GIMP is a multi-platform photo
manipulation tool. GIMP is an acronym for
GNU Image Manipulation Program. The
GIMP is suitable for a variety of image
manipulation tasks, including photo retouching, image composition, and
image construction.
GIMP has 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, etc.
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 from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.
One of The GIMP's strengths is its free availability from many sources for many operating systems. Most GNU/Linux distributions include The GIMP as a standard application. The GIMP is also available for other operating systems such as Microsoft Windows™ or Apple's Mac OS X™ (Darwin). The GIMP is a Free Software application covered by the General Public License [GPL]. The GPL provides users with the freedom to access and alter the source code that makes up computer programs.
The first version of the GIMP
was written by Peter Mattis and Spencer Kimball. Many other developers
have contributed more recently, and thousands have provided support and
testing. GIMP
releases are currently being orchestrated by Sven Neumann and Mitch
Natterer and the other members of the
GIMP-Team.
The GIMP Documentation Team and other
users have provided you with the information necessary to understand
how to use GIMP. The User Manual is
an important part of this help. The current version is on
the web site of the Documentation Team
[GIMP-DOCS] in HTML format. The HTML
version is also available as context sensitive help (if you installed
it) while using GIMP by pressing the
F1 key. Help on specific menu items can be accessed
by pressing the F1 key while the mouse pointer is
focused on the menu item. Read on to begin your
GIMP journey.
The following list is a short overview of some of the features and
capabilities which GIMP offers you:
Cropping and scaling (resizing) photos, along with adjusting the brightness and contrast of them, are among the most basic elements of photo editing. In this hands-on tutorial, you will learn how to use The GIMP's powerful cropping, scaling, brightness, and contrast tools by editing a photograph in our digital darkroom.
You can later apply the basic skills, elements, and principles that you learn in this tutorial to edit and manipulate photos, clipart, scanned images and other digital graphics. You also can use the GIMP to design and create all sorts of stunning computer graphics and images from scratch. However, today's tutorial focuses on editing already existing images with the GIMP.
Originally, GIMP was a Linux/UNIX program. However, it has been ported to the Microsoft Windows platform -- that effectively makes GIMP a cross-platform (XP) program. There appear to be some Mac versions of the GIMP now also.
The GIMP and Adobe Photoshop are comparable, digital-darkroom, software products as to features, functions, and usability -- other than some advanced professional and prepress stuff in Photoshop. The basic photograph and image cropping, scaling, color-brightness adjustment, and color-contrast adjustment operations covered in today's tutorial are just as easily done and well-done with the GIMP as with Photoshop.
Moreover, GIMP is free and Photoshop costs $699. Because GIMP is an excellent, pixel-based, image manipulation and editing program and because of licensing and pricing issues, we chose to use the GIMP rather than Photoshop in our digital darkroom. More about the GIMP and Photoshop further on in this article.
For more information about The GIMP, please see our article Overview of The GIMP - a free photograph and digital-image editing program.
The purpose of today's tutorial is:
If you have a digital camera, the GIMP is an important tool that you should have in your digital darkroom. Please see About the Digital Darkroom in the right-hand sidebar.
The GIMP is included with many prominent GNU-Linux distributions. If you have a major GNU-Linux distribution such as Mandrake or SUSE, you likely already have the GIMP.
If you are an MS Windows user you might not already have the GIMP installed. The good news is that whichever of the above listed OSs you use; you can download and install the GIMP at no charge to you. Download links are in the Resources section at the end of this tutorial on page 4.
Figure 1, below, shows the GIMP version 1.3 opened in SUSE Linux Professional 9.0 and the KDE desktop. The Geese picture to be edited is in the upper right of the screen shot.
GIMP has 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, etc.
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 from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.
One of The GIMP's strengths is its free availability from many sources for many operating systems. Most GNU/Linux distributions include The GIMP as a standard application. The GIMP is also available for other operating systems such as Microsoft Windows™ or Apple's Mac OS X™ (Darwin). The GIMP is a Free Software application covered by the General Public License [GPL]. The GPL provides users with the freedom to access and alter the source code that makes up computer programs.
Authors
The GIMP Help system
Features and Capabilities
-
A 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 for working with transparency
-
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
-
Support for a wide range of file formats, including GIF, JPEG, PNG,
XPM, TIFF, TGA, MPEG, PS, PDF, PCX, BMP and many others
-
Selection tools, including rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy, bezier
and intelligent scissors
-
Plug-ins that allow for the easy addition of new file formats and
new effect filters.
Cropping and scaling (resizing) photos, along with adjusting the brightness and contrast of them, are among the most basic elements of photo editing. In this hands-on tutorial, you will learn how to use The GIMP's powerful cropping, scaling, brightness, and contrast tools by editing a photograph in our digital darkroom.
You can later apply the basic skills, elements, and principles that you learn in this tutorial to edit and manipulate photos, clipart, scanned images and other digital graphics. You also can use the GIMP to design and create all sorts of stunning computer graphics and images from scratch. However, today's tutorial focuses on editing already existing images with the GIMP.
Originally, GIMP was a Linux/UNIX program. However, it has been ported to the Microsoft Windows platform -- that effectively makes GIMP a cross-platform (XP) program. There appear to be some Mac versions of the GIMP now also.
The GIMP and Adobe Photoshop are comparable, digital-darkroom, software products as to features, functions, and usability -- other than some advanced professional and prepress stuff in Photoshop. The basic photograph and image cropping, scaling, color-brightness adjustment, and color-contrast adjustment operations covered in today's tutorial are just as easily done and well-done with the GIMP as with Photoshop.
Moreover, GIMP is free and Photoshop costs $699. Because GIMP is an excellent, pixel-based, image manipulation and editing program and because of licensing and pricing issues, we chose to use the GIMP rather than Photoshop in our digital darkroom. More about the GIMP and Photoshop further on in this article.
For more information about The GIMP, please see our article Overview of The GIMP - a free photograph and digital-image editing program.
Overview of Today ' s GIMP Tutorial
In today's tutorial, let's edit one of the photos from the Goose series used in the GIMP Overview article.The purpose of today's tutorial is:
(a) to introduce people that never have used an image or photo-editing program to image-editing and photo-editing software basics,Thus the focus of today's how-to article is on the basics of using GIMP's cropping, scaling, brightness adjustment, and contrast adjustment tools. You will learn how to use these tools by editing a digital photograph.
(b) to introduce people that never have used The GIMP to GIMP basics,
(c) and to help Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements users migrate to the GIMP.
If you have a digital camera, the GIMP is an important tool that you should have in your digital darkroom. Please see About the Digital Darkroom in the right-hand sidebar.
The GIMP is included with many prominent GNU-Linux distributions. If you have a major GNU-Linux distribution such as Mandrake or SUSE, you likely already have the GIMP.
If you are an MS Windows user you might not already have the GIMP installed. The good news is that whichever of the above listed OSs you use; you can download and install the GIMP at no charge to you. Download links are in the Resources section at the end of this tutorial on page 4.
Figure 1, below, shows the GIMP version 1.3 opened in SUSE Linux Professional 9.0 and the KDE desktop. The Geese picture to be edited is in the upper right of the screen shot.
 |
Figure 1. Screen shot of GIMP version 1.3 running on SUSE Linux 9.0 and the KDE desktop for Linux. The crop tool has been used to place a crop box around the area that will remain after cropping. Please see text for an explanation. (Geese photo by Mike Angelo)
|
Since this tutorial is based upon GIMP 1.3, it should also be applicable to GIMP 2.0 when it is released. The tools used in today's tutorial also are in GIMP 1.2.x. Thus, this tutorial also is applicable to GIMP 1.2.x.
The Hands-On GIMP Tutorial
- Getting Started
This tutorial shows you the mechanics of basic photograph and image editing with the GIMP. Unfortunately, photograph and image artistry is beyond the scope of today's tutorial.
However, it is much more the photo artistry than the mechanics that makes great photos and graphics. If you are a college student, take a studio (art) course to learn artistry basics. That is a real hands-on studio course not some wimpy art appreciation course. Or if you are not a college student, take a real, hands-on, studio course at your local community college.
Obtain GIMP for MAC: http://www.gimp.org/macintosh/
GIMP for Mac OS X
Getting and Installing GIMP
There are various ways to obtain and install GIMP for your Macintosh. In addition to the source code distribution here on www.gimp.org, there are various alternative sources for packaged and even commercially distributed CDs, which aim to make installation and setup an easier task. These include:- GIMP on OS X provides application bundles of of GIMP 2.6 for Mac OS X users.
- MacPorts provide an easy way to install various open-source software products on Mac OS X. They have GIMP 2.6 in the latest revisions.
Requirements
GIMP will only run on Mac OS X, not on version 9 or earlier of the Macintosh operating system. There are a number of reasons why it is unlikely that GIMP will ever run on older versions of Mac OS. In addition to Mac OS X, the following is a list of what you will need to run GIMP on your Macintosh:- X Windowing Layer
GIMP uses a separate windowing layer, the X11 windowing protocol, on Mac OS X, which must be installed first. The XQuartz project provides this functionality. There you can download the most recent version of X11.app. - Graphics libraries and toolkits
Unlike most GNU/Linux distributions, Mac OS X does not come with the open source libraries upon which GIMP is built. These are typically installed along with GIMP, but can be installed separately. If you want to compile GIMP from source, we suggest that you use MacPorts or fink to install the libraries it depends on.
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