Development Update, August 2026 - GIMP

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Development Update, August 2026

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2026-08-16

by GIMP Team

For the past few months, we’ve been developing all kinds of features for<br>the future GIMP 3.4 release. We noticed recently that our<br>changelog<br>was getting quite long - a good problem to have!

While there’s been a lot going on internally, it’s been a while since we made a<br>public progress report. So we want to share details on some of the new features<br>and UX improvements that’ll be available in the first development release,<br>GIMP 3.3.2. This won’t be an exhaustive list (we have to save at least some<br>news for the release itself!) but hopefully it will give you some insight into<br>the current direction and progress of GIMP’s development.

New Project File Format

MyPaint Brush: Spectral Blending

Non-Destructive Editing

PSD Support Improvements

Native File Chooser Dialogs

User Experience and Interface Updates

Assorted Changes and Fixes

What’s Next

New Project File Format&para;

The big focus for maintainer Jehan recently has been developing a new project file format<br>for GIMP.

XCF has been GIMP’s primary project<br>format since 1997, and it has served many users well. Over time however, we’ve observed<br>more and more limitations of the binary XCF format.<br>Among other issues, it does not easily support very large or complex projects, such as<br>the multi-page and animation features currently planned for GIMP 3.6.

The new project file format will follow a more common "zipped XML" structure. While<br>the technical details are still being designed and implemented, this change will allow for<br>faster saving since we’ll only need to update parts of the file instead of the whole<br>thing each time. It will also set the stage for much desired features such as auto-saving,<br>which will now be much more feasible.

That said, XCF is not going away! Backwards compatibility is important to us,<br>and we will continue to support loading XCFs in all future versions of GIMP.<br>(For instance, we’re quite proud that a<br>XCF file made by a small company<br>for their logo in 1998 still renders the same way in the latest version of GIMP)

However, going forward we will only add support for saving/loading new features<br>in the new project file format once it is finalized.

MyPaint Brush: Spectral Blending&para;

During GIMP 3.2’s development, we<br>upgraded to a newer version<br>of the MyPaint brush engine. While this brought new brushes and canvas interactions to the<br>MyPaint Brush Tool,<br>one feature that was left out was Spectral Blending .

Spectral Blending simulates the effects of blending physical pigments in digital art. For example,<br>blending yellow and blue will produce a green color instead of darker yellow, and blending red and<br>yellow will create an orange mix.

Fortunately, new contributor Cassidie Grogan picked up the slack and implemented this feature.<br>There is now a Spectral Blending checkbox in the MyPaint Brush Tool Options. If checked, the new<br>blending method is used. You can control the strength of the blending with the Pigment slider.

Demonstration of MyPaint Spectral Blending

In addition, maintainer Michael Natterer improved the MyPaint Brush preview code to display at their<br>full size instead of 48x48 pixels. This fixes an issue where the previews appeared blurry on larger screens.

Non-Destructive Editing&para;

Alx Sa has continued making updates to our non-destructive filter code. To list a few:

You can now apply filters non-destructively to Layer masks ! To go along with this,<br>the filter popover has been redesigned by Reju to show the active filters<br>for both the layer and its mask, so you can interact with both on the same screen.

The Gradient Tool can now be<br>used non-destructively! If you check Editable Gradient in the Tool Options, the<br>gradient you create will be added to the filter stack like any other effect. You can<br>toggle its visibility, rearrange its position in the filter stack and delete it. You<br>can also edit the gradient, which will switch back to the Gradient Tool to let you<br>make further changes.

User interface with a live Gradient filter on the layer, and a live filter on the layer mask

Filters without dialogs (such as Invert) can now be applied non-destructively on non-raster<br>layers such as layer groups and link, text, and vector layers.

PSD Support Improvements&para;

Normally we list all file format updates in a combined section, but there<br>has been so much work done on PSD support (and by so many people) that<br>we wanted to highlight it in more detail.

First, new contributor Frank Teklote has been busy improving our compatibility<br>with PSDs. His big project for this release was creating a PSD metadata export procedure<br>for TIFFs and JPEGs. This complements our existing<br>PSD metadata import procedure,<br>meaning that if you import a JPEG with paths or a TIFF with layers (or create one in GIMP),<br>that information can now be retained in the exported image.

Another great thing about...