Image Processing Image Editors GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) | GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) |
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GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a software for photo retouching, image creation and image editing. It supports all the basic tools of a painting program like brushes, a pencil, an airbrush, but also all the advanced features of a quality photo retouching program. Other important GIMP's characteristics are its extensibility through external plugins and its advanced scripting capabilities. Plugins Plugins are external programs built to provide GIMP with additional functionalities and designed to closely interact with the main application. Many plugins are automatically installed along with GIMP, others are available at the GIMP Plugin Registry. Script-Fu The scripting language (Script-FU) is extremely powerful and can be used to automated tasks that need to be performed frequently or are made by many hard to remember steps. Many pre-installed scripts are available. They are not only very useful but are valid examples to learn the language. GIMP is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It can be downloaded as source code or pre-compiled binaries for Linux, Windows and Mac OS. Comments GIMP is good! Thanks for a great software This is not really a comment or a review. I want to simply say a big 'thank you' to GIMP developers. I'm not a professional graphic designer, I'm a student still learning computer graphics and really don't have spare money to spend in a commercial image creation software. I must honestly admit I've used illegal copies of commercial image processing programs to practice my graphic designing skills in the past. Then I found GIMP, when I installed it I couldn't believe that a free software was as good as the commercial packages I had been using since then. But I was wrong. I planned to use GIMP only to learn computer graphics, but now I'm sure I will use this open source software for my work too. GIMP performance problems I professionally create computer graphics mainly with Photoshop. I've tested GIMP at home on my PC with MS Windows and noticed a number of performance problems. When I work with it for many consecutive hours or open large image files, GIMP greatly slows down even if it remains stable and almost never crashes my PC. I must say that I've had a chance to run GIMP on a friend's PC with Linux and it's considerably faster, so it seems the operating system plays an important role here too. Talking about features, this is really a complete product and if performance would be improved it could really compete at the same level with commercial graphics software. I will keep using this open source product and test it a bit more even if currently I don't plan to replace Photoshop with GIMP at work. Compressing JPEG images I believe that a supportive user community is essential for the success of any open source software. I was getting poor results while using GIMP to convert some images into JPEG format and reduce their size to publish them on the web. It wasn't GIMP fault because, to be honest, I'm not very experienced in graphics manipulation software. Fortunately several friendly members of the user support forum have greatly helped me not only solving this problem with GIMP, but also suggesting me some good online documentation containing helpful advices about the various graphic file formats and how to get the most out of them. I'm really impressed and grateful for the support I've received. |
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In my opinion GIMP is better than many commercial image processing programs and it's free.