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In my quest to convert to all open source applications for running my business I seem to have overlooked one key software application that although did not cost me anything other than some time does in fact come at a hefty price to registered users. Adobe Photoshop has been a mainstay graphics manipulation program for web developers for a long time and will remain such but there are many alternatives taht are worth looking at and the leading open source graphics package is GIMP or GNU Image Manipulation Program.

GIMP was designed as an open source graphics application for Unix based systems but has been ported to run on my windows machine courtesy of some fans at Sourceforge. I installed it and it’s a very smooth running program with loads of tools and an easy replacement for Photoshop if like me you barely use all the features in it anyway. I don’t think it will be difficult at all to switch over full time but I’ll have to uninstall Photoshop first or I’ll never start using GIMP as I want to.

It looks like the project has some serious support and I expect things will get better fast. There are already a number of plugins available and it should be nice to see what comes with further development.

GIMP – Introduction

Introduction to the 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.

• 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, ellipse, free, fuzzy and intelligent
  • 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

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