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Often, the name GIMP is used erroneously for the Gimp-Print printer driver set.

The GIMP
A screenshot of the GIMP version 2.2.8 running under Ubuntu Linux
Maintainer:	The GIMP Team
Stable release:	2.2.9  (October 27, 2005) [+/-]
Preview release:	2.3.5  (November 5, 2005) [+/-]
OS:	Cross-platform
Genre:	Bitmap graphics editor
License:	GPL
Website:	www.gimp.org [2]

The GNU Image Manipulation Program or The GIMP is a free software bitmap graphics editor, a program for creating and processing raster graphics. It also has 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; it is licensed under the GNU General Public License.

Contents 1 Overview 2 Features 3 Comparisons with other graphics editors 4 File Types 5 Forks and other versions 5.1 GIMP for Windows 5.2 Film Gimp/CinePaint 6 See also 7 External links 7.1 Official 7.2 Third-parties 7.3 GIMP Manual & Tricks 7.4 GIMP Tutorials 7.5 GIMP Community 8 Notes

Overview

GIMP originally stood for General Image Manipulation Program; in 1997, the name was changed to GNU Image Manipulation Program when it became an official GNU project.

The 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. The GIMP can also be used to create simple animated images.

The GIMP is also notable to some as the first major free software end-user application. Previous free software projects, such as GCC, the Linux kernel, were mainly tools created by programmers for programmers. The GIMP is considered by some to be proof that the free software development process can create things non-geeks can use productively, and as such psychologically paved the way for such efforts as KDE, GNOME, Mozilla Firefox, OpenOffice.org, and various other applications that followed.

Features

The GIMP was intended as a free software replacement for Adobe Photoshop, which is the dominant bitmap editor in the printing and graphics industries.

As well as interactive use, the GIMP can be automated with macro programs. The built-in Scheme can be used for this, or alternatively Perl, Python, Tcl and (experimentally) Ruby can also be used. This allows the writing of scripts and plugins for the GIMP which can then be used interactively; it is also possible to produce images in completely non-interactive ways (for example generating images for a webpage on the fly using CGI scripts) and for batch color correction and conversion of images. For simple automatable tasks, a package such as ImageMagick is likely to be quicker, but the GIMP has much more powerful features.

The GIMP's mascot is called Wilber, drawn with the GIMP itself.

GIMP uses GTK+ as for building its user interface. GTK+ was initially part of the GIMP, 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, Mac OS X and SkyOS.

The current stable version of the GIMP is 2.2.9  (October 27, 2005). Major changes compared to version 1.2 include a more polished user interface and further separation of the user interface and back-end. 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. However, implementing on this plan has been continually put off since 2000.

Comparisons with other graphics editors

Missing features, which some graphics artists expect, include:

• support for the Pantone color matching system.
• The range of plugins and other add-ons available for Adobe Photoshop and compatible packages is larger.
• support for 16-bit per-channel images.
• non-experimental CMYK separation support^[3].
• spot color support.
• extensive gamma support.
• color management (GIMP has limited support through LCMS^[4])
• adjustment layers.

However, GIMP is often used as a free alternative to other editors, and is even preferred by some professional photographers and designers.

There is a plugin called PSPI for the Microsoft Windows version of the GIMP only, which allows the use of the 8bf Adobe Photoshop filters in the GIMP.

File Types

The GIMP can open and save the following file formats:

• 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 (.svg)
• Microsoft Windows icon (.ico)
• Windows bitmap (.bmp)
• Paintshop Pro image (.psp or .tub)
• Adobe Photoshop PSD (.psd)
• PNM image (.pnm, .ppm, .pgm, and .pbm)
• Compuserve GIF images and animations (.gif)
• JPEG photos (.jpeg, .jpg, or .jpe)
• PNG (.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)

The GIMP can open but not save the following formats:

• PDF document (.pdf)

The GIMP can also save to the following formats which it cannot open:

• HTML as a table with coloured cells (.html)
• C source files as an array (.c or .h)
• MNG animations (.mng)

Forks and other versions

GIMP for Windows

The GIMP (along with the GTK+ toolkit) has been ported to the Microsoft Windows platform by Finnish programmer Tor "tml" Lillqvist^[5] who started that project in 1997.

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^[6]compiled by Jernej Simoncic^[7]

GIMP can be difficult to use on Windows because of the number of windows it uses (toolbox, colours, brushes, one for each image). Without Unix-style window handling, or multiple virtual desktops (which are only available on the Windows platform by installing special add-ons), working with large numbers of windows can be difficult. For this reason, some users prefer the Photoshop-style layout of a single window for everything by adopting the GIMP Deweirdifyer plugin^[8] (See this GUG discussion, although that doesn't work as well on multiple-monitor setups).

Film Gimp/CinePaint

Main article: CinePaint

Film Gimp, now known as CinePaint, is a tool specially tailored to paint on and retouch frames of movies, using a frame manager and onion skinning. It also offers greater color depth than the GIMP — 32 bits (floating point) per channel, rather than 8. It was forked from GIMP version 1.0.4.

See also

• GIMPshop
• Wilber
• Color management
• Comparison of bitmap graphics editors

External links

Official

• GIMP website
• GIMP Plug-In Registry
• GIMP Developer Resources
• GIMP meets OpenUsability
• Gimp and OpenOffice Draw.

Third-parties

• GIMP for Windows
• alt.pg. WinGIMP
• GIMPShop dot Net - Information on GIMP and GIMPShop
• GIMPshop for Mac OS X and Linux
• Linuxartist: Gimp section

GIMP Manual & Tricks

• Wilber's Wiki – The Official GIMP Wiki

• Books and Manuals
  • A list of many GIMP books
  • GIMP - The Official Handbook, by Olof S. Kylander, Karin Kylander
  • Grokking the GIMP (mirror, Debian package), by Carey Bunks
    • Free 'HTML book' about the GIMP and digital photo editing in general
  • GIMP User Manual 2.0   (still under development)

• GIMP Tricks
  • Experimental CMYK support through the "separate" plugin
  • Windows GIMP Deweirdifyer plugin (info at GUG)
    • Used for organizing GIMP panels in a single window under Microsoft Windows
  • Photoshop-ish Keyboard Shortcuts for The Gimp 2.0
  • WLUG Wiki:   GimpVersusPhotoshop

GIMP Tutorials

• CoolText – An online graphics generator powered by Gimp.
  • Shows good examples of many of the scripts included with Gimp; they can be used directly over the web.
• Examples and tutorials for The Gimp
• Short video clips demonstrating GIMP's functionality
• A lot of examples and tutorials for Gimp in German
  • Good website to see the capabilities of Gimp.
• Cool Jeba GIMP Tutorials
• SiggyMaker – Gimp generated images with PHP`s GD Library .
  • Capable of adding text to gimp generated Images.
• Wikipedia:How to use the GIMP

GIMP Community

• GIMP User Group website
• IRC: #gimp on irc.gimp.org and irc.freenode.net
• GIMP for Windows user mailing list   (Read-only archive)

Notes

1. ^  GIMP - The GNU Image Manipulation Program. URL accessed on November 20, 2005.
2. ^  GIMP Plugin for CMYK separation. URL accessed on November 20, 2005.
3. ^  LittleCms, Great color at small footprint. URL accessed on November 20, 2005.
4. ^  Tor "tml" Lillqvist. URL accessed on November 20, 2005.
5. ^  GIMP - Windows installers. URL accessed on November 20, 2005.
6. ^  SourceForge.net: Developer Profile. URL accessed on November 20, 2005.
7. ^  GIMP Deweirdifyer plugin. URL accessed on November 20, 2005.

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