The GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. The GIMP is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as image composition, photo retouching and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.

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.

Here are some key features of "The GIMP":

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, ellipse, free, fuzzy and intelligent
· 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

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· Fixed – Scaling in Gimp 2.6 is much slower than in Gimp 2.4
· Fixed – unit and zoom entries in Statusbar not visible
· Fixed – Cannot build GIMP using Sun CC on Solaris 2.8
· Fixed – projection incorrect with alpha-less layers
· Fixed – Zoom region always zooms in center of image
· Fixed – "Qmask" message popping up here and there
· Fixed – compatibility with GEGL > 0.0.20
· Fixed – Scaling gives 'jagged' edges
· Fixed – Zoom drop down doesn't update
· Fixed – Print not to scale
· Fixed – gimp crashes when a file is opened while a preview is generating
· Fixed – Alpha layer automatically added (in psd format)
· Fixed – Could you please explain a few strings [I18N]
· Fixed – build fails if configured with --without-libjpeg
· Fixed – Curves tool doesn't save free curves
· Updated translations.