GIMP - The GNU Image Manipulation Program

[MysterioussouL]

GIMP - The GNU Image Manipulation Program

In some ways this program is just as good as Photoshop . Also it is easier for newbies to learn in some ways & the best of all of it.. It's FREE!

Here is the introduction from the official page:

Introduction to GIMP

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. You can also have a look at the illustrated features overview.

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, rounded rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy
Foreground extraction tool
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!

Supported Platforms

• GNU/Linux (i386, PPC)
• Microsoft Windows (XP, Vista)
• Mac OS X
• Sun OpenSolaris
• FreeBSD

File Formats


The file format support ranges from the common likes of JPEG (JFIF), GIF, PNG, TIFF to special use formats such as the multi-resolution and multi-color-depth Windows icon files. The architecture allows to extend GIMP's format capabilities with a plug-in. You can find some rare format support in the GIMP plugin registry.
Thanks to the transparent virtual file system, it is possible to load and save files to from remote locations using protocols such as FTP, HTTP or even SMB (MS Windows shares) and SFTP/SSH.
To save disk space, any format can be saved with an archive extension such as ZIP, GZ or BZ2 and GIMP will transparently compress the file without you needing to do any extra steps.

Tutorials:
GIMP - Tutorials

Download Page:
GIMP - Downloads

GIMP Website:
GIMP - The GNU Image Manipulation Program

[foodmore]

great tool in image manipulation,it is avaiable for different types of images. here is an open source image tool that have the similar feature as Gimp. it is easy and simple to learn.

[hjimage]

right, i can see it is really a good image manipulating tool for us . can i use it to convert between different formats. if so that would be wonderful.