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The GNU Image Manipulation Program or The GIMP is a bitmap graphics editor, a program for creating and processing raster graphics. It also has some support for vector graphics. The project was started in 1995 by Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis and is now maintained by a group of volunteers; it is licensed under the GNU General Public License.
GIMP originally stood for General Image Manipulation Program; in 1997, the name was changed to GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is an official part of the GNU project.
The GIMP is popular for processing the digital graphics and photographs displayed on the Internet. Typical uses include creating graphics and logos, resizing and cropping photos, changing colors, combining images using a layer paradigm, removing unwanted image features and converting between different image formats.
The GIMP is also notable as perhaps the first major open source end-user application. Previous work, such as GCC, the Linux kernel, and so on, were tools by programmers, mainly for programmers. The GIMP is proof that the open source process can create things that non- geeks can use productively, and as such psychologically paved the way for such efforts as KDE, GNOME, Mozilla Firefox, OpenOffice.orgOpenOffice. org OOo (the ". org" inclusion is due to a trademark dispute) is an office applications suite. It is intended to be compatible, and directly compete, with Microsoft Office. OOo is free software under the LGPL or SISSL and is available for Micr and various other applications that followed.
The GIMP was intended as a free (as in speech)This article refers to free software as defined by the Free Software Foundation. For software available free of charge, see Freeware. The term free software refers to software which, once obtained, can be used, copied, studied, modified and redistributed. alternative to Photoshop, but the latter still dominates the printing and graphics industries:
As well as interactive use, the GIMP can be automated with macro programs. The built-in SchemeThe Scheme programming language is a functional programming language and a dialect of Lisp. It was developed by Guy L. Steele and Gerald Jay Sussman in the 1970s and introduced to the academic world via a series of papers now referred to as Sussman and St can be be used for this, or alternatively Perl, PythonPython is an interpreted, interactive programming language created by Guido van Rossum in 1990, originally as a scripting language for Amoeba OS capable of making system calls. Python is often compared to Tcl, Perl, Scheme, Java and Ruby. Python is develo, Tcl and (experimentally) Ruby can also be used. This allows to write scripts and plugins for the GIMP which can then be used interactively; it is also possible to produce images in completely non-interactive ways (for example generating images for a webpage on the fly using CGI scripts) and for batch color correction and conversion of images. It is generally believed however that for most non-interactive tasks, packages such as ImageMagick are superior.
GIMP uses GTK+ as its widget toolkit (the part of the program that builds the user interface); in fact, GTK+ was initially part of the GIMP, intended as a replacement for the commercial Motif toolkit, which GIMP originally depended upon. GIMP and GTK+ were originally designed for the X Window System running on Unix-like operating systems, but have since been ported to Microsoft Windows, OS/2, MacOS X and SkyOS.
The current (as of November 2004) stable version of the GIMP is 2.0.6. Major changes compared to version 1.2 include a more polished user interface and further separation of the user interface and back-end. For the future it is planned to base GIMP on a more generic graphical library called GEGL, thereby addressing some fundamental design limitations that prevent many enhancements such as native CMYK support.
Wilber is the GIMP mascot.