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Gimp is a cross-platform image editor available for GNU/Linux, macOS, Windows and more operating systems. It is free software, you can change its source code and distribute your changes.
Whether you are a graphic designer, photographer, illustrator, or scientist, Gimp provides you with sophisticated tools to get your job done. You can further enhance your productivity with Gimp thanks to many customization options and 3rd party plugins.
Features
Customizable Interface
Each task requires a different environment and GIMP allows you to customize the view and behavior the way you like it. Starting from the widget theme, allowing you to change colors, widget spacings and icon sizes to custom tool sets in the toolbox. The interface is modulized into so called docks, allowing you to stack them into tabs or keep them open in their own window. Pressing the tab key will toggle them hidden.
Gimp features a great fullscreen mode allowing you to not only preview your artwork but also do editing work while using the most of your screen estate.
Photo Enhancement
Numerous digital photo imperfections can be easily compensated for using GIMP. Fix perspective distortion caused by lens tilt simply choosing the corrective mode in the transform tools. Eliminate lens’ barrel distortion and vignetting with a powerful filter but a simple interface.
Digital Retouching
Gimp is ideal for advanced photo retouching techniques. Get rid of unneeded details using the clone tool, or touch up minor details easily with the new healing tool. With the perspective clone tool, it’s not difficult to clone objects with perspective in mind just as easily as with the orthogonal clone.
Hardware Support
Gimp includes a very unique support for various input devices out of the box. Pressure and tilt sensitive tablets, but also a wide range of USB or MIDI controllers. You can bind often-used actions to device events such as rotating a USB wheel or moving a MIDI controller’s slider. Change the size, angle or opacity of a brush while you paint, bind your favorite scripts to buttons. Speed up your workflow.
File Formats
The file format support ranges from the common likes of JPEG (JFIF), GIF, PNG, TIFF to special use formats such as the multi-resolution and multi-color-depth Windows icon files. The architecture allows to extend Gimp’s format capabilities with a plug-in. You can find some rare format support in the GIMP plugin registry.
Thanks to the transparent virtual file system, it is possible to load and save files to from remote locations using protocols such as FTP, HTTP or even SMB (MS Windows shares) and SFTP/SSH.
To save disk space, any format can be saved with an archive extension such as ZIP, GZ or BZ2 and GIMP will transparently compress the file without you needing to do any extra steps.
What’s New
After seven years of active development, we are proud to announce the next major release of GIMP – GIMP 3.0! While the original focus was on updating to a newer GUI library, this release is packed with many new features, enhancements, and usability improvements. While we can’t cover every single change from 2.10, we want to highlight some of the biggest ones as you start exploring this release.
Updated GTK3 user interface
One of the main goals of this release was to upgrade our GUI library to GTK3. This was an intensive effort that involved changing every aspect of the code for our user interface. The benefits of this work include:
- Much better UI scaling on HiDPI screens, a common concern for users of GIMP 2.10.
- Much better support for tablet input.
- The theme system now uses CSS, which we hope will allow for users to more easily develop their own custom themes.
- GIMP 3.0 now runs natively on Wayland (though you can still run it on X11 as well)!
- A lot of important bugfixes which could not be backported to the GTK2 library we were using.
Non-destructive layer effects
Another big change introduced in GIMP 3.0 is non-destructive (NDE) filters. In GIMP 2.10, filters were automatically merged onto the layer, which prevented you from making further edits without repeatedly undoing your changes. Now by default, filters stay active once committed. This means you can re-edit most GEGL filters in the menu on the layer dockable without having to revert your work. You can also toggle them on or off, selectively delete them, or even merge them all down destructively. If you prefer the original GIMP 2.10 workflow, you can select the “Merge Filters” option when applying a filter instead.
Curves Non-destructive filter being applied to a portrait of Sofiia being edited in GIMP. Photo by Sofia (CC by-sa 4.0 International)
NDE filters can also be saved to XCF and reloaded for further editing. This means that if someone sends you an XCF project with NDE filters, you can make further adjustments on the image and text effects. You can also save and load XCF using third-party filters, although they will be discarded if you don’t have those filters installed.
GEGL filters can now also be found directly with the / search keyboard shortcut. This applies to third-party filters as well, which makes it easier to locate the right effect for your project.
Searching for filters with Search Actions
Finally GEGL operations (the infrastructure underlying filters in GIMP) are now even better integrated with GIMP thanks to new metadata allowing a filter to register into menus without wrapping code in GIMP. This is particularly useful for third-party developers wishing to write filters.
Some people might be pleased to know that a spiritual successor of the legacy Logos feature has appeared in recent versions of GEGL under the name “GEGL Styles”:
- Styling text with GEGL Styles filter
Color space management
Thanks to better integration with the babl and GEGL libraries, GIMP now has more extensive support for RGB color spaces beyond sRGB. For example, if you load an image with an AdobeRGB color profile, that information will be retained in all aspects of GIMP – allowing you to make whatever edits you need without losing color space information. This update also lays the groundwork for future CMYK and LAB image color modes.
This improved support of anyRGB spaces now spans across various dialogs, such as the Colors dockable window, the Foreground and Background selection dialog, the Color Picker info window, and more, better showing which space a color is shown in.
Color simulation and soft-proofing has also been improved in a variety of ways. Internally, we have ported more of it to use our babl color library, keeping the color processing consistent throughout GIMP. We have also consolidated soft-proofing options in a pop-over menu at the bottom-right corner of the status bar. If a CMYK profile is already attached to the image, you can click the icon to toggle soft-proofing on or off. You can also right-click the icon to quickly change the color profile, rendering intent, black point compensation, and other relevant options.
Welcome Dialogue
GIMP 3.0 now displays an optional Welcome Dialogue on start. This feature provides quick access to create or load new images to begin editing via the Create section.
The Personalize section makes it easy to quickly change several preference settings such as:
- Symbolic, Color, or Legacy icon styles
- Light, Gray, and Dark variants of the UI theme
- Using Tool Groups to condense icons in the toolbox
- Merging the menu toolbars
Usability Improvements
This release contains a lot of much requested updates to the GIMP user experience. A few of the most noticeable ones include:
Layers, Channels, and Paths
It is now possible to have multiple selected layers, channels, and paths! Previously users needed to manually click link icons in order to affect multiple layers. Now you can use standard shortcuts to select multiple items at once.
Layer locks have been moved from the dockable header to a pop-over menu that you can access next to each layer’s visibility icon. This allows you to more easily see the lock status of each item, especially now that you can have multiple layers, channels, or paths selected at once.
You can now organize layers with the new layer set feature. You can also search for layers by name, making it easier to find layers within a large project.
The New Image and New Layer dialogs have a new “Middle Gray (CIELAB)” fill option.
Off-Canvas Editing
Paint tools can now automatically expand the width and height of a layer as you draw! You can select “Expand Layers” in the tool options to enable drawing past the current boundaries of layers.
More features such as guides and auto-expanding layers can be used to work in the off-canvas space!
User Interface
GIMP’s interface further incorporates Right-to-Left language layouts in various widgets and dialogues.
We now better respect reduce motion and animation OS settings across the interface. Several animations and “easter eggs” no longer display based on your system settings. We implemented these fixes after feedback from users that these animations could cause motion sickness and other issues for certain people.
Many Legacy icons have been converted to SVG, allowing for cleaner scaling when the icon theme size is increased. New icons have also been created to better distinguish certain actions, like the multiple zoom options on the Navigation dockable.
The title bar on Windows now adapts to dark mode if you use a dark variant theme. You can also choose to merge the title bar with the menu to reduce the space it takes up on the screen.
Number range sliders have been updated to be larger and easier to grab. Due to GTK3, they also now use + and – icons rather than the more ambigious ^ and v icons.
A long-standing bug on macOS caused the UI text to become garbled for some users. This has been fixed thanks to an update to the Pango library bundled with GIMP 3.0!
Workflow and Short-Cuts
Copying and pasting now creates a new layer by default rather than a “floating selection”, which many users found confusing. Floating layers can still be created with the “Paste as Floating Data” option for those who prefer that workflow.
The search menu results now show the menu location for each action. If you’ve ever wondered where a particular filter or feature was located before, now you can quickly discover them! We’ve also added a help button to the action search, making it easier to learn more about how to use each feature.
Brush dynamics can now be turned off via the “Enable Dynamics” checkbox in tool options, rather than having to search for the “Dynamics Off” option in the list.
You can now customize the actions performed with right or middle clicks (or any other buttons, except the primary button which is reserved for tools) in Edit > Preferences > Canvas Interaction > Modifiers. For instance, you want to change your brush size with a right click rather than displaying the menu? You can do it! You want to disable Canvas Rotation because you don’t use this feature? It’s possible too! You want to activate your favorite filter on Alt + middle click? No problem!
On Wayland, you can also map tablet buttons to different actions as well. This update gives more options for tablet users to customize their workflow and easily apply important actions without switching input devices.
2 New Snapping options appeared in the View menu:
- “Snap to Bounding Boxes”: allows on-canvas snapping to either layer borders or center.
- “Snap to Equidistance”: allows to snap a layer to be at the same distance from a second one that this second one is to a third one, either horizontally or vertically.
Improved file format support
GIMP 3.0 brings support for many new file formats. Icon creators can now import and export macOS ICNS icons and Windows CUR and ANI cursors. Amiga enthusiasts can now load images from a number of ILBM/IFF formats. Newer formats like QOI and JPEG XL are also now supported, and import support for older formats like DCX, PAM, and WBMP allow for accessing archived images.
Read the complete release notes.
Note: The GIMP for macOS currently available package provides GIMP 2.10.38 and has not yet updated to the latest version, GIMP 3.0.0. We’re working on that, please check back later.
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