gimp

GIMP

GIMP, version 2.8 running on Ubuntu 12.04.
Developer(s)	The GIMP Development Team
Initial release	January 1996; 16 years ago (1996-01)
Stable release	2.8  (May 3, 2012; 22 days ago (2012-05-03)) [±]
Preview release	2.8.0  (May 3, 2012; 22 days ago (2012-05-03)) [±]
Development status	Active
Written in	C and GTK+
Operating system	GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, FreeBSD, Solaris, AmigaOS 4
Available in	Many languages (52 languages, 37 full translations)[1][2]
Type	Raster graphics editor
License	GNU (L)GPLv3+ v2.7+[3]
Website	www.gimp.org

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free and open source software image retouching and editing tool^[4] and is freely available in versions tailored for most popular operating systems including Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, and Linux.

GIMP has tools used for image retouching and editing, free-form drawing, resizing, cropping, photo-montages (combining multiple images), converting between different image formats, and more specialised tasks. Animated images such as GIF and MPEG files can be created using an animation plugin.

The developers and maintainers of GIMP have a product vision for GIMP to strive to be a free software graphics application for the editing and creation of original images, photos, icons, graphical elements of web pages and art for user interface elements.^[5]

History

GIMP 2.6 manipulating an image

GIMP was originally released as the General Image Manipulation Program,^[6] by creators Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis. Development of GIMP began in 1995 as a semester-long project at the University of California, Berkeley; The first public release of GIMP (0.54) was made in January 1996 ^[7][8] and in the following year (1997) GIMP became a part of the GNU Project. The acronym GIMP was changed to the GNU Image Manipulation Program in reflection of its existence under the GNU Project.^[9] Currently GIMP is developed by a self organized group of volunteers under the banner of the GNOME Project.^[10][11]

The number of computer architectures and operating systems GIMP supported has expanded significantly since its first release. The first release supported UNIX systems such as GNU/Linux, SGI IRIX and HP-UX.^[6][12] Since the initial release, GIMP has been ported to many operating systems, including Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X; the original port to the Windows 32-bit platform was started by Finnish programmer Tor Lillqvist (tml) in 1997 and was supported in the GIMP 1.1 release.^[12]

GIMP saw formation of a community and rapid adoption following the first release. The community that formed began developing tutorials, artwork and shared better work-flows and techniques.^[13]

A new GUI tool kit called GTK+ (GIMP tool kit) was developed to facilitate the development of GIMP. GTK+ replaced its predecessor GTK (no plus symbol) after being redesigned using a modern software design technique called object oriented programming. The development of GTK+ has been attributed to Peter Mattis becoming disenchanted with the Motif GUI toolkit GIMP originally used; Motif was used up until GIMP 0.60.^[8][14]

User interface

GIMP, version 2.8.0 RC1 demonstrating single-window mode

The user interface of GIMP is designed by a dedicated design and usability team. This team was formed after the developers of GIMP signed up to join the OpenUsability project.^[15] A user interface brainstorming group has since been created for GIMP,^[16][17] where users of GIMP can send in their suggestions as to how they think the GIMP user interface could be improved.

GIMP is presented in two forms single and multiple window mode; ^[18] GIMP 2.8 defaults to the multiple window mode. In multiple window mode a set of windows contain all GIMPs functionality. By default, tools and tool settings and other dialogues are on the right.^[19]

GTK+ (GIMP tool kit) is the GUI toolkit to construct GIMPs interface. GTK+'s creation and history regarding GIMP is described in the history section above.

Media attention

GIMP's fitness for use in professional environments is regularly reviewed; as such, GIMP is often cited as a replacement for Adobe Photoshop.^[20][21] The maintainers of GIMP state that GIMP seeks to fulfil GIMP's product vision rather than seek to replicate the interface of Adobe PhotoShop.^[22]

GIMP 2.6 has been reviewed twice by Ars Technica. In the first review, Ryan Paul noted that GIMP provides "Photoshop-like capabilities and offers a broad feature set that has made it popular with amateur artists and open source fans. Although GIMP is generally not regarded as a sufficient replacement for high-end commercial tools, it is beginning to gain some acceptance in the pro market."^[20] Dave Girard also reviewed GIMP 2.6, specifically with the aim of testing GIMP's fitness for professional tasks. He noted at the beginning that GIMP was a high-end tool, but the review conclusion noted that, although many of GIMP's tools were of high quality, he felt that GIMP lacked in some areas such as non-destructive editing, and that it was missing select tools (such as a desaturation brush).^[23][24]

Features

Animation Showing Brushes, Patterns, Gradients Created in gimp on Mac OS X Lion

Tools used to perform image editing can be accessed via the toolbox, through menus and dialogue windows. They include filters and brushes, as well as transformation, selection, layer and masking tools.

Color

GIMP has several ways of selecting colors including palettes, color choosers and using an eyedropper tool to select a color on the canvas. The built-in color choosers include RGB/HSV selector or scales, water-color selector, CMYK selector and a color-wheel selector. Colors can also be selected using hexadecimal color codes as used in HTML color selection. GIMP has native support for indexed color and RGB color spaces; other color spaces are supported using decomposition where each channel of the new color space becomes a black and white image. CMYK, LAB and HSV (hue, saturation, value) are supported this way.^[25][26] Color blending can be achieved using the blend tool, by applying a gradient to the surface of an image and using GIMP's color modes. Gradients are also integrated into tools such as the brush tool, when the user paints this way the output color slowly changes. There are a number of default gradients included with GIMP; a user can also create custom gradients with tools provided.

Selections and paths

In GIMP, tools for creation of selections include a rectangular and circular selection tool, free select tool, and fuzzy select tool (also known as magic wand). More advanced selection tools include the select by color tool for selecting contiguous regions of color and the scissors select tool which creates selections semi-automatically between areas of highly contrasting colors. GIMP also supports a quick mask mode where a user can use a brush to paint the area of a selection. Visibly this looks like a red colored overlay being added or removed. The foreground select tool is an implementation of Simple Interactive Object Extraction (SIOX) a method used to perform the extraction of foreground elements, such as a person or a tree in focus. The Paths Tool allows a user to create vectors (also known as Bézier curves). Paths can be used to create complex selections around natural curves, paths can also be named, saved, and painted (or "stroked") with brushes, patterns, or various line styles.

Image editing

There are many tools that can be used for editing images in GIMP. The more common tools include a paint brush, pencil, airbrush, eraser and ink tools used to create new or blended pixels. Tools such as the bucket fill and blend tools are used to change large regions of space in an image and can be used to help blend images. GIMP also has a selection of smart tools, which are tools that use a more complex algorithm to enable a user to do things that otherwise would be time consuming or impossible; these smart tools include the clone tool that copies pixels using a brush, the healing brush which copies pixels from an area and corrects the tone and color where it is being used. The perspective clone tool works in a similar way to the clone tool previously mentioned but also allows a user to correct for distance changes. The blur and sharpen tool is a brush that blurs and sharpens. Finally, the dodge and burn tool is a brush that makes target pixels lighter (dodges) or darker (burns).
A list of GIMP transform tools include the align tool, move, crop, rotate, scale, shear, perspective and flip tools.

Animation showing three docked and tabbed dialogs: layers, channels, and paths.

Layers, layer masks and channels

An image being edited in GIMP can consist of many layers sitting in a stack. The GIMP users' manual suggests that "A good way to visualize a GIMP image is as a stack of transparencies," where in GIMP terminology, each transparency is a layer.^[27] Each layer in an image is made up of several channels. In an RGB image there are normally 3 or 4 channels, each consisting of a red, green and blue channel. Color sublayers look like slightly different gray images, but when put together they make a complete image. The fourth channel that may be part of a layer is the alpha channel (or layer mask), this channel measures opacity where a whole or part of an image can be completely visible, partially visible or invisible.

Text layers can be created using the text tool, allowing a user to write on an image. Text layers can be transformed in several ways, such as converting them to a path or selection.^[28][29]

GIMP architecture

Automation, scripts and plug-ins

GIMP has approximately 150 standard effects and filters, including Drop Shadow, Blur, Motion Blur and Noise.
GIMP operations can be automated with scripting languages. The Script-Fu is a Scheme based extension language implemented using TinyScheme. GIMP can also be scripted in Perl, Python (Python-fu), or Tcl. New features can be added to GIMP not only by changing program code (GIMP core), but also by creating plug-ins. These are external programs that are executed and controlled by the main GIMP program.^[30] MathMap is an example of a plug-in written in C.

Droste effect using Mathmap plug-in

A rendered flame using the flame plug-in

GIMP has support for several methods of sharpening and blurring images including the blur and sharpen tool. The unsharp mask tool is used to sharpen an image selectively — it only sharpens areas of an image that are sufficiently detailed. The Unsharp Mask tool is considered to give more targeted results for photographs than a normal sharpening filter.^[31][32] The Selective Gaussian Blur tool works in a similar way, except it blurs areas of an image with little detail.

GEGL

The Generic Graphics Library (GEGL) was first introduced as part of GIMP on the 2.6 release of GIMP. This initial introduction does not yet exploit all of the capabilities of GEGL; as of the 2.6 release, GIMP can use GEGL to perform high bit-depth color operations; because of this less information is lost when performing color operations.^[33] When fully integrated, GEGL will allow GIMP to have a higher color bit depth and also a better non-destructive work-flow.

File formats

GIMP supports importing and exporting with a large number of different file formats,^[34] GIMP's native format XCF is designed to store all information GIMP can contain about an image; XCF is named after the eXperimental Computing Facility where GIMP was authored.

	File formats
Import and export	GIMP has import and export support for image formats such as BMP, JPEG, PNG, GIF and TIFF, along with the file formats of several other applications such as Autodesk flic animations, Corel Paint Shop 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 and read/write ICO Windows icon files.
Import only	GIMP can import Adobe PDF documents and the raw image formats used by many digital cameras, but cannot save to these formats. An open source plug-in, UFRaw, adds full raw compatibility, and has been noted for being quicker than Adobe in updating for new camera models, several times.
Export only	GIMP can export to MNG layered image files (GNU/Linux version only) and HTML (as a table with colored cells), C source code files (as an array) and ASCII Art (using a plug-in to represent images with characters and punctuation making up images), though it cannot read these formats.

Derived applications

GIMP 2.2.8 running under X11 on Mac OS X

Several variations and derived graphic applications exist today. These applications can exist because GIMP is released under the GNU General Public License, GPL, which specifically allows anybody to take the source code and use it as they see fit, so long as they follow the rules laid out in the license. GIMP is available on many popular operating systems; even so, some variants of GIMP exist for OS-specific modifications.

The GIMP website only offers source code downloads; executable versions of GIMP are made available by other sources.

CinePaint

Formerly "Film Gimp", this is a fork of GIMP version 1.0.4, used for frame-by-frame retouching of feature film. The present version supports up to 32-bit IEEE-floating point color depth per channel. CinePaint supports color management and HDR. CinePaint is used primarily within the film industry due mainly to its support of high-fidelity image formats. The current release supports BSD, GNU/Linux, and Mac OS X.

GIMP classic

is a patch^[35] against the 2.6.8 GIMP source code that was created to undo the changes made to the GIMP user interface between the 2.4 and 2.6 versions. A build of GIMP classic for Ubuntu is available.^[36] As of March 2011, a new patch can be downloaded from the sourceforge site that patches against the experimental 2.7 version of GIMP.

GIMP Portable

is a portable version of GIMP that can be installed on a USB hard drive such that brushes and presets are the same from one computer to the next. GIMP Portable is only portable between different computers running Microsoft Windows (XP or later).^[37]

GimPhoto and GIMPshop'

Derivitives that aim to replicate the Adobe Photoshop in some form.

Instrumented GIMP (ingimp)

was created at the University of Waterloo to track and report user interaction with the program to generate statistics about how GIMP is used.

Seashore, GIMP.app and GIMP on OS X

Derivitives and releases of GIMP targeted for various releases of Mac OS.^[38][39]

Extensions

GIMP Animation Package (GAP)

is an advanced plug-in for GIMP for creating animations, extending GIMP's normal capabilities. GAP can save animations in several formats including GIF and AVI.^[40] The animation function relies on GIMP's layering capability. Animations are created by placing each image on its own layer (in other words, treating each layer as an animation cel), then placing and rotating the layers within time constraints. The resulting project can be saved as an animated GIF or encoded video file. GAP also provides programmed layer transitions, timing, and move paths, allowing the creation of sophisticated animations.

GIMP Paint Studio (GPS)

is a collection of brushes and accompanying tool presets for GIMP aimed at artists and graphic designers. It speeds up repetitive tasks and allows tool settings to be saved between sessions.^[41]

Mascot

Wilber, the mascot of GIMP

Wilber is the official GIMP mascot. Wilber has relevance outside of GIMP as a racer in SuperTuxKart and was displayed on the Bibliothèque nationale de France as part of Project Blinkenlights.^[42][43][44]

Wilber was created at some point before 25 September 1997 by Tuomas Kuosmanen (tigert) and has since received additional accessories and a construction kit to ease the process.^[45]

Development

This section is outdated. Please update this section to reflect recent events or newly available information. Please see the talk page for more information. (May 2012)

GIMP is primarily developed by volunteers. The GIMP project has a development branch, unstable branches and stable branches. New features are added to the development branch of GIMP, when the developers decide that there are enough new features they begin the process of creating a release. The process starts off by creating an unstable branch from the development branch; this unstable branch will be stabilized and will receive bug-fixes until it is ready to replace the existing stable branch. GIMP has adopted a scheme also used by many other FOSS projects: the second number in a version (for example, the "6" in 2.6.11) denotes whether a GIMP release is stable or unstable. An odd number means an unstable version and an even number means a stable version. The final number represents the number of bug-fix releases after a stable or unstable branch is released. As of May 2012^[update], the current stable version of GIMP is 2.8.0.

Each year GIMP applies for several positions in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC),^[46][47] to date GIMP has participated in all years except 2007.^[48] From 2006 to 2009 there have been 9 GSoC projects that have been listed as successful,^[46] although not all successful projects have been merged into GIMP yet. The healing brush and perspective clone tools and Ruby bindings were created as part of the 2006 GSoC and can be used in the current version of GIMP, although there were three other projects that were completed and are not yet available in a stable version of GIMP; those projects being Vector Layers, and a JPEG 2000 plug-in. Several projects were completed in 2008, but none are yet a part of a stable release of GIMP.

Libre Graphics Meetings

The Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) is a yearly event where developers of GIMP and other projects meet up to discuss issues related to free and open source graphics software. The GIMP developers take the opportunity to hold birds of a feather (BOF) sessions at this event.

Distribution

GIMP is released under the GNU General Public License (version three or later) as free software.^[49] The current version of GIMP works with numerous operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. Many GNU/Linux distributions include GIMP as a part of their desktop operating systems, including Debian and Fedora. Due to file size constraints, Ubuntu no longer includes GIMP by default as of Ubuntu 10.04, but it remains available for installation via the package manager.

A port of GIMP to Microsoft Windows was started by Tor Lillqvist in 1997. The GIMP website links to binary installers compiled by Jernej Simončič for the platform.^[50] MacPorts is listed as the recommended provider of recent Mac builds of GIMP.^[51] MacPorts also provides builds of other free and open source software applications and provides tools to make doing so simpler.^[52] GTK+ was originally designed to run on an X11 server. Because Mac OS X can optionally use an X11 server, porting GIMP to Mac OS X is simpler compared to creating a Windows port.

There is no stable 64-bit Windows distribution version of GIMP available as of March 2011, although there have been experimental 64-bit versions like GIMP 2.6.10 for Windows.^[53]

See also

	Computer Science portal
	Free software portal

• Comparison of raster graphics editors
• Image editing
• Libre Graphics Meeting
• Linux color management
• List of raster graphics editors

References

External links

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of GIMP

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: GIMP

• Official website
• GIMP at the Open Directory Project

• Resources to learn GIMP
  • Official GIMP user manual (English) or (other languages)
  • (book) Montabone, Sebastian (2010). Beginning Digital Image Processing: Using Free Tools for Photographers. Apress. ISBN 978-1-4302-2841-7. 
  • (book) Grokking the GIMP
  • (book) Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition--a new book covering 2.4 and previewing 2.6
  • Gimp tutorials for photographers

• Wilber (the GIMP mascot) links
  • Wilber images at the GIMP homepage (near bottom)
  • Wilber on the Bibliothèque nationale de France (photo taken at a Project Blinkenlights installation in Paris)

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