GIMP Image Editor – Free Photoshop Replacement
Posted by admin on August 10, 2009 under Free Software | 
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GIMP (The GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free software raster graphics editor that could be seen as replacement for Adobe Photoshop. Primarily, GIMP is used as a tool for photo manipulations, such as
- Resizing
- Editing
- Cropping Photos
- Combining Multiple Images
- Converting Between Different Image Formats
GIMP can also be used to create basic animated images in the GIF format.
Features of GIMP
Tools used to manipulate images can be accessed via the toolbox, through menus and dialogue windows. They include filters and brushes, as well as transformation, selection, layer and masking tools.
- Colour: Colors could be selected using palettes, colour choosers and using an eyedropper tool to select a colour on the canvas. CMYK, LAB and HSV (hue, saturation, value ) are supported.
- Selections and paths: Tools are a rectangular and circular selection tool, free select tool, and fuzzy select tool (also known as magic wand). More advanced selection tools include the select by colour tool for selecting contiguous regions of colour and the scissors select tool which creates selections semi-automatically between areas of highly contrasting colours.
- Image editing: the more common tools include a paint brush, pencil, airbrush, eraser and ink tools used to create new or blended pixels. Tools such as the bucket fill and blend tools are used to change large regions of space in an image and can be used to help blend images.
- Layers, layer masks and channels: an image being edited in GIMP can consist of many layers sitting in a stack.
- Automation, scripts and plug-ins: GIMP has approximately 150 standard effects and filters, including Drop Shadow, Blur, Motion blur and Noise. GIMP operations can be automated with scripting languages . The Script-Fu is a Scheme based extension language implemented using TinyScheme , GIMP can also be scripted in Perl , Python (Python-fu), or Tcl .
- The Generic Graphics Library (GEGL) : was first introduced as part of GIMP on the 2.6 release of GIMP. This initial introduction does not yet exploit all of the capabilities of GEGL.
- File formats: GIMPs native format XCF is designed to store an image including all features specific to GIMP such as layers, channels and vectors; XCF is named after the eXperimental Computing Facility where GIMP was authored.
Download the Latest Version of Gimp Image Editor
Read More about Gimp on Wikipedia
