GIMP: GNU Image Manipulation Program, or "free Photoshop"

In my enthusiasm to share GIMP tips, I forgot to back up and talk about it a bit.

It's an open source program for editing and creating raster images. So, Photoshop like. It's not Photoshop lite, though; as with Photoshop there are hundreds of features that I've never heard of the words for, much less know how to tackle. It's big and powerful. I am not a graphic artist so can't do a detailed evaluation or comparison, but my point is, it's got lots of stuff.

You can download and install it from here. http://www.gimp.org/

Here's what the GIMP folks say about it:

"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.

GIMP is written and developed under X11 on UNIX platforms. But basically the same code also runs on MS Windows and Mac OS X."

Here's what it looks like.

I definitely recommend downloading it and trying it out. You might have heard that it's hard to use. I wouldn't really say that. Some of the items aren't under the menu you'd expect them in, and the phrasing is a little weird, but overall, not too bad. Plus, I'm blogging about it here for a while, and there'll be a book coming soon.

Comments

[Peter Horlings]

If you want to know more about Gimp then I can recommend the videopocasts of http://meetthegimp.org/ I recently started with first videocast of May 2007, I'm now at episode 38. Rolf Steinort shows in his videocasts the full potential of Gimp.