The GIMP – which is short for the “GNU Image Manipulation Program” – is open source graphics editing software having a range of powerful features for image authoring, image composition, and photo retouching. Versions with the program are for sale to use on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, also it provides a powerful but extremely affordable replacement for expensive commercial programs like Adobe Photoshop.

In relation to painting and drawing images, the GIMP incorporates a full suite of drawing tools (which produce smooth drawing effects on account of powerful anti-aliasing technology) like pencils, brushes, airbrush, and cloning. The program obviously supports custom brushes and patterns, along with gradient and blending tools. For adjusting, manipulating and taking care of images, there are many tools, and more importantly the program supports multiple degrees of undo and redo, for those times you make a mistake, it is possible to recover from it.

The GIMP possesses his own native formatting for saving images, called XCF, which retains layers along with the other sophisticated editing features you need to keep for work’s that happen to be still beginning. However images in GIMP may also be loaded, saved, or reconstructed as and from the wide variety of popular file formats including bmp, gif, jpeg, png, ps, psd, tiff and numerous others.

Another powerful aspect on the GIMP, is always that like top-end commercial graphics programs, the application is both extensible which enables it to be automated:

* Extensibility implies that programmers can enhance the software program with add-on modules (“extensions” or “plug-ins”) that offer extra features past the basic program. For example, typical extensions may add support for loading or saving images in numerous file formats, or provide extra effects and filters for manipulating images.

* The automation features in the GIMP allows scripts to become set up to perform common procedures which you might otherwise ought to do again and again. For example, for those who have a large number of images to convert from one formatting to another, a script can be established to do this in automated way, in lieu of you manually should load and re-save every person image.

Obtaining the GIMP is not hard. The GIMP is actually an open source program, so that you can download it (such as source code, which you’ll review or perhaps edit should you have the programming skills) without cost. That said, if you’re not a technically-orientated style of person, it’s not always the best option for you personally. The other way to obtain this course is to obtain a commercial distribution from the program (they’re mostly very inexpensive) – the main benefit of which is often a straightforward and straightforward installation procedure, documentation, support, and in some cases, useful extras bundled with the standard program, like tutorials or clip art libraries.