What does GIMP do? What is GIMP?

Question

http://www.gimp.org

Answer 1

The GIMP is a multiplatform photo manipulation tool. GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. The GIMP is suitable for a variety of image manipulation tasks, including photo retouching, image composition, and image construction.



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.



* 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

* 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

* File formats supported include GIF, JPEG, PNG, XPM, TIFF, TGA, MPEG, PS, PDF, PCX, BMP and many others

* Selection tools including rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy, bezier and intelligent

* Plug-ins that allow for the easy addition of new file formats and new effect filters



IN SHORT...ITS A FREE IMAGE EDITING TOOL... LIKE ADOBE PHOTOSHOP... get it here:

http://www.gimp.org/

Answer 2

I promise to try not to be too long-winded but to understand GIMP you have to understand its older sibling Linux. Both come out of the Unix Underground,



What gimp does is edit bitmaps. It and Photoshop are the two most sophisticated Paint programs out there. Photoshop is THE program if you are going to use these bitmap images in commercial printing. With gimp it is a pain in the behind because most commercial printing technology has used proprietary standards for the last hundred years or so, and this part of the UNIX Underground HATES proprietary standards.



In 1983 a graduate student at MIT named Richard Stallman, with backing from Mitch Kapoor who cofounded Lotus 123 created the Free Software Foundation and the GNU tools, whose purpose were to create a free, cross-platform OS. You may have heard of GCC. In 1991 a Finnish Grad Student named Linus Torvalds finally wrote the kernel for this OS which became known as Linux. Out of the box it ran a GUI for Unix called X-Windows (it still does) and suddenly people who had been running Unix programs at work or in school were able to run it at home.



In 1995 two students at UC Berkely (which had already had a student named Bill Joy write a version of Unix) were assigned to write a paint program. To make a long story short it began as the General Image Manipulation program but soon changed to the GNU Image Manipulation program (as in the group in Cambridge) and many of its graphics routines were incorporated into the Gnome Desktop which Ubuntu runs (and which runs on top of X-Windows.



Gimp has been ported onto everything they can port it onto, but it comes out of *nix (Unix/GNU/Linux is generally called *nix) and most versions of either OS shares a code base with it. If you want to post something to the web, which mainly runs on *nix, then GIMP is a good choice to make it with. You can do just as well with Photoshop though, which does BETTER when you are trying to have it commercially printed.

Answer 3

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages