Introduction
GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.
It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, an image format converter, etc.
Originally designed for use on Linux/Unix systems, the Gimp is user supported software, meaning that many of the people using the Gimp software also contribute to writing the software.
What Can GIMP Do?
GIMP can do nearly all that Adobe Photoshop can do. You won’t notice the differences between these two programs unless you are a graphics professional, and in that case you likely have access to Photoshop anyway.
GIMP can do almost anything you can imagine to a photograph: It’s most exciting capabilities for the non-professional user can be expressed as how it can select complex areas of an image and then edit them. You can take a photo of the car you’re trying to sell, and remove the distracting background. You can rescue over- and under-exposed snapshots. You can sharpen small photos before you post them online, and you can choose one single part of a photo and put it against a transparent background. For example the followin pictures show an old photo before and after editing using GIMP.
Also the following pictures show a color photograph that has been converted to a B&W one with color restored to selective areas.
Why isn’t GIMP as Famous as other graphical softwares?
Open-source software, of course, does not have an advertising budget. It relies on word of mouth. The early versions of GIMP were not easy to download or to use, and its devotees had to be way more computer-savvy than the average user. However, GIMP’s creators are continuously simplifying and updating it, and the program is now easily accessible to anyone who is familiar with the basics of how to move files around in their computer.
Some Difficulties with GIMP
Curiously enough the Gimp's biggest strength, the fact that it has a lot of available features, is also its weakness. The user interface can be confusing at times especially for the novice user. In a few places the menu options can seem somewhat redundant and confusing. One notable example of this is using the Gimp's image rotate feature. To rotate an image exactly 90 degrees or 180 degrees the menu item is found under Image/Transform/Rotate. However if you wish to rotate a selected portion of an image by varying degrees you'll find that option in the menu under Tools/Transform/Rotate. This will no doubt seem strange to Photoshop users who are accustomed to having these options available simply by right clicking on the image selection.
The other difficulty that can be mentioned is the fact that it loads itself as several different dialog boxes as opposed to a single windowed application. Thus each dialog, the toolbar, the image window, etc. must be minimized or restored separately. While some might consider this an advantage since it does allow you to easily move/resize these components while working with images, for some purposes it is actually quite a disadvantage. For example, if someone does a great deal of website development work, as a result he/she often has several different software packages open at once. So she/he is flipping back and forth between her/him image editor, the html editor and other software packages that he/she uses to flesh out a website. So not being able to easily switch between these applications quickly and easily by clicking on a single window on the taskbar is something he/she considers to be a difficulty in working with GIMP. Further, creating good looking arcs in Gimp can be frustrating. You can throw the pencil or paint brush right out the window. Unless you have an uncanny ability with a mouse or lots of free time, you won’t be able to draw an arc with either one of those tools.