GIMP 3.0 has finally arrived, and it's an excitingly feature-packed release

Summary

GIMP is one of the most iconic free and open-source PC photo editing programs.
GIMP first hit the scene back in the late 1990s, and has finally hit version 3.0 as of March 16 of this year.
GIMP 3.0 brings a number of new features to the table, in addition to a refreshed logo design.

In a new milestone release, the team behind GIMP has officially launched version 3.0 of the well-known photo-editing program — a whopping twenty-one years after the previous major numbered update first hit the web.

GIMP 3.0 officially arrived on March 16, and it brings with it a number of notable new features and enhancements. These include new layer organization tools, improved color management, enhanced format support, and an upgraded graphical toolkit.

“This is the end result of seven years of hard work by volunteer developers, designers, artists, and community members (for reference, GIMP 2.10 was first published in 2018 and the initial development version of GIMP 3.0 was released in 2020),” says the official GIMP Team in a blog post.

GIMP, which stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, is one of the most iconic photo-editing programs to ever grace the PC. GIMP is free and open-source, and it’s been around on both Windows and macOS for a great many years.

GIMP 3.0 includes a number of new features, in addition to a logo refresh

GIMP 3.0 is the first major update to the photo editor in over 2 decades

GIMP

GIMP 3.0 arrives with several new features to call its own, which makes sense given that it’s a major numbered release. The following are a few of the more notable upgrades that have been made over the previous 2.10 version release:

The addition of non-destructive and real-time image filtering
Better file exchange support, as well as improved support for exporting to Adobe Photoshop PSD files
An automatic layer expansion utility
New text styling and format options
Improvements to the organization of image layers

In addition to these new features, the GIMP 3.0 experience arrives with a refreshed logo in tow — the program’s Wilber mascot animal now sports a flatter and less skeuomorphic look overall.

A new version 3.0-specific splash screen is also on display upon first boot of the software, which appears to be a uniquely designed landscape image. This particular piece of digital art is attributed to a creator by the name of Sevenix.

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GIMP is great, but does 3.0 do enough to stave off competition?

These days, a number of photo-editing competitors are vying for total market domination

Canva / Pocket-lint

For as exciting as the 3.0 release of GIMP is, I can’t help but wonder whether there’s enough here to drive new market share for the storied photo editor. Aside from the usual suspects — Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, Affinity Photo, and others — a new crop of web-based editors have recently taken the world by storm.

Perhaps most noteworthy of all is Canva, an online graphic design and image-editing platform with a user-friendly design that makes it an ideal choice for beginners. By contrast, GIMP maintains a more traditional user interface guided by PC operating system principals of the 1990s and 2000s.

GIMP is certainly a powerful tool, and its interface is intuitive for those already acclimated to traditional photo-editing software, but version 3.0 doesn’t do much in terms of improving the discoverability of features or offering a ‘beginner mode,’ as it were.

…it’s great to see the continued support of free and open-source image editing suites like GIMP.

Apple also appears keen to take on the photo-editing market, at least if its recent acquisition of Pixelmator is anything to go off of. In a world of big-tech software giants, there’s less air left in the room for community-driven and non-profit software to survive and thrive in.

In any case, it’s great to see the continued support of free and open-source image editing suites like GIMP, and I firmly believe that the program plays an important (if somewhat niche) role in today’s current digital app landscape.