User guide

CHAPTER1
Introduction
1.1 What is The GIMP?
Introduction The GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. The
GIMP is an application suitable for such tasks as retouching of photographs, compos-
ing and authoring images. Its capabilities as an image manipulation program make it
a worthy competitor to other similar programs such as Adobe PHOTOSHOP or Corel
PHOTOPAINT.
The biggest advantage of The GIMP is it’s free availability (e.g. from the Internet,
packaged with various Linux distributions, etc). Even more importantly, it’s not freeware.
The GIMP is an OSS (Open Source Software) program covered by the GPL license,
which gives you the freedom to access and also to change the source code that makes
up the program.
This is how and why GIMP is constantly being developed and improved, not only by
it’s core developers, but by a large amount of contributers and users.
1.1.1 A Brief List of Features and Capabilities
• Full suite of painting tools including brushes, a pencil, an airbrush, an ink tool,
and cloning.
• Tile-based memory management so image size is limited only by available disk
space.
• Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools, allowing for high-quality anti-aliasing.
• Full Alpha channel (transparency) support.
• Layers and channels.
• Advanced scripting capabilities provided by a procedural database so you can
call internal GIMP functions from external scripts, such as Script-Fu, Perl-Fu
(Perl scripts) and Python-Fu (Python scripts).
• Multiple undo and redo, limited only by disk space.
• Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear, and flip.
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