It is a useful tool for Graphic Designers, Photographer, and other professionals. It supports various third-party plug-in to make it a more advanced editing tool. We can enhance our creativity with the help of these plug-ins.
It is a useful tool for various image manipulation tasks such as photo editing, image composition, image construction, logo designing, painting, and many more. It is capable enough of being used as a simple paint tool, an advanced photo editing tool, a mass production image renderer, or an image format converter tool.
One of the other reasons for its popularity is that it is a free tool while other editing tools such as photoshop are paid. Most Linux distributions include it as a standard application. But, it can be downloaded for other platforms such as macOS and Windows as well.
GIMP is licensed under the GPL (General Public License).
Features of GIMP
Some key Features of GIMP are as following:
- Free and Open Source
- Cross-Platform
- High-Quality Photo Manipulation
- Original Artwork Creation
- Graphic Design Elements
- Programming Algorithms
- Key Component in a Desktop Publishing Workflow
- It provides a full suite of painting tools such as brushes, airbrushes, pencils, cloning, etc.
- It provides a tile-based memory management tool to limit the image size by available disk space.
- It provides a sub-pixel sampling for high-quality and anti-aliasing.
- It provides full alpha channel support for transparency.
- It provides several layers and channels.
- It supports a procedural database for calling internal GIMP functions from an external program.
- It has advanced scripting capabilities.
- It provides several undo/redo options.
- It provides several transformation tools such as rotate, scale, shear, and flip.
- It supports a wide range of file formats such as GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, PDF, BMP, etc.
- It provides several selection tools such as rectangle, ellipse, circle, fuzzy, bezier, etc.
- It supports various plug-ins for the easy addition of new file formats and filters.
GIMP History
The GIMP project had been initiated in 1995 by Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis as a semester project at the University of California. It was named as General Image Manipulation Program.
GIMP Versions
The first version of GIMP was released in January 1996 as "GIMP 0.54" with various colors and file format support. It got updated over the years and released many versions. The version list of GIMP is as follows:
- GIMP 0.54
- GIMP 0.60
- GIMP 0.99
- GIMP 1.0
- GIMP 1.1
- GIMP 1.2
- GIMP 2.0
- GIMP 2.2
- GIMP 2.4
- GIMP 2.6
- GIMP 2.8
- GIMP 2.10
- GIMP 3.0
- GIMP 3.2