[HN Gopher] GIMP 3.2 released
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GIMP 3.2 released
Author : F3nd0
Score : 184 points
Date : 2026-03-14 19:51 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gimp.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gimp.org)
| Jabrov wrote:
| The lack of GenAI integration is actually refreshing
| nirv wrote:
| Do you suggest using manual brushes instead of content-aware
| fill, or am I supposed to not want to retouch the images in the
| way that GenAI makes so quickly and easily? My argument is that
| applications probably should provide useful tools for solving
| practical problems, regardless of their implementation details.
| cyberjunkie wrote:
| There are other applications with that implemented, with
| GenAI too.
| mikae1 wrote:
| Content-aware fill has been in PS since 2010 I believe, long
| before the genAI craze.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Photoshops recent AI rotate tool looks useful compared to these
| features GIMP is adding.
| tejohnso wrote:
| Love GIMP. Always capable of doing anything I need done with
| raster images or even PDFs. Lately I've been opening PDFs and
| lightening the pages so that they can be printed without wasting
| a bunch of toner on backgrounds that are meant to be white but
| were scanned in as a light grey.
| tartoran wrote:
| I assume you don't do this manually and you're doing some kind
| of scripting, can you describe your process?
| nickjj wrote:
| Being able to scale an image without losing quality is going to
| be handy. I always found it odd that scaling down an image now
| and then scaling it back to its original size 2 seconds later
| with the same tool resulted in a loss of quality and having to
| delete the layer, then re-import the image to get the original
| quality back.
|
| This plugin
| https://github.com/LinuxBeaver/Gimp_Layer_Effects_Text_Style...
| also makes adding text effects with GIMP pretty good. This is
| unrelated to 3.2 but turned out to be a necessity for me.
| vunderba wrote:
| Nice - all actions performed on a layer should retain a hidden
| "raw original" so we get non-destructive transforms.
| cmyk_student wrote:
| It's because each transform was "destructive" (like filters use
| to be by default). What link & vector layers do instead is
| store a transform matrix, so each transform just updates the
| matrix instead of actually re-rasterizing the layer each time.
|
| We were hoping to expand that feature to _all_ layer types for
| 3.2, but we ran out of time to properly test it for release. It
| 'll like be finished for the next minor release.
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| It sounds like you are a gimp developer. Curious about the
| use of AI to work on it. Do the gimp devs use AI to write
| code?
| locusofself wrote:
| I see you are getting downvoted but I don't blame you for
| this question. I've been curious about what developers of
| established products are doing with LLM assisted coding
| myself.
| Alupis wrote:
| Like most of us, they're certainly using ai-assisted
| auto-complete and chat for thinking deep. I highly doubt
| they're vibe coding, which is how I interpret the
| parent's question and probably why they are being down
| voted.
| cmyk_student wrote:
| I can't speak for all of us, but generally no (in terms of
| GenAI at least). There are concerns about generated code
| not being compatible with GPL, and honestly a lot of the
| drive-by GenAI coded merge requests tend to not work.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| > I always found it odd that scaling down an image now and then
| scaling it back to its original size 2 seconds later with the
| same tool resulted in a loss of quality
|
| Maybe it's because I grew up with Paint Shop Pro 6 and such,
| but that seems completely normal and expected to me
| enriquto wrote:
| > I always found it odd that scaling down an image now and then
| scaling it back to its original size 2 seconds later with the
| same tool resulted in a loss of quality
|
| I'm honestly baffled at your surprise... say, if you crop an
| image, and 2 seconds later you enlarge it to its original size;
| do you expect to get the inital image back? Or a uniform color
| padding around your crop?
|
| Scaling is just cropping in the frequency domain. Behaviour
| should be the same.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| I use Gimp pretty sporadically but the latest UI refresh (I'm
| guessing introduced in 3.0?) completely baffles me.
|
| It might just be that it's better tailored for graphic designers,
| which I'm clearly not. But now I can't even figure out how to
| draw a square on screen. Let along anything clever.
| masfuerte wrote:
| Select a rectangle. Stroke or fill the selection.
|
| I agree it's a bit counter-intuitive, but afaik it's always
| worked like that.
| cmyk_student wrote:
| Hi! What was the last version of GIMP that you used before 3.0?
|
| We get an equal amount of "GIMP's UI never changes!" and "You
| changed too much of the UI in the latest version", so it's
| difficult sometimes to figure out the specific issues.
| purerandomness wrote:
| If you want to draw squares, you're probably looking for a
| vector drawing program, like Inkscape.
| Retr0id wrote:
| Does anyone else find non-destructive editing kinda unintuitive?
|
| I get the practical benefits of it, but it feels shoehorned in to
| an interface for doing destructive edits. Chained edits
| frequently interact in ways that confuse/surprise me.
|
| I think I'd rather do non-destructive edits via some sort of
| node-editor interface. (And to be honest most of the things I use
| GIMP for don't need non-destructive editing in the first place)
| stringfood wrote:
| "When I was a kid, when we shrunk a 200x200 image down to
| 100x100 we lost information forever, and we liked it that way.
| It was a simple time. A predictable time."
| Retr0id wrote:
| That is generally my intention when downscaling an image.
| cmyk_student wrote:
| The current non-destructive UI is a bit of a compromise - we
| can't really mix layers with NDE filters in the layer dock
| until GTK4 (from what I understand), so the pop-up menu is what
| we had to work with.
|
| You can check "Merge filter" at the bottom of the filter
| dialogue though, and it will automatically merge the filter
| like in 2.10 (and the setting is remembered going forward)
| bitwize wrote:
| This is one of those things I'd think geeks would geek out
| about, as nondestructive edits mean the steps to construct an
| image are stored, not just the final image--kinda like a monad
| in FP.
| Retr0id wrote:
| nondestructive edits are great, it's the interface that's
| weird
| dvh wrote:
| Can I finally Ctrl+s jpeg image? And no, export is not enough
| because first time it will ask for for path and compression level
| which it already knows. I just want to Ctrl+s and be done.
| F3nd0 wrote:
| It seems like you can assign this action to Ctrl + S, yes. See
| here: Edit - Keyboard Shortcuts - file -
| Overwrite [...]
|
| I think this would be awful default behaviour, but I guess it's
| nice to have the option if you really want it, and I was
| pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to find after reading
| your comment.
| necovek wrote:
| It used to be even simpler, though I am sure it caused all
| sorts of problems: for any Gtk+ program, if you hovered over
| a menu and pressed a new key combination, it would reassign
| the shortcut for that menu to what you just pressed. You
| still had to turn it on, and it was an amazing feature, but
| you'd occasionally reassign something you did not want to :)
| pxoe wrote:
| File - Overwrite file, that's been there for a while. It can be
| turned into a hotkey, it's unmapped by default, and I don't
| think that'd change nor should it change, given how user
| hostile that'd be, the long history of how it works in editors
| like that, and with how they lean towards non-destructiveness
| of it all. Also, that just sounds like perhaps a simpler editor
| would be a better fit, like Paint.
| orev wrote:
| Almost all programs treat the "Save" operation as something
| used with the native format, in this case XCF files. These
| preserve things like layers, etc. JPG and other formats are
| exports because after you close the file you can't get all that
| stuff back when you reopen it.
| purerandomness wrote:
| Why is then opening a JPEG not an Import?
|
| I get it, and when Photoshop changed this default, GIMP
| followed with changing this workflow. It used to be different
| in older versions of Photoshop and Gimp.
|
| Advanced user usually know exactly what they're doing, and
| opening a PNG or JPEG file, changing a few pixels, and saving
| it, should require as few key presses as possible.
|
| I don't want the UI to get in my way when I open->edit->save.
| hxorr wrote:
| When opening a jpg, it literally says "importing pic.jpg"
| when opening a jpg
| jbrnh wrote:
| 'Opening a JPEG' is creating a new image an importing the
| JPEG to it. ctrl-e on first use will establish the export
| setting. It's two clicks if you really want to overwrite
| the original. I think it would be very easy to accidentally
| and destructively overwrite the original image file if it
| was different, when ctrl-e is in muscle memory.
| quicon wrote:
| I find Gimp super useful and easy to learn. Using it to edit pdfs
| generated by NotebookLM is my new way of creating decks and
| presentations. Thanks for the great work.
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| Ah, PDF editting works?
|
| Didnt know that! Thanks for telling!
| AbuAssar wrote:
| Is it possible to train a model on all gimp features that will
| eventually let us prompt whatever edits we want and it'll
| automate gimp to achieve it?
| kernc wrote:
| Let everyone be reminded how joyful GIMP 2.10 menus used to look
| ...
|
| https://i.imgur.com/nVyMQBt.png
| cmyk_student wrote:
| If you mean the color icons, you can easily switch back to
| those in the Welcome Dialog that appears when you first open
| GIMP (look in the Personalize tab). It's the first thing I do
| when I install GIMP on a new machine. :)
| kernc wrote:
| Did you also manage to enable menu icons?
| cmyk_student wrote:
| That was a feature in GTK2 (the GUI library we use) that
| was removed in GTK3. We could try to fight the library and
| reimplement it ourselves, but it'd take a developer
| dedicated to do it. I miss the menu icons too. :(
| em-bee wrote:
| oh wow, i never realized that this is in such a convenient
| location. and you can't just change the icon style, but also
| disable the tool groups which was the most annoying change i
| found because it makes finding the right tool harder. (i'd
| love tool groups where the tools are grouped but not folded,
| or in a way where i can expand certain groups that i use
| often)
| rsaxvc wrote:
| Thank you for this.
|
| Also small world, floating point JPEG person here.
| cmyk_student wrote:
| Ah, hey! We've been busy with getting 3.2 finished, but I
| plan to go back and read over your latest message once
| we've recovered a bit. :)
| helij wrote:
| One of the first things I install on any new computer is Gimp.
| Thank you to all involved in the Gimp project.
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