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.
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.
• Painting
◦ Full suite of painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, Clone, etc.
◦ Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high quality anti-aliasing
◦ Extremely powerful gradient editor and blend tool
◦ Supports custom brushes and patterns
• System
◦ Tile based memory management so image size is limited only by available disk space
◦ Virtually unlimited number of images open at one time
• Advanced Manipulation
◦ Full alpha channel support
◦ Layers and channels
◦ Multiple Undo/Redo (limited only by diskspace)
◦ Editable text layers
◦ Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip
◦ Selection tools including rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy
◦ Foreground extraction tool
◦ Advanced path tool doing bezier and polygonal selections.
◦ Transformable paths, transformable selections.
◦ Quickmask to paint a selection.
• Extensible
◦ A Procedural Database for calling internal GIMP functions from external programs as in Script-fu
◦ Advanced scripting capabilities (Scheme, Python, Perl)
◦ Plug-ins which allow for the easy addition of new file formats and new effect filters
◦ Over 100 plug-ins already available
• Animation
◦ Load and save animations in a convenient frame-as-layer format
◦ MNG support
◦ Frame Navigator (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
◦ Onion Skin (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
◦ Bluebox (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
• File Handling
◦ File formats supported include bmp, gif, jpeg, mng, pcx, pdf, png, ps, psd, svg, tiff, tga, xpm, and many others
◦ Load, display, convert, save to many file formats
◦ SVG path import/export
• Much, much more!
