GIMP
GIMP stands for “GNU image manipulation program”, and it is one of the oldest and most well known alternatives to Photoshop in existence.
You can create graphics, design logos, re-size and crop photos, combine images together, remove parts of an image, enhance photos, and create animated images using the freeware GIMP (GNU or General Image Manipulation Program). While often suggested as a free application to replace the expensive Adobe Photoshop program, GIMP’s designers did not set out to design a Photoshop clone and GIMP has a different user interface system. GIMP does not support the Pantone colours, but can do everything else Adobe Photoshop can.
GIMP is easy to use with simple tools to manipulate images and photos. GIMP provides the complete suite of typical painting tools including pencil, brush, airbrush, clone, and a gradient editor that is excellent. Advanced users will appreciate the options provided by layers, channels, and the unlimited redo / undo options. Only the available memory space in your computer system will limit GIMP’s performance, so you can easily have several images open at the same time.
Other tools available in GIMP include transformation, a variety of selection tools, and a foreground extraction tool which allows you to cut the background away from a selected image. Animators will appreciate the layer format and the frame navigator, allowing easy changes to the animation frame by frame. GIMP allows users to alter the format of images and can load, display, and convert an image into bmp, gif, jpeg, pdf, tiff, mng, png, psd, tga, and many other recognised formats.
“Gimp is an nice open-source alternative to professional graphics editing programs such as Fireworks or Photoshop.”
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.
- 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.
OS requirements:
Win XP/Vista/Win 7
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