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. GIMP 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 written and developed under X11 on UNIX platforms. But basically the same code also runs on MS Windows and MacOSX. GIMP is 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.
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
Systems
- 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, rounded rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy
- Foreground extraction tool
- 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
A Few Difference between Gimp and Photoshop
Operating system : Gimp supports almost all operating systems. In the case of Photoshop only supports Windows and Mac OS.
Editing tools: Gimp will not support Image gallery, in the case of Photoshop will supports all tools.
Color spaces: Gimp will not supports cmyk, lab and hsv. Photoshop support all of color space.
File format: Both support all file formats.
Download GMIP for Windows desktops, which runs as a stand alone software tool.
GIMP Software Tool for USB drive
GIMP is also available as a portable tool with the Portableapps.com platform. The Portableapps.com platform acts as a launching pad for a wide range of portable applications from Portableapps.com.
If you want GIMP to be launched directly from a directory, without any installation, you can extract the file to a directory in your USB drive or your PC’s disk drive and then run the application directly from the directory. This will not add any entry in the registry. You can simply copy these extracted files to anywhere and run immediately without any other installation process.
If you want GIMP to be launched from Portableapps Launch platform, first you have to download and install the Portable apps launch platform in USB or PC. Then install GIMP using Portable apps launch platform. [Portable apps launch platform can install and provide shortcuts to all your downloaded portable applications from portableapps.com]
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