GIMP stands for the GNU Image Manipulation Program, a freely distributed program for photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.
It has a large feature set. 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. It also makes the task of screenshots easy.
GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions.
The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.
Features include:
- A full suite of painting tools including brushes, a pencil, an airbrush, cloning, etc.
- Digital retouching.
- Tile-based memory management, so image size is limited only by available disk space.
- Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high-quality anti-aliasing.
- Full Alpha channel support for working with transparency.
- Layers and channels.
- Scalable Brushes.
- Fullscreen Editing.
- Color Management and Soft-proofing.
- A procedural database for calling internal GIMP functions from external programs, such as Script-Fu.
- Advanced scripting capabilities.
- Multiple undo/redo.
- Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip.
- File formats supported include GIF, JPEG, PNG, XPM, TIFF, TGA, MPEG, PS, PDF, PCX, BMP and many others.
- Selection tools including rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy, bezier and intelligent.
- Plug-ins that allow for the easy addition of new file formats and new effect filters.
- Support for vector layers using the GFig plug-in.
- Support for various input devices out of the box. Pressure and tilt sensitive tablets, but also a wide range of USB or MIDI controllers.
Website: www.gimp.org
Support: Documentation
Developer: First version written by Peter Mattis and Spencer Kimball. Thousands of individuals have contributed since.
License: GNU GPL v2
GIMP is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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