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GIMP

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Often, the name GIMP is used erroneously for the Gimp-Print printer driver set.
GIMP.app icon GIMP

A screenshot of GIMP version 2.2.8 running under Ubuntu Linux
Maintainer: The GIMP Team
Stable release: 2.2.10  (December 28, 2005) [+/-]
Preview release: 2.3.7  (February 8, 2006) [+/-]
OS: Cross-platform
Genre: Bitmap graphics editor
License: GPL
Website: www.gimp.org [2]

The GNU Image Manipulation Program or just GIMP is an open source free software bitmap graphics editor, a program for creating and processing raster graphics. It also has some support for vector graphics. The project was started in 1995 by Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis and is now maintained by a group of volunteers; it is licensed under the GNU General Public License.

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Overview

GIMP originally stood for General Image Manipulation Program. Its creators, Spencer Kimball and Petter Mattis, initially started GIMP as a semester-long project for a class at UC Berkeley. Both were integral members of eXperimental Computing Facility, an elite undergrad student club at Berkeley, whose official acronym XCF was paid tribute as file extensions of GIMP files. In 1997, after both Kimball and Mattis had graduated from Berkeley, the name was changed to GNU Image Manipulation Program when it became an official GNU project.

GIMP can be used to process digital graphics and photographs. Typical uses include creating graphics and logos, resizing and cropping photos, changing colors, combining images using a layer paradigm, removing unwanted image features, and converting between different image formats. GIMP can also be used to create simple animated images.

GIMP is also notable to some as the first major free software end-user application. Previous free software projects, such as GCC and the Linux kernel, were mainly tools created by programmers for programmers. GIMP is considered by some to be proof that the free software development process can create things non-geeks can use productively, and as such psychologically paved the way for such efforts as KDE, GNOME, Mozilla Firefox, OpenOffice.org, and various other applications that followed.

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Features

A screenshot of GIMP version 2.2.8 running under X11 on Mac OS X
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A screenshot of GIMP version 2.2.8 running under X11 on Mac OS X
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Brushes, colours, and painting tools

  • 48 standard brushes, plus facilities to create new ones
  • Brushes can be used in hard-edged, soft-edged, or eraser modes, or used to apply various effects
  • Palette with RGB, HSV, colour wheel, CMYK, and mixing modes, plus tools to pick colours from the image with various averaging options. Support for HTML colour codes.
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Selection and masking tools

  • Selection of rectangles, circles, contiguous regions, similar colours, or freehand selection
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Layers, transparency

  • Support for layers, including transparent layers, which can be shown, hidden, or made semitransparent
  • Transparent and semitransparent images
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Paths

  • Support for paths containing line segments or bezier curves. Paths can be named, saved, and painted with brushes, patterns, or various line styles
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Effects, scripts, and filters

  • Approximately 150 standard effects and filters
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Scripting

As well as interactive use, GIMP can be automated with macro programs. The built-in Scheme can be used for this, or alternatively Perl, Python, Tcl and (experimentally) Ruby can also be used. This allows the writing of scripts and plugins for GIMP which can then be used interactively; it is also possible to produce images in completely non-interactive ways (for example generating images for a webpage on the fly using CGI scripts) and for batch color correction and conversion of images. For simple automatable tasks, a package such as ImageMagick is likely to be quicker, but GIMP has much more powerful features.

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Development

GIMP Logos with Wilber, the GIMP mascot
GIMP Logos with Wilber, the GIMP mascot

GIMP was intended as a free software replacement for Adobe Photoshop, which is the dominant bitmap editor in the printing and graphics industries.

GIMP uses GTK+ as for building its user interface. GTK+ was initially part of GIMP, intended as a replacement for the proprietary Motif toolkit, which GIMP originally depended upon. GIMP and GTK+ were originally designed for the X Window System running on Unix-like operating systems, but have since been ported to Microsoft Windows, OS/2, Mac OS X and SkyOS.

The current stable version of GIMP is 2.2.10  (December 28, 2005). Major changes compared to version 1.2 include a more polished user interface and further separation of the user interface and back-end.

For the future it is planned to base GIMP on a more generic graphical library called GEGL, thereby addressing some fundamental design limitations that prevent many enhancements such as native CMYK support. However, implementation of this plan has been continually put off since 2000.

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Comparisons with other graphics editors

Missing features, which some graphics artists expect, include:

Benefits of GIMP system include:

  • Zero licensing costs, even for installations on many computers
  • Available for many types of computing system
  • Not dependant on any single company for updates or support
  • Freely redistributable, so can be shared on an intranet or given to friends
The same padlock after being touched up with the clone tool
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The same padlock after being touched up with the clone tool
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File Types

GIMP can open and save the following file formats:

GIMP can open but not save the following formats:

  • PDF document (.pdf)

GIMP can also save to the following formats which it cannot open:

  • HTML as a table with coloured cells (.html)
  • C source files as an array (.c or .h)
  • MNG animations (.mng)


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Availability, versions, and forks

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Linux distributions

GIMP is included as the standard image editor on most consumer Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Mandriva, and SUSE.

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GIMP for Windows

GIMP (along with the GTK+ toolkit) has been ported to the Microsoft Windows platform by Finnish programmer Tor "tml" Lillqvist[5] who started that project in 1997.

Currently, the Windows port is practically identical to the original version in terms of features and stability. The installation has been tremendously eased with the introduction of the binary installers[6]compiled by Jernej Simoncic[7]

The number of windows used by GIMP's interface (it doesn't put everything in a MDI window like some programs) can cause desktop clutter, which is especially apparent on systems like Microsoft Windows which are not equipped to deal with it.

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Gimp.app for Mac OS X

Gimp.app provides a self contained application bundle of GIMP for OS X. Gimp.app requires Apple's X11.app. Gimp.app is packaged by Aaron Voisine.

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Seashore for Mac OS X

Seashore is a program based on GIMP for Mac that uses the native Cocoa interface in OS X. The program is currently still in beta (0.1.8).

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GIMPshop

GIMPshop is a modification to GIMP, rearranging its user interface to mimic that of Adobe Photoshop

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Film Gimp/CinePaint

Film Gimp, now known as CinePaint, is a modification (forked from v. 1.0.4), adding 16-bit color depth and other improvements for use within the film industry.

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See also

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External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
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Official

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Third-parties

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GIMP Manual & Tricks

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GIMP articles and tutorials

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GIMP Community

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Notes

  1. ^  GIMP - The GNU Image Manipulation Program. URL accessed on November 20, 2005.
  2. ^  There is a plugin called PSPI for the Microsoft Windows version of the GIMP only, which allows the use of the 8bf Adobe Photoshop filters in the GIMP.
  3. ^  GIMP Plugin for CMYK separation. URL accessed on November 20, 2005.
  4. ^  LittleCms, Great color at small footprint. URL accessed on November 20, 2005.
  5. ^  Tor "tml" Lillqvist. URL accessed on November 20, 2005.
  6. ^  GIMP - Windows installers. URL accessed on November 20, 2005.
  7. ^  SourceForge.net: Developer Profile. URL accessed on November 20, 2005.
  8. ^  GIMP Deweirdifyer plugin. URL accessed on November 20, 2005.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMP"
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