GIMP adalah salah satu aplikasi editor grafis favorit para desainer. Aplikasi ini memiliki tiga ciri utama yang membuat popularitasnya menanjak, yaitu freeware, opensource dan multi-platform (tersedia versi Windows, Mac dan Linux).
Dilengkapi dengan fitur yang beraneka ragam, seperti ketersediaan plugin, filter, dan brush yang bertebaran di internet dari komunitas pendukung GIMP.
GIMP sampai saat ini belum menjadi aplikasi yang bisa menggantikan aplikasi populer semacam Photoshop, tapi dari hari-ke hari pengembangan dari versi GIMP selanjutnya lebih mendekati tampilan maupun fungsi dari Photoshop.
Anda bisa menggunakan aplikasi ini untuk membuat desain grafis, membuat logo, mengedit foto dan juga membuat animasi sederhana (memakai plugin GAP (GIMP Animation Package). Tapi, tetap saja banyak orang yang tidak familiar dengan aplikasi opensource ini, cara penggunaan yang berbeda membuat banyak orang sulit beralih dari Photoshop yang berbayar dan mahal.
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The GIMP is a multiplatform 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.
It 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.
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
- 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
Sumber : IFWDB (Internet Freeware Database) & Udaramaya
