GIMP 3.0 RC 1 is a preview of a massive update to this open source image editor

GIMP is a free and open source image editing application that’s been around for more than 26 years, and which is a powerful, versatile app that’s often compared to Photoshop.

This week the team launched the first release candidate for GIMP 3.0, which will be the biggest update in years, bringing significant changes to the user interface and feature set. It’s available now from the GIMP Development Version downloads page.

From a UI standpoint, GIMP 3.0 brings a new logo, updated splash screen with new art (and a promise that the splash screen will be updated more frequently to show off art from community members), and icons that look better on screens with high pixel density.

GIMP 3.0 is also built using the GTK3 toolkit, something that the GIMP team has been working toward for years.

In terms of feature changes, GIMP 3.0 brings:

• Improved color management
• Support for non-destructive filters
• Support for adding TIFFs with Autodesk Sketchbook format layers as well as Photoshop format layers
• Support for BMP files with 64 bits per image
• New filters
• New file conversion processes

GIMP 3.0 RC1 also includes bug fixes, translation updates, and a whole bunch of other code changes. And it introduces a stable version of the GIMP 3.0 API, which means that developers can begin working to port scripts and plugins that worked with GIMP 2.10 to work with version 3.0.

The new software is also designed to be backward-compatible though, so you should be able to open XCF project files created in GIMP 2.10 or earlier and work with them in GIMP 3.0.

The last time GIMP had an update significant enough to warrant this kind of version number change was twenty years ago when GIMP 2.0 was released. But a lot of work has been going on behind the scenes. You just couldn’t necessarily access all of the latest updates and features if you were running a stable build of GIMP, because they were only available in development builds.

In the GIMP 3.0 RC1 announcement, the team says that its “restructuring our development process to decrease time between release” so that users don’t have to wait as long to try out new features.

So after the final release of GIMP 3.0 is available, developers will prioritize “smaller, featured focused releases” in hopes of pushing out GIMP 3.2 within a year.