What Is Gimp?

A quick description of Gimp.

## About The Gimp

From the "About the Gimp" website at http://www.gimp.org/, we quote the following:

Gimp is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. Gimp 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, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter and more.

Gimp is 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 to be easily scripted, from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures.

### Features And Capabilities

This is only a brief list of Gimp features:

· Full suite of painting tools including brushes, a pencil, an airbrush, cloning, etc.

· Tile-based memory management so image size is limited only by available disk space

· Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high-quality anti-aliasing

· Full Alpha channel support

· Layers and channels

· A procedural database for calling internal Gimp functions from external programs, such as Script-Fu

· Advanced scripting capabilities

· Multiple undo/redo (limited only by disk space)

· Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip

· File formats supported include GIF, JPEG, PNG, XPM, TIFF, TGA, MPEG, PS, PDF, PCX, BMP and many others

· Load, display, convert and save to many file formats

· Selection tools including rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy, bezier and intelligent

· Plug-ins that allow for the easy addition of new file formats and new effect filters

### Authors

The Gimp was written by Peter Mattis and Spencer Kimball. Many other developers have contributed plug-ins and thousands have provided support and testing. Gimp releases are currently being orchestrated by Manish Singh.

End quote (we couldn't have said it better ourselves).

### What We Can Say About Gimp

First, we want to congratulate Peter Mattis, Spencer Kimball and all of the other developers of this lovely program. The "About The Gimp" section is only the tip of the iceberg. Gimp is capable of everything from advanced image manipulation to basic drawing. Many of its features are inspired by Photoshop and other image manipulation programs.

Karin, who is an architect and designer and a former Photoshop user in both Mac and Windows environments, can only say this:

Compared to Photoshop, Gimp has it all (and even more if you don't buy third-party Photoshop plug-ins). Most of the features in Gimp are more flexible and powerful once you get to know them. The great thing is that Gimp supports the PSD file format and Filter Factory files, so you can easily switch from Photoshop to Gimp. Simply, it's a heck of a program and it 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

### 0.54

We'll quote a bit more, this time from Peter Mattis and Spencer Kimball, the original creators of Gimp, in their announcement of Gimp 0.54:

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 yacc. 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 yacc. Ideas went flying, decisions were made, the Gimp began to take form.

An image manipulation program was the consensus. A program that 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.

Version 0.54 was released in February 1996, and had a major impact as the first truly professional free image manipulation program. This was the first free program that could compete with the big commercial image manipulation programs.

Version 0.54 featured:

· Support for 8, 15, 16 and 24 bit color

· Ordered and Floyd-Steinberg dithering for 8 bit displays

· Viewing images as RGB color, grayscale or indexed color

· Simultaneous editing for multiple images

· Zooming and panning in real-time

· GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF and XPM support

· Selection tools including rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy, bezier and intelligent scissors

· Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip

· Painting tools including bucket, brush, airbrush, clone, convolve, blend and text

· Effects filters (such as blur and edge detect)

· Channel and color operations (such as add, composite and decompose)

· Plug-ins that allowed for the easy addition of new file formats and new effect filters

· Multiple undo/redo (note that this is a new feature in Photoshop 5)

Version 0.54 was a beta release, but it was so stable that you could use it for daily work. However, one of the major drawbacks of 0.54 was that the toolkit (the slidebars, menus, dialog boxes, etc.) was built on Motif, a commercial toolkit. This was a big drawback for systems like Linux, because you had to buy Motif if you wanted to use the faster, dynamically linked Gimp. Many developers were also students running Linux, who could not afford to buy Motif.

### Version 0.60

When 0.60 was released in July 1996, it had been under S&P (Spencer & Peter) development for four months. Main programming advantages were the new toolkits, GTK (Gimp Toolkit) and gdk (Gimp Drawing Kit), which eliminated the reliance on Motif. For the graphic artist, 0.60 was full of new features like:

· Basic layers

· Improved painting tools (sub-pixel sampling, brush spacing)

· A better airbrush

· Cloning between all image types

· A pattern selection dialog and a clone tool making it possible to clone from the active pattern

· Paint modes

· Border and feather selection commands

· Selection by color

· Better palette handling

Version 0.60 was only a developer's release, and was not intended for widespread use. It served as a workbench for 0.99 and the final 1.0 version, so functions and enhancement could be tested and dropped or changed. You can look at 0.60 as the alpha version of 0.99.

### Version 0.99

In February 1997, 0.99 came on the scene. Together with other developers, S&P had made several changes to Gimp and added even more features. The main difference was the new API and the PDB, which made it possible to write scripts; Script-Fus (or macros) could now automate things that you would normally do by hand. GTK/gdk had also changed and was now called GTK+. In addition, 0.99 used a new form of tile-based memory handling that made it possible to load huge images into Gimp (loading a 100 MB image into Gimp is no problem). Version 0.99 also introduced a new native Gimp file format called XCF.

The new API made it really easy to write extensions and plug-ins for Gimp. Several new plug-ins and extensions emerged to make Gimp even more useful (such as SANE, which enables scanning directly into Gimp). At the time we're writing this, Gimp has more than 150 plug-ins, covering everything from file formats to fractal tracers.

In the summer of 1997, Gimp had reached version 0.99.10, and S&P had to drop most of their support since they had graduated and begun jobs. However, the other developers of Gimp continued under the orchestration of Federico Mena to make Gimp ready for primetime.

GTK+ was separated from Gimp in September 1997. GTK+ had been recognized as an excellent toolkit, and other developers began using it to build their own applications.

Gimp went into feature freeze in October 1997. This meant that no new features would be added to the Gimp core libraries and program. GUM version 0.5 was also released early in October 1997. The developing work continued to make Gimp stable and ready for version 1.0.

### Version 1.0

Gimp version 1.0 was released on June 5, 1998. Finally, Gimp was considered stable enough to warrant a worldwide announcement and professional use.

## The Future Of Gimp

Gimp will naturally continue to evolve. The future is bright, and we will see new versions of Gimp with new features and functions. The version naming convention of Gimp is the same as for Linux, meaning that stable versions will have even point release numbers (such as 1.0.X), whereas the development version will have odd point release numbers (like 1.1.X). This makes it possible for normal users to grab the stable version and use it for a primetime job, while the developers work on a bleeding-edge version without introducing new bugs into the stable version.

If you want to, you can always download the development version and test it to check out new features and give the developers feedback about bugs and enhancements. But be aware, it will be unstable, so don't use it for daily work, and don't flood the developers with unnecessary bug reports.

Frozenriver Digital Design http://www.frozenriver.nu Voice: +46 (0)31 474356 Fax: +46 (0)31 493833 support@frozenriver.com | Publisher Coriolis http://www.coriolis.com