GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program)

GIMP (the GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free software raster graphics editor. It is primarily employed as an image retouching and editing tool.
In addition to offering freeform drawing, GIMP can accomplish essential image workflow steps such as resizing, editing, and cropping photos, combining multiple images, and converting between different image formats. GIMP can also be used to create basic animated images in the GIF format. At present GIMP is entirely suitable for amateur or professional work with images intended for viewing on monitors and printing on inkjet printers; GIMP does not yet offer the CMYK separation and color management functionality which is essential for prepress work.

The product vision for GIMP is to become a high-end graphics application for the editing and creation of original images, icons, graphical elements of web pages and art for user interface elements. One point in GIMP's product vision would see GIMP used for the development of cutting-edge image-processing algorithms.

Features and Capabilities

This is only a very quickly thrown together list of GIMP features. You can also have a look at the illustrated features overview.

• 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, rounded rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy
  • Foreground extraction tool
  • 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!

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