GIMP
 | |
 | |
| Developer(s) | The GIMP Team |
|---|---|
| Repository | |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Available in | Multilingual[1] |
| Type | 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.
GIMP is used to process digital graphics and photographs. Typical uses include creating graphics and logos, resizing and cropping photos, altering colors, combining multiple images, removing unwanted image features, and converting between different image formats. GIMP can also be used to create basic animated images in GIF format. It is often used as a free software replacement for Adobe Photoshop, the most widely used bitmap editor in the printing and graphics industries. The project's mascot is a coyote named Wilber.
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.
History
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. 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. A version 2 was released in 2005.
Features
The GIMP's manipulation tools can be accessed via the toolbox, menu paths, and dialog boxes (which are also known as palettes). They include filters and brushes, as well as transformation, selection, layer and masking tools.
For example, the GIMP comes with 48 standard brushes, plus facilities to create new ones. Brushes (and brush tools) can be used in hard-edged, soft-edged, or eraser modes, be applied at different opacities, or used with different modes for composition.
Color support
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. There is 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.
GIMP 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.
Selection and masking tools
GIMP can perform rectangular or circular selection, freehand selection, and "by color" selection. Alternatively, the Smart Selection tool, known as the "Magic Wand", can be used to select contiguous regions. The Intelligent Scissors (iScissors) tool can be used to auto-create paths between regions defined by strong color-changes.
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.
Paths
Paths containing line segments or bezier curves can be created using the Ink tool. Paths can be named, saved, and painted (or "stroked") with brushes, patterns, or various line styles. Paths can also be used to create complex selections.
Effects, scripts and filters
GIMP has approximately 150 standard effects and filters, including Drop Shadow, Blur, Motion blur and Noise.
GIMP operations can be automated with scripting languages. A Scheme interpreter named Gimp-Fu is built in, and external Perl, Python, or Tcl can be used. Ruby support is in experimental development. These scripts and plugins for GIMP can be used interactively, or combined non-interactively.
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 Template:Latest stable release/GIMP. Major changes compared to version 1.2 include a more polished user interface and further separation of the user interface and back-end.
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.[2]
Forks and ports
The standard GIMP is included as the standard image editor on most general purpose Linux distributions, including Debian, Ubuntu, Mandriva, SUSE, and Fedora. There are a number of variations and derivative programs, including ports to other operating systems and forks with task- or OS-specific modifications.
Microsoft Windows
GIMP for Windows is a port of the GIMP (along with the GTK+ toolkit) to the Microsoft Windows platform.[3] The project was started by Finnish programmer Tor "tml" Lillqvist in 1997. Currently, the Windows port is practically identical to the original version in terms of features and stability, and binary installers compiled by Jernej Simoncic are available.[4]
Mac OS X
Seashore is a program based on GIMP for Mac that uses the native Cocoa interface in Mac OS X. The program is currently in beta (0.1.9) and includes only a small subset of the many filters available in GIMP.
Gimp.app provides a self-contained application bundle of GIMP for Mac 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.[5] Gimp.app requires Apple's X11.app. Gimp.app is packaged by Aaron Voisine.
A project named osx-gimp provides native builds of GIMP on Mac OS X using GTK+ built for Quartz. It is mostly functional, but there is currently limited support for the Quartz backend of GTK+, and it is considered a beta version.[6]
Other
CinePaint, formerly known as "Film Gimp", is a fork of GIMP version 1.0.4, 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 used primarily within the film industry due mainly to its support of high-fidelity image formats.
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, and so-forth, (unlike many competing graphics programs, which use a multiple document interface or an SDI with integrated toolbars). GIMPshop is a modification to GIMP, rearranging its user interface to mimic that of Adobe Photoshop, including the use of a multiple document interface, renamed functions, and rearranged menus.
GIMP is often criticized for its poor usability,[7] and a special edition called Instrumented GIMP was created at the University of Waterloo, which tracks and reports user interaction with the program, to generate statistics to guide future improvements.
Comparison with Adobe Photoshop
Like Photoshop, GIMP features support for 8-bit per-channel images. Its Intelligent Scissors are similar to Photoshop's Magnetic Lasso tool, and many basic tools and filters have identical functionality in both.
Photoshop features several advantages in color management. It has support for 16-bit, 32-bit, and floating point images,[8] support for the Pantone color matching system, or spot color and support for color models other than RGB(A) and greyscale, such as CIE XYZ.[9] Photoshop features extensive gamma correction support.
GIMP features no support for plugins designed for Photoshop, such as 8BF filters.[10]
In addition, Photoshop contains several productivity features and tools not supported by the GIMP, such as native support for Adjustment layers (layers which act like filters),[11], undo history "snapshots" that persist between sessions, the history brush tool, folders in the layer window, a free transform tool to rotate, scale and move in one tool, and an interpolation code to draw smooth brush strokes using a tablet.
As the GIMP is free and open source software, it is much more readily available at low or zero cost than Photoshop, and plugin development is not limited by developers; by comparison, access to Adobe Photoshop's SDK requires authorization.[12] GIMP is also available on more operating systems than Photoshop.
File types
GIMP has support for opening and saving to a large number of different file formats.[13] Its native format is XCF, named after the computing facility where GIMP was authored.
GIMP has read/write support for popular image formats such as bitmap, JPEG, PNG, GIF and TIFF, along with the file formats of several competing applications such as Autodesk flic animations, Paintshop Pro images and Adobe Photoshop Documents. Other formats with read/write support include PostScript documents, X bitmap image and Zsoft PCX. GIMP can also read and write path information from SVG files.
GIMP can import Adobe PDF documents and the Raw image formats used by many digital cameras, but cannot save to these formats.
GIMP can export to MNG layered image files and HTML (as a table with coloured cells), C source code files (as an array) and ASCII Art (with characters and punctuation making up images), though it cannot read these formats.
See also
References
- ^ See List of available languages of the user manual
- ^ "The GIMP's next-generation imaging core demonstrated".
- ^ http://gimp.org/windows
- ^ "GIMP - Windows installers".
{{cite web}}: Unknown parameter|accessmonthday=ignored (help); Unknown parameter|accessyear=ignored (|access-date=suggested) (help) - ^ http://gimp-app.sourceforge.net/
- ^ http://osx-gimp.sourceforge.net/
- ^ Dave Neary (2006-09-18). "The GIMP usability". Safe as Milk blog. Retrieved 2007-07-29.
{{cite web}}: Check date values in:|date=(help) - ^ GIMP has limited support through LCMS; "LittleCms, Great color at small footprint".
{{cite web}}: Unknown parameter|accessmonthday=ignored (help); Unknown parameter|accessyear=ignored (|access-date=suggested) (help) - ^ partial CMYK support is available with the Separate plug-in.
- ^ There is a plugin called PSPI for Windows and Linux versions of the GIMP, which allows the use of the 8bf Adobe Photoshop filters in the GIMP. It however requires the Adobe Photoshop SDK to compile, the use of which must be requested from Adobe, but pre-compiled versions are freely distributable.
- ^ A plugin is available which adds some support for these.
- ^ http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/photoshop/devcenter.html
- ^ http://www.gimphelp.org/formats.shtml
External links
