VIPS is a free image processing system. It aims to be about half-way between Photoshop and Excel: it is very bad at retouching photographs, but very handy for the many other imaging tasks that programs like Photoshop get used for.
It is good with large images (images larger than the amount of RAM in your machine), and for working with colour. Here is a recent publication on VIPS.
VIPS comes in two main parts: libvips is the image-processing library and nip2 is the graphical user-interface.
Both work on Unix (with convenient packages for Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu and FreeBSD), Windows (NT, 2k and XP only) and Macintosh (OS 10.2 and later). The VIPS library is licensed under the LGPL and and the user-interfaces are licensed under the GPL.
VIPS has been used and developed in the EU projects VASARI, MARC, VISEUM, ACOHIR, CRISATEL, ARTISTE and MUSA. The Department of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton use it as an image processing framework in research projects.
It's used at The National Gallery, London for most of their imaging research. VIPS is also used in a number of other labs, museums and galleries around the world (including MOMA, the Louvre and BStGS), mostly for infra-red reflectogram mosaic assembly. IIPimage use it to manipulate very large images.
Product's homepage
What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
· This release adds support for OpenSlide, adds a new read mode that reduces memory use for sequential operations on large images, adds an operation cache that can reuse old results, and improves file format support.
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