At long last, the GIMP 3.0 release candidate is available for testing, bringing the venerable image editing app one step closer to its next big release.

GIMP is an open source image editing app that is often compared to Adobe Photoshop. Despite its popularity, the current 2.x series release has been around for two decades. The team has been working on 3.0 for some time, bringing the app into closer feature parity with Photoshop.

As the developers explain, GIMP 3.0 RC1 is now available for testing, and could well become the final release.

So, what exactly is a “release candidate” (RC)? A release candidate is something that might be ready to be GIMP 3.0, but we want the larger community to test it first and report any problems they find. If user feedback reveals only small and easy to fix bugs, we will solve those problems and issue the result as GIMP 3.0. However, we hope and expect a much larger audience to try out 3.0 RC1 – including many people who have only been using 2.10 up until now. If larger bugs and regressions are uncovered that require more substantial code changes, we may need to publish a second release candidate for further testing.

An important milestone that had to be crossed before RC1 could be released was the finalization of the public API, giving developers the ability to migrate their plugins and scripts from 2.x to 3.0.

Since the API is now stable, plug-in and script developers can begin porting their 2.10 scripts based on this release. You can find initial API documentation on our developer site. We intend to add more tutorials and porting guides here during the release candidate phase. We also encourage you to check out the Script-fu and Python plug-ins in our repository to see working examples of the new API.

One of the biggest changes to 3.0 is the addition of non-destructive editing, one of the main differences between Photoshop and GIMP. The team has continued to improve on the feature, as well as added a way for users to continuing using the old method if they desire.

Since our last update, we have continued to make improvements and bug fixes to our non-destructive filter code. Many of these issues were reported by Sam Lester during the developing and testing of his third-party GEGL filters.

While non-destructive filters have been a very popular addition to GIMP 3.0, some early adopters have requested that we provide a way to return to the original destructive workflow. Therefore, we have added an optional “Merge Filters” checkbox at the bottom of NDE filters. If enabled, the filter will be immediately merged down after it is committed. Note that filters can not be applied destructively on layer groups – in those cases, the option to merge filters is not available.

The release candidate also includeds user interface improvements and a host of other features.

Given the increasing cost of tools like Canva, as well as tools like Photoshop costing a monthly subscription fee, GIMP 3.0 could potentially see a major influx of users.