GIMP

For most of its existence this program was described the same way, as the free one you put up with. GIMP spent a long stretch without a major release while the criticisms accumulated, and the overhaul that eventually arrived addressed most of them directly rather than working around them.

Knowing which complaints are now historical and which remain accurate is the useful thing an article about it can provide, because a great deal of what people repeat about it stopped being true.

GIMP image editing itself was never the problem. Selection, layers, masks, paths, retouching and the filter set have been capable for a very long time.

Pasting no longer traps you

Start with the small GIMP thing, because it illustrates how long the irritations persisted. Pasting used to produce an intermediate state that was neither a layer nor part of the image, requiring a further action before you could continue working. Every newcomer met it, nothing else behaved that way, and it confused people for two decades.

It is gone. A paste now creates a layer immediately, exactly as it does in every other layer-based editor.

That single change removes the most common reason people abandoned the program in their first hour, and it is a fair marker for the rest of the overhaul.

Filters can now be adjusted after the fact

The GIMP absence working designers complained about most, and the one that mattered. Applying a filter used to alter the pixels permanently. Changing your mind meant undoing back to before it, redoing whatever came after, and applying it differently.

Filters now stack as live effects on a layer. Each remains adjustable or removable afterwards, and editing the layer underneath leaves the effects in place, so text can be rewritten with its shadow and glow still applied.

The internal detail behind that is worth a line. The effects operate in high precision and only convert to the image’s own format when merged, rather than converting back and forth at every stage, which is what prevented the earlier attempts from being usable.

What is still missing is the equivalent of grouping several layers into a single reusable object, which remains on the list rather than in the program.

For painting and illustration rather than photographic work, Krita has had these capabilities for considerably longer.

The print question, stated precisely

Here is where the honest GIMP answer is neither of the two things people say. The old position was no support for the colour model that printing uses. The new position is not full support either, and the distinction matters if print is your work.

Colour models including the printing one are now handled natively by the underlying pixel library. Files can be exported in that model for the common formats, and metadata from the commercial editor’s own files loads and saves correctly.

Soft proofing is the practical part. A printing profile can be loaded and the image viewed through it while you continue working in the ordinary colour space, so you see what the press will do without working in the press’s terms.

What remains absent is editing directly in that colour model, with the channels available as channels. A retoucher who works that way still cannot, and anybody preparing artwork for a printer who accepts ordinary colour files, which most now do, is unaffected.

It does not use your graphics card

The GIMP limitation nobody advertises and reviewers notice immediately. Operations run on the processor. The commercial equivalent has used graphics hardware for heavy work for a long time, so an operation that completes instantly there produces a few seconds of waiting here.

That is not a small difference on large images with several effects stacked. It is the reason the program feels slower even when it is not doing less, and the only remedy available is a faster processor.

The rendering engine underneath is where that would eventually change, and hardware acceleration through it is part of the ongoing work rather than something present today.

Colour handling caught up quietly

The GIMP improvement that matters to photographers and gets no attention.

Wide gamut spaces are now worked in natively rather than being converted down, which preserves colour information that the earlier behaviour discarded.

High precision per channel has been available for a while and is what makes heavy adjustment survivable, since repeated operations on eight bits per channel visibly degrade gradients and shadow detail.

Together those mean a photograph can go through a substantial edit without the banding and posterisation that used to betray where it had been.

For reducing an image to a web-sized file afterwards, a compressor that previews what each setting does to the picture shows the result before you commit.

The interface, honestly

Being fair about the remaining GIMP complaint, since it is the one people still make. The default arrangement is recognisably the same as it was, and single window mode, which most people want, is a setting rather than the default. Icon rendering on high resolution displays was fixed and a welcome screen now offers the theme choice immediately rather than leaving it in preferences.

So it looks better and behaves better and it has not been redesigned. Somebody arriving from the commercial editor will still find tools in unexpected places and shortcuts that differ.

That is a real cost and it is a learning cost rather than a capability one, which is a different complaint from the ones this program used to deserve.

Plugins and scripting

The GIMP extension arrangement is why the program does more than it ships with.

A scripting interface allows operations to be automated and new functions written, and the plugin ecosystem covers effects, batch processing and format support that the base program omits.

The overhaul modernised the interface plugins use, which broke older ones and required them to be updated. Most of the widely used ones were, and anything obscure may not have been, which is worth checking if a particular plugin is why you use the program.

For vector work, which this does not do, Inkscape is the counterpart and the two are commonly used together.

Who it suits now

Being direct about GIMP now, since the answer changed. Somebody doing photographic editing, retouching, composition and web graphics gets a program that does what they need without a subscription, and the reasons to avoid it have largely been removed.

Somebody preparing work for commercial print who edits in the printing colour model directly still cannot do that here. Somebody whose livelihood depends on speed will feel the absence of graphics acceleration on every heavy operation.

And somebody who simply wants to crop a photograph and adjust its brightness is installing a great deal more than they need, for which a lighter editor with layers and nothing else is the better answer.

Conclusion

GIMP spent long enough without a major release that people assumed it had stopped, and what arrived addressed the criticisms rather than deflecting them. Filters that stay editable, pasting that behaves normally, proper colour handling and a printing profile you can proof against are the things designers said were missing, and they are there.

Judge it now on what actually remains. There is no graphics card acceleration, so heavy work waits on your processor, and editing directly in the printing colour model is still not possible. Those are specific, nameable limitations rather than the vague dismissal this program used to attract, and for most photographic and web work neither of them will touch you.