GIMP image editor announced the third release candidate for the next major 3.0 series yesterday, with dozens of bug-fixes, requests, and translation updates.

The new release fixed crash and stability issues when working on Wayland. The new GIMP running with most recent GTK 3.24.48 fixed freeze with certain actions on KDE/Wayland, and crash when dragging layers and text glitches in certain widgets with Right-To-Left languages.

The new RC3 release made a big change in how filters work. Instead of converting filter output to and from the original image’s bit-depth when stacked, it now only converts when the filter is meant to be merged in.

The release also introduced new gimp-drawable-merge-filter PDB call allows Script-fu writers to use labels to specify filter properties.

There’s as well new named-argument syntax, inspired by the Racket Scheme variant. All the functions generated from plug-ins’ PDB procedure must now be called with it. The benefit is that orders of arguments did not matter anymore when calling PDB procedures from the C API, as well as all introspected bindings.

For Linux users, the AppImage package that was introduced in last RC release is now official! Meaning you can now easily try out the image editor without installation. Just grab the package, add executable permission, finally run to launch the program.

Other changes in GIMP 3.0 RC3 include:

• Thread-safe projection changes to fix potential multi-threading crashes.
• Hide “private” functions, and show the previously hidden public functions in Procedural DataBase browser.
• Support loading 16-bits-per-channel LAB PSDs.
• Support loading DDS images with BC7.
• Load images from Google Drive and other remote without having to manually select a file format to try opening it with.
• Plug-in developers no longer have to make custom file chooser buttons.
• Working on support for importing color profiles in BMPs.
• Update CNS plug-in with support for ic05 icon types and ARGB icon formats.
• For more, see the official release note.

How to Get GIMP 3.0 RC3

The GIMP website provides official packages for Linux, macOS, and Windows, through the link below:

For Linux, they include the AppImage and Flatpak package that run in sandbox environment.

For Ubuntu users who prefer the native .deb package, I’ll build the new release package into this unofficial PPA in next few days. However, the .deb package will NOT include some bug-fixes due to outdated GTK3 libraries in Ubuntu repositories.