GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.
It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.
GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.
Features and Capabilities:
This is only a very quickly thrown together list of GIMP features.
• Painting
° Full suite of painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, Clone, etc.
° Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high quality anti-aliasing
° Extremely powerful gradient editor and blend tool
° Supports custom brushes and patterns
• System
° Tile based memory management so image size is limited only by available disk space
° Virtually unlimited number of images open at one time
• Advanced Manipulation
° Full alpha channel support
° Layers and channels
° Multiple Undo/Redo (limited only by diskspace)
° Editable text layers
° Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip
° Selection tools including rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy and intelligent
° Advanced path tool doing bezier and polygonal selections.
° Transformable paths, transformable selections.
° Quickmask to paint a selection.
• Extensible
° A Procedural Database for calling internal GIMP functions from external programs as in Script-fu
° Advanced scripting capabilities (Scheme, Python, Perl)
° Plug-ins which allow for the easy addition of new file formats and new effect filters
° Over 100 plug-ins already available
• Animation
° Load and save animations in a convenient frame-as-layer format
° MNG support
° Frame Navigator (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
° Onion Skin (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
° Bluebox (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
• File Handling
° File formats supported include bmp, gif, jpeg, mng, pcx, pdf, png, ps, psd, svg, tiff, tga, xpm, and many others
° Load, display, convert, save to many file formats
° SVG path import/export
• Much, much more!
Changelog:
User Interface
- Toolbox Menubar Removed
- Toolbox and Docks are Utility windows
- Ability to Pan Beyond Image Border
Minor Changes
- Renamed Dialogs menu to Windows.
- Keep a list of recently closed Docks and allow reopening them.
- Make opening images in already running GIMP instances work better on Windows.
- You can now enter the image zoom ratio directly in the status bar.
- Added support for using online help instead of a locally installed GIMP Help package.
- Make it possible to lock tabs in docks to prevent accidental moving.
Tools, Filters & Plug-ins
- Improved Free Select Tool
- Brush Dynamics
Minor Changes
- Added a bounding box for the Text Tool that supports automatic wrapping of text within that bounding box.
- Move handles for rectangle based tools like Crop and Rectangle Select to the outside of the rectangle when the rectangle is narrow.
- Added motion constraints to the Move Tool.
- Improved event smoothing for paint tools.
- Mark the center of rectangles while they are moved, and snap the center to grid and rulers.
- Enable brush scaling for the Smudge tool.
- Added ability to save presets in all color tools for color adjustments you use frequently.
- Allow to transfer settings from Brightness-Contrast to Levels, and from Levels to Curves.
- Allow changing opacity on transform tool previews.
- The Screenshot plug-in has been given the ability to capture the mouse cursor (using Xfixes).
- Display aspect ratio of the Crop and Rectangle Select Tool rectangles in the status bar.
- Desaturate has been given an on-canvas preview.
- The Flame plug-in has been extended with 22 new variations.
- Data file folders like brush folders are searched recursively for files.
- Replaced the PSD import plug-in with a rewritten version that does what the old version did plus some other things, for example reading of ICC color profiles.
Under the Hood
- Important progress towards high bit-depth and non-destructive editing in GIMP has been made. Most color operations in GIMP are now ported to the powerful graph based image processing framework GEGL, meaning that the interal processing is being done in 32bit floating point linear light RGBA. By default the legacy 8bit code paths are still used, but a curious user can turn on the use of GEGL for the color operations with Colors / Use GEGL.
In addition to porting color operations to GEGL, an experimental GEGL Operation tool has been added, found in the Tools menu. It enables applying GEGL operations to an image and it gives on-canvas previews of the results. The screenshot to the right shows this for a Gaussian Blur.
Minor Changes
- Ported many widgets to use the 2D graphics library cairo for drawing.
Miscellaneous
- Plug-in Development
There are new things for a plug-in developer to enjoy as well. For example, procedures can now give a detailed error description in case of an error, and the error can be propagated to the user.
GIMP 2.6 also further enhances its scripting abilities. In particular there is now a much richer API for the creation and manipulation of text layers. Here is a list of new symbols in GIMP 2.6.
- Backwards Compatibility
Script-Fu has undergone some clean up and includes several bug fixes. One important bug fix, for bug #508020, prevents a possible crash of Script-Fu. A side effect of the fix will break any script which does not provide an initial value for a variable in the binding portion of a let, let*, or letrec block.
An initial value for a variable is required as stated in the R5RS Scheme standard document. The initial value can be provided as a simple constant, or as the result of a function call. The following examples will illustrate the problem and show a simple change that will fix a broken script.
Known Problems
- The Utility window hint is currently only known to work well in the GNOME desktop environment.
- Using the Text Tool is currently not an optimal experience. Making it work better is a goal for GIMP 2.8.
- If you build GIMP yourself and don't have GVfs support on your platform you need to explicitly pass --without-gvfs to configure, otherwise opening remote files will not work properly.
What's Planned
- For the interested, here is roughly what is planned for GIMP 2.8, the next stable release:
- Merging Google Summer of Code 2008 projects to trunk, namely on-canvas text editing, tagging of GIMP resources and Python scripting enhancements.
- Continue integration of GEGL.
- And of course many other improvements...
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