GIMP

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

GIMP
A screenshot of GIMP 2.2.8 running in GNOME. The picture is of Wilber, the GIMP mascot.
Maintainer:	The GIMP Team
Stable release:	2.2.13  (August 25, 2006) [+/-]
Preview release:	2.3.15  (March 10, 2007) [+/-]
OS:	Cross-platform
Use:	Raster graphics editor
License:	GNU General Public License
Website:	http://www.gimp.org/

The GNU Image Manipulation Program, or GIMP, is a raster graphics editor application with 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; licensed under the GNU General Public License, GIMP is free software.

Contents 1 Overview 2 Features 2.1 Brushes, colors, and painting tools 2.2 Gradients 2.3 Selection and masking tools 2.4 Layers, channels, and transparency 2.5 Paths 2.6 Effects, scripts and filters 2.7 Scripting 3 Development 4 Comparisons with other graphics editors 5 File types 6 Availability, versions, and forks 6.1 Linux distributions 6.2 GIMP for Windows 6.3 GIMP Portable 6.4 Gimp.app for Mac OS X 6.5 Seashore for Mac OS X 6.6 GIMPshop 6.7 CinePaint 6.8 GIMP Animation Package 7 See also 8 References 9 External links

[edit] Overview

GIMP originally stood for General Image Manipulation Program. Its creators, Spencer Kimball and Petter Mattis, initially started GIMP as a semester-long project for a class at the University of California, Berkeley. Both were integral members of eXperimental Computing Facility, a student club at Berkeley (the GIMP's file extension, XCF, is taken from the initials of this club). In 1997, after both Kimball and Mattis had graduated from Berkeley, the name was changed to GNU Image Manipulation Program when it became an official part of the GNU project.

GIMP can be used to process digital graphics and photographs. 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. GIMP can also be used to create animated images using an improved layers method. The full capabilities of the GIMP extend much further, however, and include advanced image editing, manipulation, and professional graphics creation. It is often used as a free software replacement for Adobe Photoshop, which is the dominant bitmap editor in the printing and graphics industries.

[edit] Features

[edit] Brushes, colors, and painting tools

GIMP comes with 48 standard brushes, plus facilities to create new ones. Brushes can be used in hard-edged, soft-edged, or eraser modes, be applied at different opacities, or used to apply various effects. GIMP also has a Palette with RGB, HSV, colour wheel, CMYK, and mixing modes, plus tools to pick colours from the image with various averaging options. Support for hexadecimal colour codes (as used in HTML). While 'CMYK' is offered in the Palette, GIMP, by default, works only in RGB, grayscale and index color modes.

[edit] Gradients

GIMP also supports gradients, which integrate into its other tools (such as brushes and fills) to shade image areas with automated color blending. It includes a variety of built-in gradients, and as with the brushes, also allows the user to customize and create their own gradient fills.

[edit] Selection and masking tools

GIMP can perform rectangular or circular selection, freehand selection, and color selection. Alternatively, the Smart Selection tool, known as the "Magic Wand", can be used to select contiguous regions.

[edit] Layers, channels, and transparency

GIMP has support for layers, including transparent layers, which can be shown, hidden, or made semitransparent. It also supports transparent and semitransparent images. Channels add different types of opacity and color effects to images. Settings made with the opacity slider in the Layers Dialog are not represented correctly in the Transform tool previews. This can make lining up layers correctly more difficult.

[edit] Paths

Paths containing line segments or bezier curves can be made. Paths can be named, saved, and painted with brushes, patterns, or various line styles. They are also an extremely powerful and useful selection tool, allowing you to create complex selections. Intelligent Scissors (iScissors) tool can be used to auto-create paths between regions defined by strong color-changes.

[edit] Effects, scripts and filters

GIMP has approximately 150 standard effects and filters, including Drop Shadow, Blur, Motion blur, Noise, and much more.

[edit] Scripting

GIMP operations can be automated with macro programs. A Scheme interpreter is built-in, or external Perl, Python, or Tcl can be used. Ruby is in experimental development. These scripts and plugins for GIMP can be used interactively, or combined non-interactively. For example, images for a webpage could be generated on the fly using CGI scripts, or a large number of images could have their color corrected and format changed. For simple automatable tasks, a package such as ImageMagick might be quicker, but GIMP has much more powerful features.

[edit] Development

The GIMP's user interface is built using GTK+, the GIMP ToolKit. The GTK+ library was initially a part of the GIMP source tree, but has since been refactored due to its usefulness outside the scope of the GIMP. GTK+ is also used as the widget toolkit for the GNOME desktop environment. GTK+ was intended as a replacement for the proprietary 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, and SkyOS.

The current stable version of GIMP is 2.2.13  (August 25, 2006). Major changes compared to version 1.2 include a more polished user interface and further separation of the user interface and back-end.

Also, an unstable 2.3.x version is being updated by GIMP developers, with new versions being available every few months.

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. Implementation of this plan was continually put off from 2000 until October 2006, when developer Øyvind Kolås demonstrated a limited working version of GEGL, including a new graphical interface, that had been developed by Sven Neumann, Michael Natterer, and Kolås.^[1]

[edit] Comparisons with other graphics editors

Missing features include:

• Support for the Pantone color matching system, or spot color.
• Support for Adobe Photoshop plugins and other add-ons.^[2]
• Support for anything but 8-bit per-channel images e.g. 16-bit, 32-bit, floating point.
• Support for color models other than RGB(A) and greyscale, such as CIE XYZ. (Partial CMYK support is available with the Separate plug-in.)
• Extensive gamma support.
• Extensive support for color management (GIMP has limited support through LCMS^[3])
• Native support for Adjustment layers, i.e. layers which act like filters. (A plugin is available which adds some support for these.)
• Undo history "snapshots" that persist between sessions.
• The magnetic lasso tool, which assists the user in edge-finding.

Benefits of the GIMP system include:

• Free software; can be installed, shared, or redistributed on any number of computer systems with zero licensing costs
• Open source; is freely developed and supported by a community of users and is available on a many different operating systems
• Plug-in development is not limited by developers (by comparison, access to Adobe Photoshop's SDK requires authorization [1])
• Using the GIMP Portable version of GIMP, the GIMP can be carried on a thumb drive and used on any computer.

[edit] File types

GIMP can open and save the following file formats: [2]

• GIMP XCF, the native format (.xcf, or compressed as .xcf.gz or .xcf.bz2)
• Autodesk flic animations (.fli)
• DICOM (.dcm or .dicom)
• PostScript documents (.ps, .ps.gz and .eps)
• FITS astronomical images (.fits, or .fit)
• Scalable vector graphics for exporting paths (.svg)
• Microsoft Windows icon (.ico)
• Microsoft Uncompressed AVI Video (.avi)
• Windows bitmap (.bmp)
• Paintshop Pro image (.psp or .tub)
• Adobe PhotoShop Documents (.psd, .pdd)
• PNM image (.pnm, .ppm, .pgm, and .pbm)
• Compuserve Graphics Interchange Format images and animations (.gif)
• Joint Photographic Experts Group Images (.jpeg, .jpg, or .jpe)
• Portable Network Graphics (.png)
• Tagged Image File Format (.tiff or .tif)
• TARGA (.tga)
• X bitmap image (.xbm, .icon, or .bitmap)
• X pixmap image (.xpm)
• X window dump (.xwd)
• Zsoft PCX (.pcx)

GIMP can import (open but not save) the following formats:

• Adobe PDF files (.pdf)
• Raw image formats (many extensions)

GIMP can also export to (save, but not open) the following formats:

• HTML as a table with coloured cells (.html)
• C source files as an array (.c or .h)
• Multiple Network Graphic layered image files (.mng)
• ASCII Art or HTML, with characters and punctuation making up images

[edit] Availability, versions, and forks

See also: fork (software development)

[edit] Linux distributions

GIMP is included as the standard image editor on most general purpose Linux distributions, including Debian, Ubuntu, Mandriva, and SUSE.

[edit] GIMP for Windows

GIMP for Windows is a port of the GIMP (along with the GTK+ toolkit) to the Microsoft Windows platform. The project was started by Finnish programmer Tor "tml" Lillqvist 1997.^[4]

Currently, the Windows port is practically identical to the original version in terms of features and stability. The installation has been tremendously eased with the introduction of the binary installers^[5] compiled by Jernej Simoncic.^[6]

The number of windows used by GIMP's interface can cause desktop clutter. This is not only because the GIMP uses a (controlled) single document interface, but also because it uses multiple windows for its tools, color palette, etc. (unlike many competing graphics programs, which use a multiple document interface or at least an SDI with integrated toolbars). This issue can be, to a degree, reduced through the use of the Virtual Desktop PowerToy called Deskman, released by Microsoft. Deskman allows users to keep all GIMP windows on a separate desktop, reducing clutter at the expense of some simplicity.

Another way of grouping all windows under a single window is to use the Windows Gimp Deweirdifyer plugin.

[edit] GIMP Portable

GIMP Portable is a repackaged version of GIMP for Windows, which can be run directly from media without installation. It is intended to be carried on a USB flash drive, or similar portable storage device e.g. USB hard drive or digital audio player. It does not require administrator privileges and thus can be used in restricted (e.g. work) environments without troubling a network administrator. Also for Mac OS X is available Portable Gimp.app — packaged as portable application for external drive.

[edit] Gimp.app for Mac OS X

Gimp.app provides a self-contained application bundle of GIMP for OS X. Gimp.app has many features that Seashore does not have, but being built upon the GTK for its GUI features, it requires a version of X11 to run it,^[7]Gimp.app requires Apple's X11.app. Gimp.app is packaged by Aaron Voisine.

[edit] Seashore for Mac OS X

Seashore is a program based on GIMP for Mac that uses the native Cocoa interface in OS X. The program is currently still in beta (0.1.8) and currently includes only a small subset of the many filters available in GIMP.

[edit] GIMPshop

GIMPshop is a modification to GIMP, rearranging its user interface to mimic that of Adobe Photoshop

[edit] CinePaint

CinePaint, formerly known as 'Film Gimp', is a modification (forked from v. 1.0.4) basically used for frame-by-frame retouching of feature film. The present 'Film Gimp' version supports up to 32-bit IEEE-floating point color depth/channel. Unlike the Gimp, CinePaint has support for color management, HDR, and much more. CinePaint is basically used within the film industry.

[edit] GIMP Animation Package

The GIMP Animation Package (GAP) simply adds the function of being able to create (and modify) animations.

[edit] See also

• Color management
• Linux color management
• Comparison of raster graphics editors
• Wilber
• Krita A similar open source program part of Koffice

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• GIMP Web site
• Online GIMP Book
• GIMP Tutorials Archive
• GIMP meets OpenUsability
• Gimp and OpenOffice Draw.
• Freshmeat project page