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.
It includes these features:
- a full suite of painting tools including brushes, a pencil, an airbrush, cloning;
- tile-based memory management, so image size is limited only by available disc space;
- full Alpha channel support for working with transparency;
- layers and channels;
- advanced scripting capabilities;
- multiple undo/redo (limited only by disc 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.
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.
