Tutorials2D GraphicsGIMPGIMP Tutorial: What is the GIMP?

GIMP Tutorial: What is the GIMP?

Written by Marc Roberge | 10 January 2010

1 How To GIMP - What Is The GIMP What is the GIMP? The GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program), simply put, is an extremely versatile and powerful Open Source photo manipulation, drawing and design application. Many would compare it to the heavyweight Adobe Photoshop. While it isn’t quite as powerful, expansive or evolved as Photoshop, it certainly is more than adequate for most enthusiasts and professionals alike.

Furthermore, it is available to you, free of charge, from http://www.gimp.org/downloads/ for MAC OS, various flavors of Linux and Windows platforms.

Installation is extremely straightforward on Windows, MAC and major Linux distributions (ie. Ubuntu, Debian, openSUSE, Fedora, Mandriva). Simply download and install as you would any other application. Should you run into issues installing GIMP on your computer, help for Unix/Linux machines can be found here: http://www.gimp.org/downloads/install_help.html and for Windows platforms here: http://www.gimp.org/windows/.

Strengths:

The following list is a short overview of some of the features and capabilities which GIMP offers you:

A full suite of painting tools including brushes, a pencil, an airbrush, cloning, etc.
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
A procedural database for calling internal GIMP functions from external programs, such as Script-Fu
Advanced scripting capabilities
Multiple undo/redo (limited only by disk space)
Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip
Support for a wide range of file formats, including GIF, JPEG, PNG, XPM, TIFF, TGA, MPEG, PS, PDF, PCX, BMP and many others
Selection tools, including rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy, bezier and intelligent scissors
Plug-ins that allow for the easy addition of new file formats and new effect filters.
Menu picks are more accessible than CS2, for instance Levels and Curves are at first level.
Easier to zoom up and down and shrink/expand the window to fit.
Most dialogs have fine-grained up/down control over numeric values.
Curves window includes Levels histogram.
Levels window has exponential view and can be stretched (see below).

Weaknesses

A few less advanced tools, filter sets and layer options than Photoshop
8-bit versus 16-bit(Photoshop), can not handle RAW images
Cannot handle EXIF

Why I recommend it?

Cost is $0 versus ~$699 for Photoshop CS4 ($999 for extended version)
Does everything I need it to do other than handle RAW images
Expandable via freely available plugins and can also accommodate a variety of Photoshop plugins as well.

Thanks for reading!