Photoshop for Linux, free Photoshop - General Image Manipulation Program, GIMP, has turned 25
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| "Happy 25th birthday GIMP!" by Aryeom, Creative Commons by-sa 4.0) |
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What is GIMP?
It is freely distributed software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.
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.
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How the GIMP started?
As a July 1995 thought bubble by Peter Mattis, who posted the following to several newsgroups:
Suppose someone decided to write a graphical image manipulation program (akin to photoshop). Out of curiosity, I have a few questions: What kind of features should it have (tools, selections, filters, etc)? What file formats should it support (jpeg, gif, tiff, etc) ?
Four months later, Mattis and fellow University of California Berkeley student Spencer Kimball delivered what they described as software - "designed to provide an intuitive graphical interface to a variety of image editing operations."
The answer to the file format support question turned out to be GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and XPM. The rest is history.
Richard Stallman gave Mattis and Kimball permission to change the "General" in its name to "GNU", reflecting its open-source status. Today the program is released under the GNU General Public License.
As the program added features such as layers, it grew more popular and eventually became a byword for offering a FOSS alternative to Photoshop even though the project pushes back against that description.
The project's celebration page says volunteers did their "best to provide a sensible workflow to users by using common user interface patterns. That gave a few questionable monikers like 'Photoshop for Linux', 'free Photoshop', and 'that ugly piece of software'.
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As a free resource, GIMP is fantastic.
It has a tremendous number of tools and capabilities which would cost you a pretty penny elsewhere, and the user interface is clean and well organized. It does require a bit of a learning curve, whether you're transitioning from a similar program elsewhere, or whether you're brand new to the concept and learning from scratch.
However, the investment of time and effort on the front-end, familiarizing yourself with the program and getting comfortable with its abilities and options, will pay excellent dividends moving forward.
Essentially you're trading that time and effort for the savings you get by not having to purchase a commercial program elsewhere, which, to be fair, you'd have to take time to learn a purchased program as well.
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GIMP is a cross-platform image editor available for GNU/Linux, OS X, Windows and more operating systems. It is free software, you can change its source code and distribute your changes.
Whether you are a graphic designer, photographer, illustrator, or scientist, GIMP provides you with sophisticated tools to get your job done. You can further enhance your productivity with GIMP thanks to many customization options and 3rd party plugins.
The Website: https://www.gimp.org/
