Non-Destructive Fun

It's been a long wait, but the latest Gimp release offers a nondestructive workflow and an improved codebase that promises future enhancements.

- By Michael Reed

The wait is over. After several years of work, the Gimp development team has unleashed version 3 of the premier open source image editing application. Gimp 3 [1] mixes changes under the hood with new features that improve both the workflow and capabilities of the program.

Headlining this release, more of Gimp’s features now fit within a nondestructive approach. In other words, you can make changes to an image without committing to them. This includes images that have been saved and then reloaded in Gimp’s native XCF format, which means that you retain full edit-ability and can back out of changes at any time, a boon both for individual users and collaborative teams.

Beyond this, nearly every area of the program has a few new features to offer. Read on for an overview of the improvements.

Checking It Out

Gimp 3 has replaced Gimp 2 in the repositories of the major Linux distributions such as Ubuntu. It’s also in the Flatpak and Snap repositories, but bear in mind that using these repositories may cause some extra hunting to find various internal Gimp folders if you intend to add extensions and custom scripts. Improvement in the management of add-ons is planned for later 3.x releases.

The user interface is the first point of contact for the user, and this now benefits from an improved Welcome dialog. It’s worth spending a bit of time here to scale the user interface to your liking (in the Personalize tab), and it helps that your choices are reflected in real time. In my case, I scaled things up in the areas of font and icon size and selected the Legacy (color) icon set (Figure 1). You can get back to this dialog, later, via the Help menu once you've dismissed it.