. The only exception is the first time you open GIMP after an update, so you can see what has changed.

Alx Sa reordered the Hue Saturation GUI so that the Lightness slider is placed below the Saturation slider. While this is a small fix, it standardizes the order with all other places in GIMP where we have HSL settings.

The Flip tool can now be controlled with arrow keys, similar to the Move and Rotate transformation tools. When the Flip tool is selected, you can use the Left and Right arrows to flip the image horizontally, and the Up and Down arrows to flip it vertically.

The Shear tool can also now be adjusted with the arrow keys. Use the Left and Right arrows to shear your image horizontally, and the Up and Down arrows to do the same vertically. Like the Move tool, you can hold down Shift to shear with a larger value.

The GIMP_ICON_TEXTURE pattern has been removed from the background of the Navigation and Selection dockables. This should remove a source of visual irration from those dockables in dark mode.

The Delete button in the Layer dockable will now delete only the layer mask if it is selected, instead of always deleting the layer.

Jehan has refined the logic for color selection so that it is not impacted by the image when that wouldn’t make sense in context. For instance, you can now use the full color palette to set Grid colors, even if you’re working on an indexed image with a limited palette.

The Crop Tool now automatically adds transparency to a layer if you set it to fill with transparency and make a crop that’s larger than the current layer. Thanks to Michael Schumacher for the initial UX report!

Jacob Boerema adjusted our GUI code to prevent overly wide dialogs in places like the image export comment field and the Image Map guide pop-up.

Denis Rangelov added initial support for using the Global Menu on flatpak. You’ll need to set the GIMP_GTK_MENUBAR variable inside the Flatpak environment (as noted here) to use it for now.

File Formats

DDS

The DDS plug-in now supports exporting in BC7 format, as a complement to the BC7 import support added in GIMP 3.0.

We use the bc7enc_rdo library developed by Rich Geldreich for the conversion.

JPEG2000

We fixed a bug in the JPEG 2000 export process which was causing the quality setting to be lower than what OpenJPEG allowed. This fix gives you more fine-grain control of the image export quality.

OpenEXR

New contributor Waris Maqbool improved our support for importing Luminance/Chroma OpenEXR images.

Previously we only imported the grayscale luminance channel, but thanks to their efforts we now also support the YR and YB color channels.

Procreate Swatches

You can now import palette swatches from the Procreate art program.

This support was added by our resident file format fan Alx Sa after seeing a teammate use it during the Global Game Jam and finding that they couldn’t open the palette in GIMP!

Swatchbooker Palettes

We improved our existing support for this palette format by adding any attached color profiles to the imported palettes.

XMC

Longtime contributor Michael Schumacher has made several improvements to our XMC plug-in. In addition to updating several aspects and fixing warnings, he has also added protections to prevent it from modifying layer names in the original project when exporting as XMC.

WebP

We improved the code for Lossless WebP export to ensure that some of the “lossy” settings defined in the GUI didn’t impact the lossless image quality.

Bug Fixes and Improvements

Anders Jonsson has corrected the default color in the Fog filter for linear color conversion.

Bruno Lopes fixed a regression in our Camera RAW plug-ins that caused them to not work on macOS.

Sample Point modes are now correctly copied over when duplicating an image.

programmer_ced improved our flatpak build to use HOST_XDG_CONFIG_HOME for its configuration location. This should make it more intuitive for flatpak users to find where to put third-party plug-ins and where to retrieve various settings.

Alx Sa upgraded the Histogram Editor. It can now handle pixel counts for much larger images - in theory, up to both widths and heights of 4 billion!

Jacob Boerema fixed a bug on Windows where Gradient Flare presets wouldn’t be loaded.

The Round Corners filter now uses your current background color for the fill, instead of always using the default color.

Anders Jonsson diagnosed and fixed an issue with the alignment of our transform anchor points GUI in the System theme.

We made a number of fixes to non-destructive filters, especially related to the scaling and cropping of Render style filters. New contributor balooii fixed a bug that could occur when undoing filters applied to individual channels.

Jehan corrected a bug where the pressure curve did not show in the input device manager on certain platforms.

New contributor Kaushik B fixed a bug that caused warnings in plug-ins when creating number input buttons with small min and max ranges.

Fancier .dmg and Windows installer; and sturdier .appimage

Noticeable improvements have been made to our macOS package. In short, Bruno Lopes designed a custom icon for the mounted .dmg on the desktop. He also scripted the generation of custom .dmg background matching the splash screen for each release.

Background for GIMP 3.2 RC3 macOS DMG Installer - GIMP 3.2 RC2

Similar scripts were made for the Windows installer which will also feature part of the splash image, automatically extracted at build time.

Also, some important fixes have been made by Bruno to our AppImage package. It should work again on AArch64 (it stopped working after our move to Debian 13), and support for third-party plugins (built for Debian 13) is hopefully fixed.

API

Thanks to work by Alx and Jehan, the Curve-Bend plug-in can now be used in scripts via its individual parameters as listed in the Procedure Browser.

Previously, you needed to use a generic settings-data which combined several parameters in a single string. Both methods will work until GIMP 4, at which point we’ll retire the settings-data parameter.

The GimpColorScales and GimpColorSelect widgets are now introspectable, which means you can use their public functions in your plug-ins and scripts.

We’ve added gimp_config_get_xcf_version () and gimp_config_set_xcf_version () functions. These can be used when saving XCFs to target a specific version. Currently, we use this feature in GIMP to decide whether to save colors as the older GimpRGB format or the new colorspace-aware GeglColor.

Ondřej Míchal has improved the logic for setting bounds for integer-type GimpSpinScales.

As we continue to expand the GimpDrawableFilter API, we’ve marked a number of gimp_drawable_* () functions as deprecated. They will stay available until GIMP 4, but we recommend moving your filter code to use the GEGL filters directly instead of the older, dedicated wrapper functions.

You can now create GimpCurve objects in plug-ins. This allows you to add gimp:curves filters to layers and layer groups.

As a result, we’ve deprecated gimp_drawable_curves_explicit () and gimp_drawable_curves_spline () since they can be replaced with the Curve filter directly.

This work was done by Jehan and Alx Sa.

Here is an example of applying an inverted gimp:curves as non-destructive filter, on the blue channel in non-linear space, through the Python binding:

c = Gimp.Curve.new()
c.set_curve_type(Gimp.CurveType.FREE)
x = 0
while x <= 1.0:
c.set_sample(x, 1.0 - x)
x += 1 / c.get_n_samples()
filter = Gimp.DrawableFilter.new(layer, "gimp:curves", "")
config = filter.get_config()
config.set_property("curve", c)
config.set_property("channel", Gimp.HistogramChannel.BLUE)
config.set_property("trc", Gimp.TRCType.NON_LINEAR)
layer.append_filter(filter)

Security

This release also contains fixes for possible exploits in some of our file loading plug-ins.

We appreciate security reports from the Zero Day Initiative and individuals such as JungWoo Park and wooseokdotkim, and the work of developers like Jacob Boerema to patch them.

The fixes include those for:

• ZDI-CAN-28232
• ZDI-CAN-28599
• ZDI-CAN-28265
• ZDI-CAN-28530

Around GIMP

Website

If you ever encountered a 404 Missing Page error on our website, you would have noticed our cute Wilber animation! This was work by the animation film director Aryeom, created as a hand-made SVG+SMIL animation by Aryeom and Jehan back in 2016.

As our logo design was updated in GIMP 3 (which by the way is also work by Aryeom, with feedback by the whole team), a refresh to this animated SVG, using the new Wilber, has been initiated by Bruno Lopes.

Additional refinements were made by Aryeom Han and Jehan.

Since we hope you won’t normally see this page (and if you do, please report the broken link), here’s what it looks like (if you missed it, force-refreshing the page should work, or just go to any non-existing page to see the animation in proper context):

GIMP Website 404 Page animation by Bruno Lopes, Aryeom Han, and Jehan

Translations

We have a new Cornish translation of GIMP, provided by Flynn!

Team News

Core team member Anders Jonsson got added to the i18n coordination team in GNOME Translation Project. He immediately sought to fix some of our longstanding bugs on the localization infrastructure. He is now starting to work on a working procedure for handling new language coordinators.

Google Summer of code

We are once again participating in the Google Summer of Code.

This is an opportunity for potential new contributors (of any age!) to work with us to develop a new feature for GIMP. We have a list of suitable projects, but you are welcome to propose your own idea. Please reach out early so we can get to know you beforehand!

Release Stats

Since GIMP 3.2.0 RC2, in the main GIMP repository:

• 70 reports were closed as FIXED.
• 60 merge requests were merged.
• 468 commits were pushed.
• 22 translations were updated: Basque, Bulgarian, Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Czech, Danish, Esperanto, Georgian, German, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Kabyle, Lithuanian, Norwegian Nynorsk, Persian, Slovenian, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian.

38 people contributed changes or fixes to GIMP 3.2.0 RC3 codebase (order is determined by number of commits; some people are in several groups):

• 7 developers to core code: Jehan, Alx Sa, Bruno Lopes, Anders Jonsson, Gabriele Barbero, Lukas Oberhuber, balooii balooii.
• 7 developers to plug-ins or modules: Alx Sa, Jacob Boerema, Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Michael Schumacher, Anders Jonsson, Waris.
• 25 translators: Sveinn í Felli, luming zh, Alexander Alexandrov Shopov, Marco Ciampa, Aefgh Threenine, Cheng-Chia Tseng, Alan Mortensen, Anders Jonsson, Danial Behzadi, Martin, Shigeto YOSHIDA, YOSHIDA Shigeto, dimspingos, Aurimas Aurimas Černius, Ekaterine Papava, Kristjan ESPERANTO, Kristjan SCHMIDT, Sabri Ünal, Yuri Chornoivan, Athmane MOKRAOUI, Flynn Peck, Ibai Oihanguren Sala, Jan Papež, Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Tim Sabsch.
• 2 theme designers: Alx Sa, Anders Jonsson.
• 5 build, packaging or CI contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Alx Sa, Jacob Boerema, Jeremy Bícha.
• 2 contributors on other types of resources: Jehan, Jeremy Bícha.

The gimp-data submodule had 24 commits by 4 contributors: Jehan, Bruno Lopes, Alx Sa, Jeremy Bícha.

Contributions on other repositories in the GIMPverse (order is determined by number of commits):

• Our UX tracker had 4 reports closed as FIXED.
• ctx had 236 commits since 3.0.8 release by 1 contributors: Øyvind Kolås.
• The gimp-macos-build (macOS packaging scripts) release had 22 commits by 2 contributors: Lukas Oberhuber, Bruno Lopes.
• The flatpak release had 17 commits by 2 contributors: Bruno, rangelovd.
• Our main website (what you are reading right now) had 94 commits by 4 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Alx Sa, Jehan, Aryeom.
• Our developer website had 36 commits by 4 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Alx Sa, Jacob Boerema.
• Our 3.0 documentation had 256 commits by 12 contributors: Jacob Boerema, dimspingos, Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Anders Jonsson, Marco Ciampa, Sabri Ünal, Yuri Chornoivan, Alx Sa, Aurimas Aurimas Černius, Dick Groskamp, Sage M, Tomo Dote.

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.

Downloading GIMP 3.2 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)
• 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: packages on the Microsoft Store and Snap Store may be delayed as we wait for validations.

What’s next

We nearly thought that the RC2 would be the last release candidate, but it turned out we found more things we were not really happy with, for a stable version. And the more we fixed, the more it became clear that a RC3 was needed.

We are now in a state where we feel happy again. Of course, there are some things we would like to spend more time on, but we have to stop somewhere. Hopefully you will think the same! So as usual, we are calling for everyone to massively test this version 3.2.0 RC3.

Please everyone, test and report any issue you find!

Depending on the testing feedback, we may get GIMP 3.2.0 out very soon!

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!

Original source

We are happy to announce the fourth micro-release GIMP 3.0.8!

As we close in on the release of GIMP 3.2, we wanted to share with you what may be the last set of bugfixes for GIMP 3.0.

Release Highlights

• Font Loading Performance
• Assorted updates and fixes
• Themes and UX
• Security fixes
• API
• Packaging improvements on macOS
• Help Manual
• babl
• Release Stats
• Downloading GIMP 3.0.8
• What’s Next

Release Highlights

Micro releases like 3.0.8 are focused on fixing bugs and regressions. While this news post is not an exhaustive list of all fixes, we wanted to highlight some of the ones with a more noticeable impact.

Font Loading Performance

Improvements in start-up time for users with a large number of fonts was backported from our 3.2 RC2 release.

As a result, we now wait to load images until fonts are initialized - this prevents some occasional odd displays and other issues when an XCF file tried to access a partially loaded font.

For macOS users, we have special-cased the legacy Skia font, as we received reports that it did not behave properly with the Pango library we use to render fonts. You should now be able to use all fonts weights instead of just Bold.

Assorted updates and fixes

Daniel Plakhotich helped us identify an issue when exporting a lossless WEBP image could be affected by lossy settings (such as Quality being less than 100%). We’ve updated our WEBP plug-in to prevent this from happening.

Jehan fixed a bug in the Windows installer where text would be duplicated in certain languages.

René de Hesselle diagnosed an issue with font kerning on macOS, which was fixed by Jehan.

Because of differences in how different operating systems represent file paths, default color profiles were not being loaded correctly on start-up on Windows. This should now be fixed, though you may need to reassign your default color profiles in Preferences to clear out the older, incorrect file path.

Thanks to Jehan‘s efforts, the standard gimp-3.0 executable can now be run with a --no-interface flag instead of requiring users to call gimp-console-3.0 even on devices with no display. The --show-debug-menu flag is now visible as well.

programmer_ceds improved our flatpak by adding safe guards to show the correct configuration directory regardless of whether XDG_CONFIG_HOME is defined on the user’s system. This should make it much easier for flatpak users to install and use third party plug-ins.

We fixed a rare but possible crash when using the Equalize filter on images with NaN values. Images that contain these are usually created from scientific or mapping data, so you’re unlikely to come across them in standard editing.

Jeremy Bicha fixed an internal issue where the wrong version number could be used when installing minor releases (such as the 3.2 release candidates and upcoming 3.2 stable release).

As noted in our 3.2RC2 news post, we have updated our SVG import code to improve the rendered path.

Further improvements have been made to our non-destructive filter code to improve stability, especially when copying and pasting layers and images with filters attached to them. Some issues related to applying NDE filters on Quick Masks have also been corrected.

An unintended Search pop-up that appeared when typing while the Channels dockable was selected has been turned off.

When saving XCFs for GIMP 2.10 compatibility, we unintentionally saved Grid color using the new color format. This caused errors when reopening the XCF in 2.10. This problem has now been fixed! If you encounter any other XCF incompatibility, please let us know.

Themes and UX

The Navigation and Selection Editor dockables no longer show a large bright texture when no image is actively selected. This was especially noticeable on dark themes.

When a layer has no active filters, the Fx column had the same “checkbox” outline when hovered over as the lock column. This led to confusion about clicking it to add filters. We have removed the outline on hover as a small step to help address this.

Ondřej Míchal fixed alignment and cut-off issues with the buttons on our Transform tool overlays. All buttons should now be properly centered and visible.

The options for filling layers with colors when resizing the canvas will be turned off when not relevant (such as when you set layers to not be resized).

More GUI elements such as dialog header icons will now respond to your icon size preferences.

Ondřej Míchal has continued his work to update our UI with the more usable Spin Scale widget. He has also updated the widget itself to improve how it works for users and developers alike.

Security fixes

Jacob Boerema and Gabriele Barbero continued to patch potential security issues related to some of our file format plug-ins. In addition to existing fixes mentioned in the release candidate news posts, the following exploits are now prevented:

• ZDI-CAN-28232
• ZDI-CAN-28265
• ZDI-CAN-28530
• ZDI-CAN-28591
• ZDI-CAN-28599

Another potential issue related to ICO files with incorrect metadata was reported by Dhiraj. It does not have a CVE number yet, but it has been fixed for GIMP 3.0.8. Jacob Boerema also fixed a potential issue with loading Creator blocks in Paintshop Pro PSP images.

As part of GIMP 3.0.8, we also updated several dependencies to prevent vulnerabilities. Thanks to Bruno Lopes, our Windows installer now uses a newer version of Python due to several CVEs in Python 3.12.11. We also updated our SVG library librsvg 2.61.3 to prevent a possible NTLM authentication exploit when loading a malicious SVG.

API

For plug-in and script developers, a few new public APIs were backported to GIMP 3.0.8. gimp_cairo_surface_get_buffer () allows you to retrieve a GEGL buffer from a Cairo surface (such as a text layer). Note that this deprecates gimp_cairo_surface_create_buffer ().

gimp_config_set_xcf_version () and gimp_config_get_xcf_version () can be used to specify a particular XCF version for a configuration. This will allow you to have that data serialized/deserialized for certain versions of GIMP if there were differences (such as the Grid colors mentioned above).

Fixes were made for retrieving image metadata via scripting. GimpMetadata is now a visible child of GExiv2Metadata, so you can use standard gexiv2 functions to retrieve information from it.

Original thumbnail metadata is also now removed on export to prevent potential issues when exporting into a new format.

Packaging improvements on macOS

Bruno Lopes and Lukas Oberhuber worked on some packaging fixes for macOS:

• Image Graph is now available (if GIMP is run with --show-debug-menu)
• Thai language interfaces have proper word breaking
• EPS and PS files can be opened again
• Dialogs should receive focus again thanks to a patch on GTK3
• GIMP icon is not tiny anymore on macOS 26 Tahoe (we plan to support Liquid Glass effects in the future)
• Configuration migrations between GIMP 2.10 and 3.0 should be more robust now.

Help Manual

Our documentation maintainer Jacob Boerema has released a new version of the GIMP 3.0 help manual.

Version 3.0.2 of the manual includes updated information on non-destructive filters, changes in the Align tool, and more.

Updates to fifteen translations have been made as part of this release.

Special thanks to Sabri Ünal for their work in standardizing formatting across the help manual and reducing the need to retranslate duplicate text.

babl

Øyvind Kolås has released a new update for babl, our color space engine. Version 0.1.120 adds support for the x86_64-v4 microarchitecture for code optimizations.

Release Stats

Since GIMP 3.0.6, in the main GIMP repository:

• 26 reports were closed as FIXED.
• 468 commits were pushed.
• 12 translations were updated: Chinese (China), Danish, Georgian, Greek, Lithuanian, Norwegian Nynorsk, Persian, Slovenian, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian.
• 28 people contributed changes or fixes to GIMP 3.0.8 codebase (order is determined by number of commits; some people are in several groups):
  • 8 developers to core code: Jehan, Alx Sa, Bruno Lopes, Gabriele Barbero, Idriss Fekir, Jacob Boerema, James Addison, aruius.
  • 9 developers to plug-ins or modules: Alx Sa, Bruno Lopes, Jacob Boerema, Jehan, Ondřej Míchal, Anders Jonsson, Dr. David Alan Gilbert, Gabriele Barbero, lloyd konneker.
  • 14 translators: Aefgh Threenine, Ekaterine Papava, Martin, Alan Mortensen, Anders Jonsson, Yuri Chornoivan, luming zh, Aurimas Aurimas Černius, Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Sabri Ünal, dimspingos, Aurimas Černius, Danial Behzadi, Luming Zh.
  • 2 theme designers: Alx Sa, Ondřej Míchal.
  • 5 build, packaging or CI contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Jeremy Bícha, Jernej Simončič, Niels De Graef.
  • 6 contributors on other types of resources: Jehan, Bruno Lopes, Jacob Boerema, Jeremy Bícha, Niels De Graef, Sabri Ünal.

The gimp-data submodule had 16 commits by 3 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Jeremy Bícha.

Contributions on other repositories in the GIMPverse (order is determined by number of commits):

• babl 0.1.120 is made of 5 commits by 2 contributors: Øyvind Kolås, Bruno Lopes.
• ctx had 181 commits since 3.2.0 RC2 release by 1 contributors: Øyvind Kolås.
• The gimp-macos-build (macOS packaging scripts) release had 27 commits by 2 contributors: Lukas Oberhuber, Bruno Lopes.
• The flatpak release had 20 commits by 1 contributor (and a bot): Bruno.
• Our main website (what you are reading right now) had 103 commits by 7 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Alx Sa, Sabri Ünal, Jacob Kauffmann, Petr Vorel, gturri.
• Our developer website had 204 commits by 2 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan.
• Our 3.0 documentation had 266 commits by 13 contributors: Sabri Ünal, Jacob Boerema, dimspingos, Marco Ciampa, Anders Jonsson, Alevtina Karashokova, Yuri Chornoivan, Matthew Leach, Richard Gitschlag, Andre Klapper, Aurimas Aurimas Černius, Dick Groskamp, 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.

Downloading GIMP 3.0.8

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

This might be the final release in the GIMP 3.0 series, unless some very ugly bug were to appear and we’d feel like making a better ending. We know indeed that some people are sometimes stuck longer on some series for various reasons (such as stable package policy in some Linux distributions, or because we do have to drop some platforms sometimes — which will soon be the case for 32-bit Windows by the way! —, and sometimes some people just prefer older GIMP!). Also we do introduce bugs with new feature code. Such is the life of software, either being stale and stabler, or evolving with higher risk of new bugs!

So whatever your reason, let’s make sure that you’ll have at least a very nice latest 3.0 build to get back too, if needed be. 😄

Now we are mostly focusing on the last few issues before starting the 3.2 series. We’ll get news about this soon.

In any case, we wish you all a very happy new Western year! May it be filled with a lot of joy, fun with GIMP too, and of course a healthy life. 🤗

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!

Original source

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 Kolås 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 Kolås, Anders Jonsson, Gabriele Barbero, Idriss Fekir, Jacob Boerema, Ondřej Míchal, Sabri Ünal.
• 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 Černius.
• 2 theme designers: Alx Sa, Jehan.
• 5 build, packaging or CI contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Jernej Simončič, Niels De Graef, Øyvind Kolås.
• 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 Kolås, Jehan, Jacob Boerema, Joe Da Silva.
• GEGL 0.4.66 is made of 62 commits by 11 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Øyvind Kolås, 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 Kolås.
• 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 Ünal.
• 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. 😄

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? 🎁🎄🤗

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! 🥳🍾🥰

Original source

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 Kolås, 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 Kolås, 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 Kolås.
• 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!

Original source

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.

Original source

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 Vašut 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 Bokmål. 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 Kolås 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 Kolås 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 Kolås.
• 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! 🤗

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!

Original source

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 Vašut 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 Kolås.
• 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! 🥂🤗

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)
• 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).

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.

Original source

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 Vašut, 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 Kolås.
• 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 by mL)

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!

Original source