GIMP is a digital photo manipulation tool for Windows (and many other platforms) that’s considered to be the open source (free) answer to Adobe Photoshop. Like Photoshop, GIMP is suitable for a variety of image manipulation tasks, including photo retouching, image composition, image construction, and has many other 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, and so much more.
GIMP is amazingly 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.
One of GIMP"s strengths is its free availability from many sources for many operating systems. So, if you don’t want to pay the price for Photoshop, GIMP is definitely the app for you!
GIMP features:
- Full suite of painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, Clone, and more – including the support of custom brushes & patterns
- Extremely powerful gradient editor and blend tool
- Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear, flip, and more
- Supports a variety of selection tools such as rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy, and more
- Supports many file formats – including bmp, gif, jpeg, mng, pcx, pdf, png, ps, psd, svg, tiff, tga, xpm, and more
- Advanced path tool doing bezier and polygonal selections
- Supports a virtually unlimited number of images open at one time
- Load, display, convert, and save to many different file formats
GIMP 2.10.0 RC1 new features:
- Dashboard dockable - A new Dashboard dock helps with monitoring GIMP’s resource usage to keep things in check, allowing you to make more educated decisions about various configuration options.
- Debug dialog - GIMP now ships with a built-in debugging system that gathers technical details on errors and crashes.
- Image recovery after crash - In case of a crash, GIMP will now attempt to backup all images with unsaved changes, then suggest to reopen them the next time you start the application. This is not a 100%-guaranteed procedure, since a program state during a crash is unstable by nature, so backing up images might not always succeed. What matters is that it will succeed sometimes, and this might rescue your unsaved work!
- Shadows-Highlights - This new filter is now available in GIMP in the Colors menu thanks to a contribution by Thomas Manni who created a likewise named GEGL operation. The filter allows adjusting shadows and highlights in an image separately, with some options available. The implementation closely follows its counterpart in the darktable digital photography software.
- Layer masks on layer groups - Masks on layer groups are finally possible! This work, started years ago, has now been finalized by Ell. Group-layer masks work similarly to ordinary-layer masks, with the following considerations.
- JPEG 2000 support ported to OpenJPEG - JPEG 2000 images importing was already supported, using the library called Jasper. Yet this library is now deprecated and slowly disappearing from most distributions. This is why GIMP moved to OpenJPEG. In particular, now GIMP can properly import JPEG 2000 images in any bit depth (over 32-bit per channel will be clamped to 32-bit and non-multiple of 8-bit will be promoted, for instance 12-bit will end up as 16-bit per channel in GIMP).
-
Linear workflow updates - Curves and Levels filters have been updated to have a switch between linear and perceptual (non-linear) modes, depending on which one you need.
-
Screenshot and color-picking - On Linux, taking screenshots with the Freedesktop API has been implemented. On Windows, Simon Mueller has improved the screenshot plug-in to handle hardware-accelerated software and multi-monitor displays. On macOS, color picking with the Color dock is now color-managed.
-
Metadata preferences - Settings were added for metadata export handling in the “Image Import & Export” page of the Preferences dialog. By default, the settings are checked, which means that GIMP will export all metadata, but you can uncheck them (since metadata can often contain a lot of sensitive private information).
-
Lock brush to view - GIMP finally gives you a choice whether you want a brush locked to a certain zoom level and rotation angle of the canvas.
-
Missing icons - 8 new icons were added by Alexandre Prokoudine, Aryeom Han (ZeMarmotfilm director), and Ell.
-
Various GUI refining - Many last-minute details have been handled, such as renaming the composite modes to be more descriptive, shortened color channel labels with their conventional 1- or 2-letter abbreviations, color models rearranged in the Color dock, and much more!
-
Translations - String freeze has started and GIMP has received updates from: Basque, Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, Chinese (Taiwan), Danish, Esperanto, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish. The Windows installer is now also localized with gettext.
-
GEGL changes - The GEGL library now used by GIMP for all image processing has also received numerous updates. Most importantly, all scaling for display is now done on linear data. This produces more accurate scaled-down thumbnails and more valid results of mipmap computations.
Download: GIMP 2.10.0 RC1 64-bit | 135.0 MB (Open Source)
View: GIMP Website | Release Notes | GIMP 2.10.0 RC1 Screenshot
