- Often, the name GIMP is used erroneously for the Gimp-Print printer driver set.
Screenshot of the GIMP version 2 The GNU Image Manipulation Program or The GIMP is a 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.
Overview GIMP originally stood for General Image Manipulation Program; in 1997, the name was changed to GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is an official part of the GNU project.
The GIMP is popular for processing the digital graphics and photographs displayed on the Internet. 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.
The GIMP is also notable as perhaps the first major open source end-user application. Previous work, such as GCC, the Linux kernel, and so on, were tools by programmers, mainly for programmers. The GIMP is proof that the open source process can create things that 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.
Features The GIMP was intended as a free (as in speech) alternative to Photoshop, but the latter still dominates the printing and graphics industries: - Photoshop includes licensed support for the Pantone color matching system.
- The number of plugins and other add-ons is larger for Photoshop.
- GIMP does not support CMYK separations and spot colors, often used in printing.
- GIMP only supports 8 bits/channel, which is not enough for linear RGB
- GIMP is relatively unaware of gamma, and does many operations that require linear RGB on whatever format (usually non-linear, sRGB gamma) happens to be in use
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.
As well as interactive use, the 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 to write scripts and plugins for the 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. It is generally believed however that for most non-interactive tasks, packages such as ImageMagick are superior.
GIMP 1.x, with GTK+ 1.x interface GIMP uses GTK+ as its widget toolkit (the part of the program that builds the user interface); in fact, GTK+ was initially part of the GIMP, intended as a replacement for the commercial 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 (as of January 2005) stable version of the GIMP is 2.2.3. 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.
Wilber is the GIMP mascot.
 The GIMP Logos with Wilber, the GIMP mascot
GIMP for Windows The GIMP (alongside with the GTK+ toolkit) has been ported to the Microsoft Windows platform by finnish programmer Tor "tml" Lillqvist (http://www.saunalahti.fi/tlillqvi/), who started that project in 1997.
Currently, the win32 port is practically 100% comparable to the original version, feature and stability-wise. The installation has been tremendously eased with the introduction of the binary installers (http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/) compiled by Jernej Simoncic (http://sourceforge.net/users/jernejs/).
Film Gimp/CinePaint Film Gimp, now known as CinePaint, is a tool specially tailored to paint on and retouch frames of movies, using a frame manager and onion skinning. It also offers greater color depth than the GIMP — 32 bits (floating point) per channel, rather than 8. It was forked from GIMP version 1.0.4.
See also: List of GNU packages, List of open-source software packages, List of Unix programs
External links
GIMP Manual and Resources - Wilber's Wiki – The GIMP Wiki (http://wiki.gimp.org/gimp/FrontPage)
- Grokking the GIMP, by Carey Bunks (http://gimp-savvy.com/BOOK/index.html) – free 'HTML book' about the GIMP and digital photo editing in general
- GIMP - The Official Handbook, by Olof S. Kylander, Karin Kylander (http://manual.gimp.org/)
- GIMP User Manual 2.0 (http://wiki.gimp.org/gimp/GimpDocs) (still under development)
- Short video clips demonstrating GIMP's functionality (http://jimmac.musichall.cz/gimp2demos.php)
- Experimental CMYK support thru the "separate" plugin (http://www.blackfiveservices.co.uk/separate.shtml)
- Photoshop-ish Keyboard Shortcuts for The Gimp 2.0 (http://epierce.freeshell.org/gimp/)
- WLUG Wiki: GimpVersusPhotoshop (http://www.wlug.org.nz/GimpVersusPhotoshop)
- Wikipedia:How to use the GIMP
GIMP Community - GIMP User Group website (http://gug.sunsite.dk/)
- GIMP for Windows user mailing list (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gimpwin-users/) (Read-only archive (http://www.spinics.net/lists/gimpwin/))
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