By Michael J. Hammel. GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It is a raster editor, which means that it performs operations directly on the pixels that make up the image, and not a vector editor. Other ( proprietary ) raster editors include Adobe Photoshop, Jasc Paintshop Pro and the humble Microsoft Paint. Most ( if not all ) GNU/Linux distributions will support GIMP through their package management systems and may even come with GIMP preinstalled. You can however download Windows executable versions and Mac OS X packages ( GIMP will only run on Mac OS X, not on version 9 or earlier of the Macintosh operating system ). GIMP borrows its look and feel from the popular Macintosh and Windows program from Adobe called Photoshop. GIMP has all the Adobe Photoshop features. Some of them work better than the same sort of features in Photoshop and also there are some features that Photoshop hasn't got. GIMP is a full featured Graphics tool in its own right. You need to use it regularly to appreciate the possibilities and where it is heading. In this fourth part we take a look at the Toolbox, the set of buttons that drives most of the major processing tools, including various styles of selections. We also look at using text and filters, and briefly discuss scripting.

>> Continue >>