Great news for fans of the open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop and other commercial image editors: GIMP 3.0 is (supposedly) almost done.
The latest delay in the long awaited GIMP 3.0 update was several developers getting sick, following the Libre Graphics Meeting conference. A new post on the project’s blog explains, “Thankfully, everyone’s feeling much better now, and work has resumed in earnest.” They noted that GIMP 3.0 RC (Release Candidate) is now 96% complete, with less than a dozen outstanding issues remaining to be fixed.
In software projects like GIMP, a Release Candidate denotes a final version of a piece of software before it ships. The only difference between the final and RC versions is that the latter includes fixes for serious bugs that may have surfaced before public release, but all the features are usually locked in the RC version. The most recent development version of GIMP is 2.99.18, released in February with new snapping options, auto-expanding layers, and improvements to the handling of fonts, color correction and PSD files, and other changes. A November 2023 update to GIMP brought out a fun new gradient tool and support for additional palette formats.
One of the remaining tasks the team faces is finishing the API for GIMP 3.0, which will ensure that plugins and scripts other developers build for GIMP continue working uninterrupted for all future releases of GIMP 3. Due to significant under-the-hood changes, the new API may break existing plugins and scripts until developers update them. “This means that if a third-party developer ported their 2.1 pluginin or script to use GIMP 2.99.16’s API, it might not work with the 2.99.18 API due to further changes,” they explained.
GIMP 3.0 will bring improvements like exporting multiple images with different settings while leaving the original intact, deeper color space integration, non-destructive filters on layer groups, and new libraries, to name but a few.
GIMP 3.0 is already behind schedule. Originally, GIMP 3.0 RC should have dropped sometime in 2023, but that didn’t pan out. GIMP maintainer Jehan with the ZeMarmot team then announced that GIMP 3.0 would arrive at the Libre Graphics Meeting 2024 in May. Provided there are no further delays, it looks like at least GIMP 3.0 RC might be released in October.
You can download GIMP for free from the project’s website. GIMP is available for Microsoft Windows, Apple macOS, and UNIX-like systems such as GNU and Linux.
Source: GIMP
