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What is Gimp?

According to the "About The Gimp" page at www.gimp.org We quote the following:

"About The Gimp

GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software suitable for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

It is an extremely capable piece of software with many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, a expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, a image format converter, etc.

GIMP is extremely expandedable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plugins and extensions to do just about anything. The adnvanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most comples image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.

Features and Capabilities

This is only a very quickly thrown together list of GIMP features. This is only the tip of the iceberg.

• Full suite of painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, Clone,etc.
• Tile based memory managent so image size is limited only by available disk space
• Sub-pixel Sampling for all paint tools for high qualityanti-aliasing
• Full alpha channel support
• Layers and channels
• A Procedural Database for calling internal GIMP functions from external programs as in Script-fu
• Advanced scripting capabilities
• Multiple Undo/Redo (limited only by diskspace)
• Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip
• File formats supported include gif, jpg, png, xpm, tiff, tga, mpeg, ps, pdf, pcx, bmp, and many others.
• Load, display, convert, save to many file formats.
• Selection tools including rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy, bezier and intelligent
• Plug-ins which allow for the easy addition of new file formats and new effect filters.
• More Features here...

Authors

The GIMP was written by Peter Mattis and Spencer Kimball. Many, many other developers have contributed plugins. And thousands have provided support and testing.

GIMP releases are currently being orchestrated by Federico Mena-Quintero."

End quote

What we can say about Gimp

First we want to congratulate Peter Mattis and Spencer Kimball and all of the other developers of this lovely program. What is said at "About the Gimp" is only the tip of the iceberg. You can do nearly anything in Gimp from image manipulation to basic drawing. It has many features inspired by Photoshop and Corel Draw. Karin, who is an architect and designer and a former user of Photoshop in both MAC and Windows environment, can only say this: Compared to Photoshop, Gimp has it all, and even more if you don't buy third party plug-ins. Most of the features in Gimp are more flexible and powerful when you get to know them.The great thing is that Gimp supports psd fileformat (beta stage and not all psd features implemented) so you can easily switch from Photoshop to Gimp. Simply, it's a hack of a program and it's comes loaded with a sack of plug-ins. So GO AND GET IT!! you will not be disappointed, and well, it's not wrong that it is free..

Karin Kylander & Olof S Kylander

Gimp History

We want to qoute from the manual that was availible in the 0.54v of Gimp.

"The GIMP arose from the ashes of a hideously crafted cs164 (compilers) class project. The setting: early morning. We were both weary from lack of sleep and the terrible strain of programming a compiler in LISP. The limits of our patience had long been exceeded, and yet still the dam held.

And then it happened. Common LISP messily dumped core when it could not allocate the 17 MB it needed to generate a parser for a simple grammar using "jyack". An unbelieving moment passed, there was one shared look of disgust, and then our project was vapor. We had to write something...ANYTHING...useful. Something in C. Something that did not rely on nested lists to represent a bitmap. Thus, the GIMP was born.

Like the phoenix, glorious, new life sprung out of the burnt remnants of LISP and jyacc. Ideas went flying, decisions were made, the GIMP began to take form.

An image manipulation program was the consensus. A program which would at the very least lessen the necessity of using commercial software under "Windoze" or on the "Macintoy". A program that would provide the features missing from the other X painting and imaging tools. A program that would help maintain the long tradition of excellent and free UNIX applications.

Six months later, we've reached an early BETA stage. We want to release now to start working on compatibility issues and cross platform stability. Also, we feel now that the program is actually usable and would like to see other interested programmers developing plug-ins and various file format support."

end quote.

TODO History of 0.60, 0.99 and GTK.