I remember years ago reading about how the GEGL backend would one day enable some “non-destructive editing” features; I just decided to figure out how that works and I see it was sort-of implemented a long time ago but in 3.0 the UI is much better: many things under the Filter menu now have a Merge filter checkbox in their dialog. When that box is unchecked, then applying the filter will make it a (non-destructive!) layer effect and an fx icon will appear for the layer (in the dockable layers dialog, which you can reach with ctrl-L if it isn’t visible). You can apply any number of layer effects, and when you click the fx icon you can reorder them or modify their settings. Very cool!
Another tip (not new to 3.0): you can type
/
to open the Search actions window, which lets you quickly find various functionality without needing to dig through menus to figure out where something is :)If you want to try a 3.0 release candidate before it is released, it’s easy to install it from the flathub-beta repo as described here. (That page is embarrassingly out of date and says “The current development release of GIMP is 2.99.6 (2021-04-26)” but if you follow the instructions there you’ll currently get version
3.0.0~rc3
which is the latest release candidate from earlier this month.)They actually got a GTK3 based release out before GTK3 went EOL. Congratulations!
Can they update ti GTK4 based before that goes EOL? :D
Hasn’t this been in the works for like 5 years
It’s been about to release in two weeks for a lot of two weeks.
And then what are the odds that it’s still a decade behind photoshop?
Feel free to contribute any features you feel it is missing
I am always rooting for GIMP but man are they behind the big dog Adobe, as loathe as I am to say that.
Yeah, I wish for a “Blender” moment for GIMP. Big improvements to the UI/UX to bring more (non-tech) users and code modernization to bring in devs.
After a decade of watching the GIMP community and leadership refuse obvious UI changes insisting it’s just “different” as well insisting on a name we can’t deal with in schools I’m not convinced they’re even serious anymore. My new hope is for the Graphite project to get where it wants to be.
There’s a reason gimp forums are full of first time artists posting pony’s while every competitor open or not is trying new things. There is some new young devs adding amazing things to GIMP (finally), I hope they can steer this into better waters but I’m beyond sceptical.