Image editing and photo retouching just got better and easier with Gimp
March 30th, 2009 | Published on: Review
If you want to have fun creating new images or retouch those favourite photos that mean so much to you, to a professional standard, you should take a look at GIMP. If you´re tired of complex image editing and photo retouching such as Photoshop, The Gimp is the perfect alternative for beginners and professionals alike.
The Gimp
The Gimp is an excellent application – used by graphic designers, photographers, and generally anyone who works with images – lets you carry out all sorts of tasks with graphics: manipulate them, retouch them, and even create multimedia presentations with them. Although it has less plug-ins and features compared to the market leading graphics editor, Photoshop, this new version of The The Gimp can be enhanced with more than 100 plug-ins. It also has support for working on an “unlimited” number of images simultaneously, it has a built-in database for calling internal The Gimp functions from other, external applications, and it comes with advanced scripting capabilities.
The Gimp also features Script-Fu, the first The Gimp scripting extension.Extensions are separate processes that communicate with the The Gimp in the same way that plug-ins do. The distinction is that extensions don’t require an active image to operate on, instead extending The Gimp ’s functionality.
Its interface is divided into modules, which are arranged into blocks of features (channels and paths; tool options menu; etc.). If you can get used to this system handling the program can be an extremely dynamic and practical experience. But if you can’t, you may have problems. Among the tools on offer are ones to rotate images, change their size (and resample), crop, and make mirror effects, as well as convert the images between different formats (BMP, GIF, JPG, PCX, PNG, PS, TIF, TGA and XPM).
Each task requires a different environment and The Gimp allows you to customize the view and behavior the way you like it. Starting from the widget theme, allowing you to change colors, widget spacing and icon sizes to custom tool sets in the toolbox. The interface is modulated into so called docks, allowing you to stack them into tabs or keep them open in their own window.
Among The Gimp features, you have the possibility of making your jpegs smaller without changing the pixel width of the images; you can actually change the weight of the image a lot. Let’s say you turned your brand new digital camera to get a vertical shot, now some of your images are on their sides, but fortunately you can rotate them quickly and easily. You can also use layers and masks, as in most professional design programs.
The file format support ranges from the common likes of JPEG (JFIF), GIF, PNG, TIFF to special use formats such as the multi-resolution and multi-color-depth Windows icon files. The architecture allows extending GIMP’s format capabilities with a plug-in.
In their own words, The Gimp is the answer to the current lack of free (or at least reasonably priced) image manipulation software for GNU/Linux and UNIX in general.
The The Gimp is open-source and free software, and is without a doubt a great choice when it comes to editing images for the web or for personal use, thanks to its ease-of-use and handy features. You’ll soon find yourself getting to grips with it. Give it a try, you won’t be disappointed.
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