GIMP

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a versatile raster graphics editing program

Wilber, the official GIMP logo image by the GIMP Team (Image rights)

Description

The GNU Image Manipulation Program, more commonly known as GIMP, is a versatile, full-featured image-editing package that is commonly used for photo editing and retouching. GIMP is released under the GNU General Public License, making it free software (also known as open-source software), a type of software that protects the freedoms of the end user to share, modify, and copy the program. GIMP offers a feature set comparable in many ways with proprietary software offered by Adobe and others. Combined with other free software tools such as UFRaw and gThumb, GIMP is an essential part of the digital photography workflow for photographers who wish to avoid the license restrictions of proprietary software, and indeed the financial cost of most proprietary software.

GIMP is included as standard software in various major GNU/Linux distributions, including RedHat Fedora. It has been dropped from Ubuntu (because GIMP targets advanced users while Ubuntu itself is designed to be palatable for beginners); however, it can easily be installed for Ubuntu.

Available platforms include:

• GNU/Linux (i386, PPC)
• Microsoft Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7)
• Mac OS X
• Sun OpenSolaris
• FreeBSD

Features

Features of GIMP are comparable with other versatile photo editing tools. A sampling of features that may be of interest to photographers include:

• Corrections for perspective
• Corrections for lens barrel distortion
• Support for most common raster image formats
• Plug-in support for most RAW image formats
• Transformation tools (e.g. rotate, scale, shear, flip)
• Full alpha channel support
• Full suite of anti-aliased painting tools
• Full suite of selection tools
• Custom brushes and patterns
• Foreground extraction tool
• Powerful gradient editor and blend tool
• Multiple undo/redo
• Editable text layers
• SVG path import/export
• Advanced scripting capabilities with a huge library of community developed filters and scripts

Features often cited as absent from GIMP but offered by Adobe Photoshop are non-destructive editing and high bit-depth support. Both are now provided by the Generic Graphics Library (GEGL), which is being integrated into GIMP and should be generally available in version 2.8. The GEGL library will also eventually provide GPU-side rendering through OpenCL support.

History

In 1995 Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis developed the General Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) at the University of California, Berkeley; the first public release of GIMP was v0.54 in 1996. The Free Software Foundation adopted GIMP as part of the GNU Project in 1997, changing the name to "GNU Image Manipulation Program". GIMP is developed as part of GNU's GNOME project primarily by volunteers. The graphic user interface software layer developed for GIMP, known as the GIMP Tool Kit (GTK), was adopted by GNOME as the foundation of the standard GNU/Linux desktop user interface."

The GNU GPL makes it easy for programmers to create forks and variants of GIMP that better suit their needs, leading to a variety of derived applications. The most famous of these is CinePaint (previously called Film GIMP), which became widely used for motion picture visual effects and animation, including well-known films such as the Harry Potter series, The Last Samurai, and The Lord of the Rings.

Links

• GIMP.org
• "Comparison of raster graphics editors", Wikipedia