GIMP 3.0.6 has been released as the latest stable version of this open-source, cross-platform, and free image editing software for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows platforms.
Coming four and a half months after GIMP 3.0.4, the GIMP 3.0.6 release introduces a new toggle in the Brushes and Fonts dialogs to allow brush and font previews to optionally follow the color theme, an alpha channel for certain transforms and on filter merge, and improves Photoshop brush support.
GIMP 3.0.6 also updates the Palette import feature with support for setting alpha values for image palette imports, better importing of Lab & CMYK ACB palettes, as well as support for palette format filters to the import dialog to make it more evident what palette formats are supported while hiding irrelevant files.
This release improves the sensitivity of filter actions to make sure they are set insensitive when relevant, especially for filters that can’t be run non-destructively, implements automatic selection of the next entry after deleting a palette entry, and adds support for applying filters on channels non-destructively.
Also improved in GIMP 3.0.6 is SVG export when exporting paths, the Palette grid to be drawn with the theme’s background color, the search pop-up to no longer pop up without an image, as well as the grid and list views, which can now be zoomed via scroll and zoom gestures.
Furthermore, GIMP now shows an undo step for Lock Content, resizes images to layers irrespective of selections, fixes Alpha to Selection on single layers with no transparency, and fills the mask with complete opacity instead of a completely transparent layer when creating a layer mask from the layer’s alpha and the layer has no alpha.
The Text tool has been updated in this release to ensure the default color is only changed when the user confirms the color change, the transform boundaries for preview of all the transform tools have been made multi-layer aware, and the Foreground Selection tool no longer creates a selection when no strokes are made.
The Print plug-in now pops a second dialog for fine-tuning prints for the Flatpak and Snap bundles, support for YCbCr decomposed images was improved, the Jigsaw plugin can now draw on transparent layers, the PDF export plugin no longer draws disabled layer masks, and Sphere Designer now uses spin scale instead of spin entries.
On top of that, GIMP 3.0.6 improves importing of JPEG 2000, TIFF, DDS, SVG, PSP, ICNS, DICOM, WBMP, Farbfeld, XWD, and ILBM image formats, as well as exporting of the FITS image format. It also improves C Source and HTML exporting to be run non-interactively too (e.g., from other plug-ins).
Some GUI changes are also present in this release, such as a better zoom step algorithm for data previews in the container pop-up, consistent naming patterns on human-facing options, various improvements to window management, and various CSS improvements for styling of the interface.
Under the hood, the AppImage bundle is built on Debian 13 “Trixie”, binary caching was improved with ORAS for the Flatpak bundle, the build scripts were made POSIX-compliant for better portability across platforms, and there’s a new nightly Snap package and a nightly Flatpak for AArch64 (ARM64).
You can download GIMP 3.0.6 right now from the official website as an AppImage universal binary that you can run on virtually any GNU/Linux distribution, or you can install it as a Flatpak app from Flathub. The source tarball is also available for download here if you fancy compiling GIMP from sources.
