It's a mostly bug fix version of the prior release candidate. So there is not much new stuff to talk about. The only thing I want to mention is, that GIMP 3 makes me believe in Half-Life 3 again.
The non destructive filter/styling stuff seems like a massive improvement imo. For people making complex scenes with effects applied to each layer this makes it so you can easily modify individual aspects of a layer after the fact.
https://www.gimp.org/news/2024/12/27/gimp-3-0-RC2-released/#gegl-filter-api
The non destructive filter was already implemented and is not new in RC2. So I assume whats new is the GEGL filters new API.
This version allowed me to do the heaviest image editing I've ever dine with ease. Granted I might have a leg up here because I've never touched PhotoShop, only GIMP, so the learning curve was very small for me.
I found a good review:
Weren’t they gonna change the name or something?
According to the roadmap at https://developer.gimp.org/core/roadmap/ its not planned to change the name.
A few years ago there was some news about a fork called glimpse, but nobody cared so it died quickly.
It was more than just a name and brand change, such as a workflow and look similar to Photoshop. And they had plans to introduce new functionality.
Maybe they should have put that more into the focus, but everything that I had read about it back then was always only about the name change.
They should have focused on the name change, to prove that there is a demand for "GIMP but with another name". Everything else can be done in the main project or any fork, and that those don't exist show that the manpower needed for that isn't really available.
There was a separate project that changed the name to "Glimpse", and then got too many other great ideas for the few people they had to actually get somewhere and it dissolved.
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