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GIMP GNU Image Manipulation Program

Reviews	Views	Date of last review
1	205	Wed July 9, 2008

Recommended By	Average Price	Average Rating
100% of reviewers	None indicated	8.0

Find the lowest price for the GIMP GNU Image Manipulation Program

Description:

Feature Overview

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a freely distributed piece of software suitable for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition, and image authoring. It is a powerful piece of software with capabilities not found in any other free software product. 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, or an image-format converter. GIMP is modular, 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.

Customizable Interface

Each task requires a different environment and GIMP allows you to customize the view and behavior the way you like it. Starting from the widget theme, allowing you to change colors, widget spacings and icon sizes to custom tool sets in the toolbox. The interface is modulized into so called docks, allowing you to stack them into tabs or keep them open in their own window. Pressing the tab key will toggle them hidden.

GIMP features a great fullscreen mode allowing you to not only preview your artwork but also do editing work while using the most of your screen estate.

Photo Enhancement
Numerous digital photo imperfections can be easily compensated for using GIMP. Fix perspective distortion caused by lens tilt simply choosing the corrective mode in the transform tools. Eliminate lens' barrel distortion and vignetting with a powerful filter but a simple interface.

Digital Retouching
GIMP is ideal for advanced photo retouching techniques. Get rid of unneeded details using the clone tool, or touch up minor details easily with the new healing tool. With the perspective clone tool, it's not difficult to clone objects with perspective in mind just as easily as with the orthogonal clone.

Hardware Support
GIMP includes a very unique support for various input devices out of the box. Pressure and tilt sensitive tablets, but also a wide range of USB or MIDI controllers. You can bind often-used actions to device events such as rotating a USB wheel or moving a MIDI controller's slider. Change the size, angle or opacity of a brush while you paint, bind your favorite scripts to buttons. Speed up your workflow!

File Formats

The file format support ranges from the common likes of JPEG (JFIF), GIF, PNG, TIFF to special use formats such as the multi-resolution and multi-color-depth Windows icon files. The architecture allows to extend GIMP's format capabilities with a plug-in. You can find some rare format support in the GIMP plugin registry.

Thanks to the transparent virtual file system, it is possible to load and save files to from remote locations using protocols such as FTP, HTTP or even SMB (MS Windows shares) and SFTP/SSH.
To save disk space, any format can be saved with an archive extension such as ZIP, GZ or BZ2 and GIMP will transparently compress the file without you needing to do any extra steps.

Supported Platforms
• Linux (i386, PPC)
• Microsoft Windows (XP, Vista)
• Mac OS X
• Sun OpenSolaris
• FreeBSD

Keywords:

Photo Editing GIMP

Author

silkstone
Feet under the table

Registered: January 2005
Location: Silkstone Common, Yorkshire, UK
Posts: 3754

Review Date: Wed July 9, 2008

Would you recommend the product? Yes | Price you paid?: None indicated | Rating: 8

Pros:	Full-featured, powerful, configurable, free!
Cons:	Very strange GUI for anyone used to PS etc, limited 16-bit support in current version.

I used to dislike the GIMP. The interface is strange, I couldn't find how to do what I wanted, and features I was used to in other editors seemed to be missing.

More recently I tried version 2.4.5 (bundled with Ubuntu) and I've changed my mind. It certainly is odd at first, but actually just about everything you would find in Photoshop is there. You can also configure the toolbox, panels and tabs once you work out how, and there's a wide choice of scripts and plugins - although PS plugins will not work.

The GIMP isn't something to dabble with and make a hasty decision. If you stick with it, you find that it is very powerful and has all the features most photographers (and graphic artists) would need. There are also plenty of extras and add-ons you can download and install, and of course everything is totally free. Although I don't use The GIMP for RAW conversion, you can add the dcraw plugin so it will read and convert RAW files from most cameras.

The main limitation of The GIMP as it stands is limited 16-bit support. If you look on the website - www.gimp.org - you'll see that there's also version 2.5 which is a development release only, and a precursor to v.2.6 which will have 16-bit support and other features.

I would recommend The GIMP to anyone who is willing to take the time to explore it. If you like it, you can look forward to a lifetime of free, high quality photo editing software.

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