Gimp 3.0: When will it be released?

Hi,

does anyone know when Gimp 3.0 is supposed to be released? And: Inhowfar will it be different from Gimp 2.10?

TIA,

Claus

I believe the answer is, and always has been, “when its ready.”

It’ll use gtk3.0 so it’ll support hidpi screens.

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This may give you some information:

https://developer.gimp.org/core/roadmap/#gimp-30

Please correct me if I am wrong, but I believe the GIMP development team consists of just six dedicated developers. I look forward to 3.0 when it comes along, but I have often felt that both GIMP and Photoshop have for many years had nearly all the essential tools in place and working and I wonder what can be done in GIMP to really improve it. I look forward to being pleasantly surprised when 3.0 appears and it has new capabilities that I never imagined. BTW, I use GIMP over PS any day and have for the last 20 years. It is a great program. I only use PS for teaching to those people who feel paying Adobe a subscription will make them a better photographer. However, I realise professional designers use a suite of Adobe products and for those professionals the subscription may be well justified. I wish the GIMP development team good luck with their endeavour and will just have to wait patiently. @Claus_Cyrny what are you hoping for in GIMP 3.0? Just wondering what is on your wish list.

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Oh, on my wish list would be a better text tool with vector layers. Then anti-aliasing could be better (at least partially, like in ‘Filters > Light and Shadows > Lighting Effects’). And CMYK support, like in Krita. I’ve also been using Gimp for the last 20 years (since 2002, when I switched to Linux), and I really like to work with the Gimp.

Claus

Nice wish list. Let’s hope the developers get some much needed help and support building GIMP 3.0.

I have taught and used GIMP extensively since about 2002 myself. I love the program and despite owning Photoshop I always defer to GIMP. In the last couple of years I discovered Darktable and it has fantastic masking capabilities that facilitate localised adjustments and has taken 99% of my photographic work away from GIMP. Before GIMP was important to me for its ability to do layers and masks to localise adjustments for photographs. Now GIMP is mainly used by me for photo restoration. But between these FOSS programs I am well covered for most of my needs.

Fortunately, there’s a pending merge request with functional vector layers (Issue #282: Implement vector layers from GSoC 2006 (!773) · Merge requests · GNOME / GIMP · GitLab). It needs a lot of polish, but the hope is to have it ready for the next micro release after 3.0 is out.

The dev version has initial CMYK support, although not a full CMYK mode yet (you can import/export several files in CMYK format, but you’ll work on them in RGB space. You can enable soft-proofing and colorpick in CMYK format however).

As for a release date, Jehan has tentatively said it’ll be this year: 2022 annual report - GIMP

I especially look forward to non-destructive layers and non-destructive filters (Filter/Adjustment Layers, Layer Effects).
That has been the major drawback of GIMP compared to Photoshop for many years for me.

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What does non-destructive mean?

Claus

Hello @Claus_Cyrny

What does non-destructive mean?

Here it is:

And here is the changelog related to the next unstable version of GIMP 3 (2.99.16):

BTW, I have been using GIMP myself for nearly 20 years now. Time flies :slight_smile:

:slight_smile:

Interesting comment and I totally respect your opinion on this, but I have found adjustments layers underwhelming and never use them. I appreciate some of their advantages such as PSD file size if saving the work in progress file, but for me I prefer to work with duplicate layeres and masks which have the disadvantage of much bigger xcf files. However, I agree this would help many PS users to migrate comfortably to GIMP.

Probably for me I would like to see some of the GMIC features just incorporated straight into the basic GIMP build. There are also some nice scripts fu written for GIMP which would be nice if it can just be incorporated into GIMP. Since I am not a coder I might be talking rubbish and am happy to stand corrected on what should be incorporated. Just please don’t incorporate Adobe’s subscription model. Which obviously you won’t.

Adjustment layers also have an advantage if you have a stack and make a change in the middle. Layers above the modified layer don’t have to be explicitly updated since they’re transparent and allow the change to propagate upward. I use both duplicate and adjustment layers in Affinity Photo, but for different reasons.

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