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GIMP

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GIMP
Wilber, The GIMP mascot

GIMP 2.6.0 screenshot
Developer(s) The GIMP Development Team
Initial release 1995
Stable release 2.6.6  (2009-03-17; 3 months ago) [+/−]
Preview release [+/−]
Written in C
Operating system Cross-platform
Available in Multilingual[1]
Development status Active
Type Raster graphics editor
License GNU General Public License
Website www.gimp.org

GIMP (The GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free software raster graphics editor commonly used to process digital photographs and other graphics. Primarily, GIMP is used as a tool for photo enhancement. Typical uses include resizing and cropping photos, altering colors, combining multiple images, removing unwanted image components, and converting between different image formats, as well as creating graphics and logos. GIMP can also be used to create basic animated images in GIF format.

The product vision for GIMP is to become a high-end graphics application for the editing and creation of original images, icons, graphical elements of web pages and art for user interface elements. GIMP may also be used as a platform for the development of cutting-edge scientific image-processing algorithms.[2] GIMP started out as a university project in 1995 by Peter Mattis and Spencer Kimball, [3] currently GIMP is maintained and enhanced by a group of volunteers under the auspices of the GNOME Project.[4][5]

Contents

[edit] History

Screenshot illustrating the new utility window hints introduced in GIMP 2.6
Main article: GIMP release history

GIMP originally stood for General Image Manipulation Program.[6] Its creators, Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis, began developing GIMP as a semester-long project at the University of California, Berkeley in 1995.[3] The name was changed to the GNU Image Manipulation Program in 1997, after Kimball and Mattis had graduated, when it became an official part of the GNU Project.[7]

GIMP was created for UNIX systems originally; in the first release there was support for Linux, SGI IRIX and HP-UX. Since the first release GIMP was rapidly adopted and a community emerged consisting of users who created tutorials, artwork and shared techniques. Since the initial release GIMP has been ported to many operating systems including Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X; the original port to the win32 platform was created by Tor Lillqvist and made available on the 1.1 release of GIMP.

GIMP has used three graphical user interface (GUI) toolkits since its inception; GIMP was originally using Motif on the first public release 0.54. At some point Peter Mattis became disenchanted with Motif and began to write his own GUI toolkit called the GIMP toolkit (GTK) and had successfully replaced Motif by the 0.60 release of GIMP.[8] Finally GTK was re-written to be object oriented and was renamed GTK+, this was first visible in the 0.99 release.

[edit] Media attention

As a popular application GIMP is regularly reviewed and criticised, reviews are often targeted at the fitness of GIMP for use in professional enviroments; As such gimp is often compared to or offered as a stand in replacement for Adobe Photoshop.[9][10] Even though comparisons to Photoshop are a regular occurance the maintainers of GIMP maintain that GIMP does not aim to replicate Photoshop.[11]

GIMP 2.6 has been reviewed twice by ars technica, first 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 the 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."[9] While previously it had been recognised that GIMP had extensive capabilities, few reviewers have noted GIMP as a professional tool. Dave Girard reviewed GIMP the second time with the aim of throwing workhorse tools at GIMP. It was noted at the beginning that GIMP was a High-End tool he concluded the review noting that although many of GIMPs tools were high quality but he felt that it lacked in some areas such as non-destructive editing, saturation brush and the fact GIMP did not intergrate well on Mac OS X; although he did recognise that OS X was not gimps native platform.[12][13]

[edit] Features

Further information: Comparison of raster graphics editors
Brushes dialog in GNOME

Tools used to manipulate images can be accessed via the toolbox, through menus, and dialog windows. They include filters and brushes, as well as transformation, selection, layer and masking tools.

  • Color: GIMP has several ways of selecting colors including a using an eyedropper to choose an existing color, palettes with a limited and color choosers. The built in color choosers include an 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. Indexed color and RGB color modes are supported natively in GIMP, 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 are supported this way.[14][15] The blend tool can apply a gradient to the surface of an image or for use with blending, 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 may also create custom gradients with tools provided.
  • Selections and paths: in GIMP there are several tools that can be used to create selections including a rectangular or circular selection tool, free select tool, 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 much like a ruby lith overlay whilst painting. 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: when editing images in GIMP there are many tools that can be used, 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 more complex mathematics 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 flit 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 user 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.[16] Each layer in an image is made up of several channels, in an RGB image there are normally 3 or 4 channels these consist of a red, green and blue channel individually these would each look like slightly different grey 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 are able to be transformed in several ways, such as converting it to a path or selection.[17][18]

  • Automation, scripts and plugins: 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.
  • 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 now use GEGL to perform high bit depth color operations, because of this less information is lost when performing color operations.[19] When fully integrated, GEGL will allow GIMP to have a higher color bit depth and also a better non-destructive workflow.
  • File formats: GIMP supports saving and loading a large number of different file formats, [20] GIMPs native format XCF is designed to store an image including all features specific to GIMP such as layers, channels and vectors; XCF is named after the eXperimental Computing Facility where GIMP was authored.
Type File formats
Readable and writable GIMP has import/export support for popular 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.
Readable GIMP can import Adobe PDF documents and the raw image formats used by many digital cameras, but cannot save to these formats.
Writeable GIMP can export to MNG layered image files (Linux version only) and HTML (as a table with colored cells), C source code files (as an array) and ASCII Art (using a plugin to represent images with characters and punctuation making up images), though it cannot read these formats.

[edit] Variants

Several variations and derived graphic applications exist today, these applications can exist because GIMP is released under the GNU General Public License; the GPL 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 version of GIMP are made available by other sources.

GIMP 2.2.8 running under X11 on Mac OS X
  • GIMP Visual Studio (GIMPVS) is a derivative of GIMP and GTK+ that is compiled using Microsoft compilers. GIMPVS aims to provide a stable GIMP for artists using Microsoft Windows and allowing developers program with GTK+ and GIMP using Microsoft Visual Studio.[21]
  • Seashore is a program derived from GIMP native Mac OS X. The program is currently in beta and includes a subset of the tools and features in GIMP.
  • GIMP.app is a distrution of GIMP built for Mac OS X. Gimp.app has all the features of the default GIMP distribution. GIMP.app is not native to the mac because it requires a version of X11 to run.[22]
  • osx-gimp provides native builds of GIMP on Mac OS X using GTK+ built for Quartz. It is mostly functional, but there is currently limited support for the Quartz backend of GTK+, and it is considered a beta version.[23]
  • CinePaint, formerly "Film Gimp", 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.
  • GIMP Portable is a program based on GIMP, that is portable from one computer to another.[24]
  • GIMP Animation Package (GAP) is an advanced tool for creating animations, it extends GIMPs normal capabilities. GAP is capable of saving animations in several formats including GIF and AVI. [25]The animation function relies on the layering capability of GIMP. By creating separate layers and treating each one as an animation cel, then placing and rotating image layers within time constraints, the animation effect is produced. By saving as an animated GIF or if encoded, a video file, simple to highly complex animations may be produced. GAP has further functionality in that different programmed layer transitions and timing as well as move paths are available this allows for the creation of sophisticated animations.
  • GIMP Paint Studio (GPS) is a version of GIMP aimed at artists and graphic designers, it is collection of brushes and accompanying tool presets that are intended to speed up repetitive tasks; a faster workflow is achieved by saving tool presets between uses.[26]
  • GIMPshop is a derivative of GIMP that re-arranges the user interface to mimic Adobe Photoshop. This is achieved by re-arranging or changing menus and user interface items. GIMPshop is released on Microsoft Windows.
  • GimPhoto has a similar aim to GIMPshop, but has been made using a more recent version of GIMP.[27] GimPhoto is targeted toward photographers who have previously used Adobe Photoshop.

[edit] Wilber

Wilber, the mascot of GIMP

The official mascot of GIMP, Wilber was created by Tuomas Kuosmanen (tigert) at some point before September 25, 1997; since then Wilber has received additional accessories from other GIMP developers. Accessories for Wilber can be found in the Wilber construction kit, included with the GIMP source code in the location /docs/Wilber_Construction_Kit.xcf.gz.

[edit] User interface

GIMP has a main window and several dialog windows used for tools, color palettes and so forth, as such GIMP uses a (controlled) single document interface. In a single document interface the responsibility of managing additional windows is left to the operating system. Not all operating systems or window managers were designed to elegantly handle an application with multiple windows, these platforms existing applications use for the most part either a multiple document interface or an single document interface with integrated toolbars.

This windowing format has been criticised and where some attention to the User Interface is being debated.[28] Using multiple windows often leads to desktop clutter, and a situation may occur where the toolbox and layer windows may end up hidden behind unrelated application windows. This is less likely in later versions, where window hints can be set on the toolbox and other docks to control how they are displayed.

In order to construct its interface GIMP uses the GIMP tool kit (GTK+). GTK+ was designed to replace Motif, a proprietary toolkit upon which GIMP depended. Originally GTK+ was a part of the GIMP source tree, but has since made a standalone library. Whilst originally being designed to run on Unix-like operating systems, GIMP and GTK+ have been ported to Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and other less well known operating systems.

[edit] GIMP usability team

GIMP signed up to join the open usability project, [29] since then a dedicated usability team has been established to guide the future of the gimp interface. A user interface brainstorm was created for gimp, [30][31] where users of gimp can send in their suggestions as to how they think the GIMP user interface could be improved.

[edit] Single window GIMP

At Libre Graphics Meeting 2008 Peter Sikking gave a presentation outlining future plans for gimp to have a single window interface, [32] amongst many other changes.

[edit] Development

GIMP is primarily developed by volunteers, however, 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 stabilised and will receive bug-fixes until it is ready to replace the existing stable branch. GIMP has adopted a scheme used by many other free software projects, the second number in a version, for example 2.6.6, 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 2009, the current stable version of GIMP is 2.6.6.

Each year GIMP applies for several positions in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC), [33][34] to date GIMP has participated in all years except 2007.[35] From 2006 to 2009 there have been 9 GSoC projects that have been listed as successful, [33] although not all success 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, a JPEG 2000 plugin. Several projects were completed in 2008, but none are yet apart of a stable release of GIMP.

[edit] Libre Graphics Meeting

Main article: Libre Graphics Meeting

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.

[edit] Distribution

GIMP 2.4.5 running on Windows Vista

GIMP is released as source code under the GNU General Public License as free software.[36] The current version of GIMP works with numerous operating systems, including Linux, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. Many Linux distributions include GIMP as a part of their desktop operating systems, including Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora.

A port of GIMP to Microsoft Windows was started by Finnish programmer Tor "tml" Lillqvist in 1997. The GIMP website links to binary installers compiled by Jernej Simončič for the platform.[37] MacPorts is listed as the recommended provider of recent Mac builds of GIMP, [38] MacPorts also provides builds of other free software applications and provide tools to make doing so simpler.[39] Mac OS X can optionally use an X11 server, GTK+ was originally designed to run on an X11 server, as such porting GIMP to Mac OS X was much simpler than creating a windows port.

[edit] See also

Free software portal

[edit] References

  1. ^ "GIMP - Documentation". GIMP documentation. GIMP Documentation team. 2001-2009. http://www.gimp.org/docs/. Retrieved on 2 July 2009. 
  2. ^ "GIMP UI Redesign". GIMP UI redesign. GIMP UI team. 17 May 2008. http://gui.gimp.org/index.php/GIMP_UI_Redesign. Retrieved on 2 July 2009. 
  3. ^ a b "GIMP - Prehistory - before GIMP 0.54". GIMP history. Peter Mattis. 1995-07-29. http://gimp.org/about/prehistory.html. Retrieved on 2 July 2009. 
  4. ^ "GNOME: The Free Software Desktop Project". gnome.org. The GNOME Project. 2005-2009. http://www.gnome.org/. Retrieved on 2 July 2009. 
  5. ^ "GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. A freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.". gnome.org. The GNOME Project. http://git.gnome.org/cgit/gimp/. Retrieved on 2 July 2009. 
  6. ^ Spencer Kimball & Peter Mattis (1996-02-11). "Readme" (txt). ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/historical/gimp-0.54.1.fixed.tar.gz. Retrieved on 2008-03-23. 
  7. ^ GIMP - Documentation
  8. ^ LinuxWorld - Where did Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis go?
  9. ^ a b Ryan Paul (1 October 2008). "GIMP 2.6 released, one step closer to taking on Photoshop". ars technica. http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2008/10/gimp-2-6-released-one-step-closer-to-taking-on-photoshop.ars. Retrieved on 2 July 2009. 
  10. ^ "The Gimp from the Eyes of a Photoshop User". slashdot.org. 2004-04-30. http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/04/30/217225. Retrieved on 2008-01-12. 
  11. ^ "GIMP Developers Conference 2006". the GIMP project. 2006. http://developer.gimp.org/gimpcon/2006/index.html#vision. Retrieved on 2 July 2009. 
  12. ^ Dave Girard (13 January 2009). "Suite freedom: a review of GIMP 2.6.4". ars technica. http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/01/gimp-2-6-review.ars. Retrieved on 5 July 2009.  [ Suite Freedom - a review of GIMP]
  13. ^ Dave Girard (13 January 2009). "Suite freedom: a review of GIMP 2.6.4 (page 11)". ars technica. http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/01/gimp-2-6-review.ars/11. Retrieved on 5 July 2009. 
  14. ^ Yoshinori Yamakawa (6 January 2007). "Separate+". cue.yellowmagic.info. http://cue.yellowmagic.info/softwares/separate.html. Retrieved on 2 July 2009. 
  15. ^ The GIMP documentation team. "Decompose". GIMP user manual. docs.gimp.org. http://docs.gimp.org/2.6/en/plug-in-decompose-registered.html. Retrieved on 2 July 2009. 
  16. ^ GIMP documentation team. "Introduction to layers". GIMP user manual. docs.gimp.org. http://docs.gimp.org/2.6/en/gimp-image-combining.html#gimp-concepts-layers. Retrieved on 2 July 2009. 
  17. ^ GIMP documentation team. "Paths and Text". GIMP manual. gimp.org. http://docs.gimp.org/2.6/en/ch07s05s05.html. Retrieved on 5 July 2009. 
  18. ^ GIMP documentation team. "Text and Fonts". GIMP manual. gimp.org. http://docs.gimp.org/2.6/en/gimp-concepts-text.html. Retrieved on 5 July 2009. 
  19. ^ GIMP development team. "GIMP 2.6 Release Notes". gimp.org. http://gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-2.6.html. Retrieved on 2 July 2009. 
  20. ^ "File formats supported by the GIMP". gimphelp.org. 2007. http://www.gimphelp.org/formats.shtml. Retrieved on 2 July 2009. 
  21. ^ Pierre RF Barthe (2007-2008). "GIMPVS: GIMP On Windows For Artists And Developers". GIMP-VS team. http://gimp-vs.sourceforge.net/. Retrieved on 2 July 2009. 
  22. ^ "GIMP.app". GIMP.app team. http://gimp-app.sourceforge.net/. Retrieved on 2 July 2009. 
  23. ^ "Native GIMP for Mac OS X". osx-gimp.sourceforge.net/. http://osx-gimp.sourceforge.net/. Retrieved on 2 July 2009. 
  24. ^ John T. Haller (22 March 2009). "GIMP Portable". ProtableApps.Com, The GIMP team. http://portableapps.com/apps/graphics_pictures/gimp_portable. Retrieved on 2 July 2009. 
  25. ^ Jakub Steiner. "Advanced Animations Tutorial". GIMP user manual. the GIMP documentation team. http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Advanced_Animations/. Retrieved on 2 July 2009. 
  26. ^ christophe=. "The Gimp + GPS (gimp paint studio)". code.google.com. http://code.google.com/p/gps-gimp-paint-studio/. Retrieved on 2 July 2009. 
  27. ^ zenith. "GimPhoto - free Photoshop alternative for photo and image editor". gimphoto.com. http://www.gimphoto.com/. Retrieved on 2 July 2009. 
  28. ^ Dave Neary (18 September 2006). "The GIMP usability". Safe as Milk blog. http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2006/09/18/the-gimp-usability/. Retrieved on 2007-07-29. 
  29. ^ Ellen Reitmayr (1 January 2008). "2007 Success Stories". openusability.org. http://www.openusability.org/index.php/2008/01/2007-success-stories/. Retrieved on 5 July 2009.  [ Open Usability Success stories.]
  30. ^ GIMP usability team. "GIMP UI Redesign". gimp.org. http://gui.gimp.org/index.php/GIMP_UI_Redesign#team. Retrieved on 5 July 2009. 
  31. ^ GIMP usability team. "GIMP UI brainstorm". gimp-brainstorm.blogspot.com. http://gimp-brainstorm.blogspot.com/. Retrieved on 5 July 2009. 
  32. ^ Peter Sikking; river-valley.tv (2008). "GIMP: a new simple interface for a complex application". Libre Graphics Meetings recordings. river-valley.tv. http://river-valley.tv/gimp-a-new-simple-interface-for-a-complex-application/. Retrieved on 5 July 2009. 
  33. ^ a b ""SummerOfCode - Wilber's Wiki"". "Wilber's Wiki". "GIMP developers". 2009-04-30. http://wiki.gimp.org/gimp/SummerOfCode. Retrieved on 2009-06-30. 
  34. ^ ""GNU Image Manipulation Program"". Google Summer of Code 2009. Google. 2009. http://socghop.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2009/gimp. Retrieved on 2009-06-30. 
  35. ^ ""GSoc 2007 - we didn't make it..."". lists.xcf.berkeley.edu:gimp-developer. Michael Schumacher. Thu Mar 15 05:01:42 PDT 2007. http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/lists/gimp-developer/2007-March/017493.html. Retrieved on 2009-06-30. 
  36. ^ "GNU Genereal Public License". license. Free Software Foundation. June 1991. http://www.gimp.org/about/COPYING. Retrieved on 2009-06-29. 
  37. ^ "GIMP - Windows installers". The gimp-win project. http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/. Retrieved on 2 July 2009. 
  38. ^ "GIMP dowload/Macintosh GIMP for Mac OS X". The GIMP Project. 2001-2009. http://www.gimp.org/macintosh/ GIMP dowload/Macintosh. Retrieved on 2 July 2009. 
  39. ^ "The MacPorts Project -- Home". MacPorts. 2002–2009. http://www.macports.org/. Retrieved on 2 July 2009. 

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