The GIMP

The GIMP is an image manipulation program which is cranking out quite a few cool images you may be seeing on the web and elsewhere. It is suitable for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

The GIMP is particularly suited for performing sophisticated and diverse manipulations. It comes with powerful editing tools and also has interfaces for writing plug-ins to manipulate images in new ways. There are quite a few plug-ins available for download.

Mailing lists and newsgroups

See the GIMP web page below for information about GIMP mailing lists.

Getting the GIMP

I suppose we need to make an explicit disclaimer that the distributions listed below are not supported by Cyclic. In most cases we are just redistributing or linking to a distribution provided by someone else, and didn't even help write any of it.

See the GIMP web page below for information on downloading it. The GIMP runs on a variety of unix systems.

Getting started with the GIMP

Although the GIMP is a very powerful program and does have a graphical user interface (of course), it isn't as easy to use or as easy to learn as one might hope for (I say this based on my attempts to learn the GIMP version 0.99.12 to edit some simple web page images). For that reason I would not recommend it for use as a simple paint program, although I'm sure that someone who is familiar with it could use it that way.

We're not aware of a GIMP tutorial that brings into one document everything that you need to know to get started. The good news is that much of the information is out there on the web, if you are willing to keep browsing.

For more information

The GIMP web page at gimp.org contains documentation, screenshots, lists of features, and more.

Wilberworks is a company which, according to their web page, offers paid support for the GIMP.

Linuxartist.org is a web site aimed at graphic designers who are new to Linux and looking for pointers for using the GIMP and other graphics software.

Some people have done some work on getting the GIMP to run under Windows. Check the following pages for details, anything we try to say here would probably be out of date by the time you read it. We probably can safely offer a generic disclaimer of "this is a work in progress, it isn't as easy to get running as GIMP on unix".

• Tor Lillqvist's page (native Win32)