Getting Started with Gimp - A Beginner's Guide to Editing

What do you want to know about GIMP?

GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for tasks such as photo retouching, image composition, and image authoring. GIMP has many capabilities and 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, and much much more.

What makes GIMP so special?

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.

Who can use GIMP and where?

Although GIMP is written and developed under X11 on UNIX platforms, basically the same code also runs on Windows and macOS2. GIMP has a full suite of painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, Clone, etc. It supports custom brushes and patterns and has an extremely powerful gradient editor and blend tool.

Is there anything else you need to know?

GIMP has 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.

That's GIMP?

That's just the start of GIMP!

Still Interested? - Lets jump into learning how this power software works and how to take full advantage of its resources!