The 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. The Gimp works on many operating systems, in many languages.

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.

Here are some key features of "The Gimp":

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

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

UI:

· Change the Text Tool to perform text editing on-canvas (GSoC 2008)
· Add support for tagging GIMP resources such as brushes and allow filtering based on these tags (GSoC 2008)
· Separate the activies of saving an image and exporting it, there is now an 'File->Export...' for example
· Port file plug-ins to new export API which gets rid of many annoying export dialogs
· Add a simple parser to size entry widgets, images can be scaled to e.g. "50%" or "2 * 37px + 10in"
· Arrange layer modes into more logical and useful groups
· Added support for rotation of brushes
· Make the Pointer dockable show information about selection position and size
· Get rid of the Tools dockable and move toolbox configuration to Preferences
· Add status bar feedback for keyboard changes to brush paramaters
· Add diagonal guides to the Crop Tool
· New docks are created at the pointer position
· Add support for printing crop marks for images
· Move 'Text along path' from tool options to text context menu
· Change default shortcuts for "Shrink Wrap" and "Fit in Window" to Ctrl+R and Ctrl+Shift+R respectively since the previous shortcuts are now used for the save+export feature
· Make Alt+Click on layers in Layers dockable create a selection from the layer
· Allow to specify written language in the Text Tool


Plug-ins:

· Map the 'Linear Dodge' layer mode in PSD files to the 'Addition' layer mode in GIMP
· Add JPEG2000 load plug-in
· Add X11 mouse cursor plug-in
· Add support for loading 16bit (RGB565) raw data
· Add palette exporter for CSS, PHP, Python, txt and Java, accessed through palette context menu
· Add plug-in API for getting image URI, for manipulating size of text layers, for getting and setting text layer hint, and for unified export dialog appearance


Data:

· Add large variants of round brushes and remove duplicate and useless brushes
· Add "FG to BG (Hardedge)" gradient


GEGL:

· Port the projection code, the code that composes a single image from a stack of layers, to GEGL
· Port layer modes to GEGL
· Port the floating selection code to GEGL
· Refactor the layer stack code to prepare for layer groups later
· Prepare better and more intuitive handling of the floating selection
· Add File->Debug->Show Image Graph that show the GEGL graph of an image
· Allow to benchmark projection performance with File->Debug->Benchmark Projection
· When using GEGL for the projection, use CIELCH instead of HSV/HSL for color based layer modes


Core:

· Make painting strokes Catmull-Rom Spline interpolated
· Add support for arbitrary affine transforms of brushes
· Add support for brush dynamics to depend on tilt
· Add aspect ratio to brush dynamics
· Add infrastructure to soon support vector layers (GSoC 2006)
· Rearrange legacy layer mode code to increase maintainability
· Drop support for the obsolete GnomeVFS file-uri backend
· Allow to dump keyboard shortucts ith File->Debug->Dump Keyboard Shortcuts
· Prepare data structures for layer groups
· Remove gimprc setting "menu-mnemonics", "GtkSettings:gtk-enable-mnemonics" shall be used instead
· Remove "transient-docks" gimprc setting, the 'Utility window' hint and a sane window manager does a better job
· Remove "web-browser" gimprc setting and use gtk_show_uri() instead


General:

· Changed licence to (L)GPLv3+
· Use the automake 1.11 feature 'silent build rules' by default
· Lots of bug fixes and cleanup