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.
Features and Capabilities
This is only a very quickly thrown together list of GIMP features.
- Painting
- Full suite of painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, Clone, etc.
- Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high quality anti-aliasing
- Extremely powerful gradient editor and blend tool
- Supports custom brushes and patterns
- System
- Tile based memory management so image size is limited only by available disk space
- Virtually unlimited number of images open at one time
- Advanced Manipulation
- Full alpha channel support
- Layers and channels
- Multiple Undo/Redo (limited only by diskspace)
- Editable text layers
- Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip
- Selection tools including rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy and intelligent
- Advanced path tool doing bezier and polygonal selections.
- Transformable paths, transformable selections.
- Quickmask to paint a selection.
- Extensible
- A Procedural Database for calling internal GIMP functions from external programs as in Script-fu
- Advanced scripting capabilities (Scheme, Python, Perl)
- Plug-ins which allow for the easy addition of new file formats and new effect filters
- Over 100 plug-ins already available
- Animation
- Load and save animations in a convenient frame-as-layer format
- MNG support
- Frame Navigator (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
- Onion Skin (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
- Bluebox (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
- File Handling
- File formats supported include bmp, gif, jpeg, mng, pcx, pdf, png, ps, psd, svg, tiff, tga, xpm, and many others
- Load, display, convert, save to many file formats
- SVG path import/export
- Much, much more!
Requirements: Windows NT/2000/XP, GTK+ Runtime Environment
|
   
|
GIMP 2.5 Development Snapshot
The most notable change in GIMP 2.5 happened under the hood. The
color tools in GIMP have been ported
to GEGL. This does not yet have much
impact on the user experience but it is a first and important step
forward. With full GEGL integration GIMP will finally get support
for higher color depths, more colorspaces and eventually
non-destructive editing.
With the help of the UI team, the
Toolbox menu has been merged into the image window. GIMP now always
keeps an image window open and the default configuration treats the
toolbox and docks as utility windows.
An often requested tool for simple polygonal selections has been
added and work has started to improve the text tool. Please see
the NEWS file on developer.gimp.org for a
more detailed list of changes.
Screenshots of the development
version can also be found there.
GIMP 2.4.5 Released
Changes in GIMP 2.4.5
=====================
- fixed a regression introduced by the brush cursor optimization (bug #514309)
- fixed bug in transform tool preview (bug #340965)
- fixed PSD export of images with layer masks
- fixed base64 encoding routine of the Mail plug-in
- use the correct background color when creating a new image (bug #514082)
- explicitly link libgimpthumb with GLib (bug #515566)
- improved selection of the font sample string (bug #514021)
- unified handling of "Enter" and "Space" keysyms (bug #516544)
- fixed bug in the Glossy script when used with a pattern (bug #517285)
- correctly record dimensions in Exif data when saving as JPEG (bug #517077)
- fixed sensitivity of plug-in menu items (bug #517683)
- fixed potential crashes in Wind, Warp, Small Tiles and Apply Canvas
plug-ins (bug #516369)
- added default keyboard shortcut for "Paste As New Image" (Ctrl-Shift-V)
- added default keyboard shortcut for "Copy Visible" (Ctrl-Shift-C)
- fixed missing preview update in Curves tool (bug #518012)
- fixed a bug in the Frosty Logo script (bug #472316)
- fixed backward transformations using the PDB (bug #518910)
- translation fixes and updates (de, eu, eo, fr, he, hu, it, ja, ko)
GIMP 2.4.4 Released
Changes in GIMP 2.4.4
=====================
- fixed typo in stock icon name
- fixed handling of PSD files with empty layer names (bug #504149)
- merged TinyScheme bug-fixes
- removed duplicate entry from Tango palette
- corrected parameter range in Chip Away script (bug #506110)
- reduced redraw priority and speed of the marching ants (bug #479875)
- fixed out-of-bounds array access in Convolution Matrix plug-in
- reduced rounding errors in Convolution Matrix plug-in (bug #508114)
- fixed potential crash on missing CMYK color profile
- fixed crash in Bumpmap plug-in when called from some scripts (bug #509608)
- Equalize should not equalise the alpha channel (bug #510210)
- increased the number of points the ImageMap plug-in can handle (bug #511072)
- adjusted the priority of the projection renderer (bug #511214)
- smooth the brush mask to get a simpler cursor boundary (bug #304798)
- show the selection even if the image window is invisible (bug #505758)
- allow to commit a pending rectangular selection using Enter (bug #511599)
- fixed bug in image dirty state logic (bug #509822)
- improved GIMPressionist preformance and reduced startup time (bug #512126)
- fixed a crash in the Convert to Color Profile plug-in (bug #512529)
- merged some other minor fixes from trunk
- translation updates (de, it, lt, ru, sv, uk)
GIMP Animation Package 2.4.0 Released
GAP, the GIMP Animation Package, is a collection of plug-ins to extend GIMP with capabilities to edit and create animations. Version 2.4.0 of the GIMP Animation Package is now available. This is a bug-fix release that makes GAP usable with GIMP 2.4.x releases.
The source code can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org. Users who are not familiar with building software from source code are advised to wait for binary packages to become available.
Second Release Candidate for GIMP 2.4
GIMP 2.4.0-RC2 is finally there. The developers have fixed quite some bugs since RC1 but it's not the final thing yet. Have a look at the NEWS file for the changes made in this release.
If you want to help by testing this release candidate, you can grab the source code from ftp.gimp.org. The release notes for the development releases still apply.
First Release Candidate for GIMP 2.4.0
The next stable GIMP release is close. The developers made available a first release candidate for GIMP 2.4.0. This marks the end of the development cycle towards GIMP 2.4. All new features should be complete and the API is now frozen. There are however still a few bugs to fix and some minor changes pending in some places.
GIMP Animation Package 2.2.2 Released
Version 2.2.2 of gimp-gap, the GIMP Animation Package, is now available. This release fixes some bugs, updates translations and prepares gimp-gap for the update to GIMP 2.4. The source code can be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org; binary packages should become available soon.
GIMP 2.3.19 Development Release
We are getting ready for the GIMP 2.4 release. Most of the outstanding issues have been resolved or will be resolved soon. You can get a snapshot of current development by downloading the source code for GIMP 2.3.19 from the usual places. Check the NEWS file for an overview of the changes in this release.
If you want to try any of the unstable development snapshots, please read the release notes for the development releases.
GIMP 2.2.17 Released
- fixed regression in PSD load plug-in (bug #456042)
- fixed crash when loading a corrupt PSD file (bug #327444)
- work around for Pango appending " Not-Rotated" to font names
GIMP 2.2.16 Released
- improved input value validation in several file plug-ins (bug #453973)
- improved handling of corrupt or invalid XCF files
- guard against integer overflows in several file plug-ins (bug #451379)
- fixed handling of background alpha channel in XCF files (bug #443097)
- improved forward compatibility of the config parser
- fixed crash when previewing some animated brushes (bug #446005)