GIMP

I was young, poor and like everyone else around me - it was the age of "cracked software". So, instead of boring you to death, the first time I needed a professional graphical software it was Photoshop. But each new Photoshop version came with a problem - you needed either money to buy a license or risk to get a virus. I was never a fan of "cracked" software back then. I recall I tried Photoshop in trial mode for 30 days but decided to look for an alternative. That's how I found GIMP back then - maybe I should've started with this.

I installed the 3.2 update last March and my complaints about the 8-bit limits are finally over. And yes I still see folks whining online that it isn't Photoshop - me being one of them 20 years ago (LOL). Obviously it isn't. I refuse to pay for a commercial software each month to edit some holiday snaps once or twice a year while their servers scan my private files (sorry for my rant).

Back to GIMP, the entire backend runs on GEGL now. That means proper 32-bit floating point precision per channel instead of the old 8-bit integer restrictions. Gradients used to band horribly like a bad 90s JPEG but they look correct now. The engine chops the image into small tiles and only calculates the pixels visible on your screen. I recall crashing an old PC with less than 1 GB of RAM trying to load a massive TIFF file back in the day - the reset button was like swearing and an instant mental recovery, at least for me. Now the software swaps those tiles to disk so you can edit huge files without the system freezing up.

They also added non-destructive editing.

I waited so many years for this. You used to apply a Gaussian blur and the pixels were permanently modified. You could not fix it the next day. GEGL stores filters as nodes in a Directed Acyclic Graph so it acts like a recipe and you can just tweak the blur radius later. They threw in Link Layers for 3.2 as well so external files keep their quality when you scale them.

A little bit of history

The entire reason this update took roughly ten years was the migration from GTK2 to GTK3. GTK is the widget library Peter Mattis wrote in 1995 because he hated the commercial Motif toolkit. He and Spencer Kimball were Berkeley students doing a compiler class assignment and accidentally built the foundation for GNOME, XFCE and half the Linux desktops on earth. Richard Stallman wandered past them in 1997, had a quick chat and that is how the "G" changed from General to GNU.

That GTK3 move sounds horribly boring but it fixed HiDPI displays so the icons aren't the size of ants on a 4K monitor. Wayland support on Linux actually works now including tablet input which used to be a total circus. Windows gets proper dark mode integration and the title bar merges into the canvas to give you a few more pixels of space.

I know some people would say it took them twenty years to figure out people want to select two things at once. Literally twenty years of only having one active layer at a time because the old procedural database was hardwired for single drawables. Re-engineering that was a nightmare but in 3.2 you can finally grab three layers, a path and a channel and move them all together. I don't know what to say, after all it was always a free product but if you're a young person and just discovered GIMP - you are lucky and have less reasons to be upset with a free and now a great tool.

They finally put Python 2.7 in the grave. Scripts run on Python 3 through GObject Introspection now so you can use NumPy and SciPy directly inside your plugins. Massive deal for batch processing because the old gimpfu module and the Global Interpreter Lock made everything painfully slow. Script-Fu is still hanging around though. That old TinyScheme thing got updated for the version 3 protocols so your ancient scripts from 2004 will mostly still run. As an old user, I appreciate that kind of backwards compatibility.

Format handling is actually usable for professionals now.

WebP works after they squashed a lossless bug in 3.0.8, AVIF is native, HEIF from your phone works out of the box and PSD export handles clipping paths and CMYK profiles. For the science crowd FITS support handles the 32 and 64-bit floating point data that astronomers need. That matters a lot. Astrophotographers and people pulling data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory trust this software because unlike JPEG which throws away data based on human eyeballs, FITS preserves every photon count and the software doesn't mangle it. Forensic investigators use it for the exact same reason. Zero telemetry and no hidden cloud filters altering evidence. I don't know how to say this but just bit-level honest editing.

Don't even get me started on this modern generative AI cloud nonsense.

You upload a private photo to their server, pay them credits and they process it on models trained on stolen data. GIMP-ML and the Intel OpenVINO plugins let you run Stable Diffusion locally on your own NPU or GPU. Your image never leaves your physical desk. Super-resolution and semantic segmentation done entirely offline for free. That is how software is supposed to work. I am old enough to remember when you owned your tools instead of renting them from a landlord who reads your mail. Again, another personal rant, actually there is more to say about AI cloud but I need to stop here.

Quick plug for G'MIC before I forget - it is available for download from dAppCDN as well. GREYC's Magic for Image Computing is made by David Tschumperlé a great person and the main developer and project manager of G'MIC. Over 500 filters, denoising that destroys paid plugins, spectral decomposition and weird artistic rendering. If you install GIMP and skip G'MIC you are doing it wrong. Of course, G'MIC is also free and open source.

CMYK is still a headache.

I am not a fanboy or I just don't get it so I will admit it. They have soft-proofing and babl conversions for exporting to TIFF but the core is still sRGB. The developers say native CMYK will take years. If you do print work for a living you will still be bouncing files through Scribus for the final separation. It is annoying. The Text Tool is clunky. The Paths tool confuses anyone who learned the Photoshop Pen tool. But expecting a Photoshop clone is a trap. I have to say it - I did this many times. I found a paid product, let's say Photoshop and expect GIMP to offer the same, identical features - but again going off-topic. Let's just say it has its own logic and once you stop fighting it the workflow makes perfect sense.

Beginners always get stuck (me included) on the exact same things.

There is no Circle Tool. You use Ellipse Select and then click Edit then Stroke Selection. The eraser has soft edges by default so you have to tick Hard edge for pixel accuracy. If your edits are getting clipped by a yellow dashed box you need to go to Layer then Layer to Image Size to extend the boundary. Image Scale changes the actual resolution but Canvas Size just changes your workspace.

Floating Selections confuse everyone - just click the anchor icon or make a new layer to commit the pixels. Write those down on a sticky note.

Alternatives

You have a lot of alternatives both free and paid ones - but I will mention only a few:

Free Alternatives: Krita, Paint.NET, Darktable, RawTherapee, Pixlr Editor etc.

Paid Alternatives: Adobe Photoshop, Affinity Photo, Luminar Neo, CorelDRAW etc.

As a conclusion

The professional open source stack is GIMP for raster, Inkscape for vector, Darktable for RAW processing and Scribus for publishing. Game developers use it for sprite sheets in Godot and Unity. Krita has the digital painting crown right now because their brush engine is better but for actual photo manipulation GIMP is still king. Affinity Photo 2 is a great one-time purchase but it is proprietary, lacks scripting and doesn't handle scientific formats.

The project survived for over thirty years purely on volunteer effort without any corporation behind. I can only imagine some didn't like this project. Most creative apps today force you to buy a monthly subscription and create a cloud account. If you've read my other reviews, you know that I am a big fan of clean software. What I mean by that: GIMP just sits on your local drive and minds its own business - your data stays on your computer.

Finally, one thing I can't lie about is that I was always complaining. How do I do that, that app X does it easier etc. Listen, it is incredibly much, much easier nowadays to benefit from GIMP. If the interface bothers you then just spend ten minutes learning it. What do I mean by that - you have a free AI tool everywhere - just ask how to do that and it will guide you step by step. I donated to GIMP project several times in the past because using it for many years without paying anything felt wrong. GIMP project and the people behind deserve it and I encourage everyone to donate, especially if you paid for a commercial alternative - make sure to send some love!

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