GIMP Development Update

For the past few months, developers have been working on various features for the upcoming GIMP 3.4 release. The team has noticed that the changelog has become quite lengthy, which is a positive sign. As there haven't been many public progress reports recently, they are sharing details about some of the new features and user experience improvements that will be available in the first development release, GIMP 3.3.2. This list will not be exhaustive, but it should give an idea of GIMP's current development direction.

Maintainer Jehan has been focusing on developing a new project file format for GIMP. The current binary XCF format, which has been GIMP's primary project format since 1997, has some limitations, such as difficulty handling very large or complex projects. The new project file format will follow a zipped XML structure, allowing for faster saving since only parts of the file need to be updated instead of the entire file.

This change will also make auto-saving much more feasible. However, XCF will not be removed; backwards compatibility is crucial, and GIMP will continue to support loading XCFs in all future versions. New features will only be added to the new project file format once it is finalized.

During GIMP 3.2's development, the MyPaint brush engine was upgraded to a newer version. This brought new brushes and canvas interactions to the MyPaint Brush Tool, but the Spectral Blending feature was not included. Spectral Blending simulates the effects of blending physical pigments in digital art, creating new colors when blending certain colors.

Cassidie Grogan implemented this feature, and now there is a Spectral Blending checkbox in the MyPaint Brush Tool Options. If checked, the new blending method is used, with the strength controlled by the Pigment slider.

Another improvement made to MyPaint is an updated preview code that displays brushes at their full size instead of 48x48 pixels, fixing the issue of blurry previews on larger screens. Alx Sa has also been working on non-destructive filter code improvements. Filters can now be applied non-destructively to Layer masks, and the filter popover has been redesigned to show active filters for both the layer and its mask.

The Gradient Tool can be used non-destructively, allowing gradients to be added to the filter stack, toggled, rearranged, and deleted, with further editing possible using the Gradient Tool.

Regarding file formats, there has been significant work on PSD support. New contributor Frank Teklote improved compatibility with PSDs by creating a PSD metadata export procedure for TIFFs and JPEGs, complementing the existing import procedure. Jacob Boerema implemented PSD Descriptor import support, addressing the use of the undocumented Descriptors text format in modern PSDs.

This has led to improvements in PSD import support, including editable text layers, modern adjustment layers appearing as GEGL equivalents, and solid color shapes imported as vector layers. This work is ongoing, with contributions from GSoC students Akascape and Waris Maqbool, aiming to make it easier for GIMP users to interact with existing PSD projects.