GNU Image Manipulation Program - GIMP

[Pages:421]title: GNU Image Manipulation Program

subtitle: User Manual

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legalnotice: Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no FrontCover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section enphrased GNU Free Documentation License.

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GIMP User Manual Authors and Contributors

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Chapter

Introduction

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Welcome to The GIMP

The GIMP is a multiplatform photo manipulation tool. GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. The GIMP is suitable for a variety of image manipulation tasks, including photo retouching, image composition, and image construction.

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.

One of The GIMP's strengths is its free availability from many sources for many operating systems. Most GNU/Linux distributions include The GIMP as a standard application. The GIMP is also available for other operating systems such as Microsoft Windows or Apple's Mac OS X (Darwin). The GIMP is not freeware. It is a Free Software application covered by the General Public License (GPL license). The GPL provides users with the freedom to access and alter the source code that makes up computer programs.

Authors

The first version of the GIMP was written by Peter Mattis and Spencer Kimball. Many other developers have contributed more recently, and thousands have provided support and testing. GIMP releases are currently being orchestrated by Sven Neumann and Mitch Natterer and many other people called the GIMP-Team.

The GIMP-Help system

The GIMP-Help system provides you with the information necessary to understand how to use The GIMP. You can get context sensitive help while using GIMP by pressing the F1 key. Help on specific menu items can be accessed by pressing the F1 key while the mouse focuses the menu item. Read on to begin your GIMP journey.

Features and Capabilities

The following list is a short overview of some of the features and capabilities which GIMP offers you:

? A full suite of painting tools including brushes, a pencil, an airbrush, cloning, etc.

? Tile-based memory management so image size is limited only by available disk space

? Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high-quality anti-aliasing

? Full Alpha channel support for working with transparency

? Layers and channels

? A procedural database for calling internal GIMP functions from external programs, such as Script-Fu

? Advanced scripting capabilities

? Multiple undo/redo (limited only by disk space)

? Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip

? File formats supported include GIF, JPEG, PNG, XPM, TIFF, TGA, MPEG, PS, PDF, PCX,

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BMP and many others ? Selection tools including rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy, bezier and intelligent ? Plug-ins that allow for the easy addition of new file formats and new effect filters

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What's New in The GIMP?

GIMP 1.0 evolved gradually into the very stable and widely used 1.2 release. Three years later, as the GIMP development came closer to the next stable release, they decided that the level of fundamental change to the inner workings of the program justified calling the new stable version 2.0. GIMP 2.0.0 was released on March 23, 2004. For GIMP 2.2, the developers aimed at a short cycle, adding a number of important features that did not require instability-inducing low level changes. GIMP 2.2.0 was released on December 19, 2004. This section briefly describes the new features that were added in GIMP 2.2, as well as the features that were introduced in GIMP 2.0.

Here is a brief summary of some of the most important new features introduced in GIMP 2.2. There are many other smaller changes that long-time users will notice and appreciate (or complain about!). There are also important changes at the level of plugin programming and script-fu creating that are not covered here.

Interoperability and standards support

? You can drag-and-drop or copy-and-paste image data from the GIMP to any application which supports image/png drops (currently Abiword and Kword at least) and image/xml+svg drops ( Inkscape supports this one). So you can copy-and-paste curves into the GIMP from Inkscape, and then drag a selection into Abiword to include it inline in your document.

? Patterns can now be any supported GtkPixbuf format, including png, jpeg, xbm and others.

? GIMP can load gradients from SVG files, and palettes from ACT and RIFF files.

? Drag-and-drop support has been extended. You can now drop files and URIs onto an image window, where they will be opened in the existing image as new layers.

Shortcut editor

You can now edit your shortcuts in a dedicated dialog, as well as continue to use the littleknown dynamic shortcuts feature (which has been there since 1.2).

Plug-in previews

We have provided a standard preview widget for plug-in authors which greatly reduces the amount of code required to support previews. David Odin has integrated this widget into all the current filters, so that now many more filters in the GIMP include a preview which updates in real time, and the various previews behave much more consistently.

Real-time previews of transform operations

The transform tools (shear, scale, perspective and rotate) can now show a real-time preview of the result of the operation when the tool is in "Traditional" mode. Previously, only a transforming grid was shown.

GNOME Human Interface Guide conformance

A lot of work has been done on making the GIMP's interface simpler and more usable for newcomers. Most dialogs now follows the GNOME HIG to the best of our knowledge. In addition, dialogs have separated out or removed many "Advanced" options, and replaced them with sane defaults or hidden them in an expander.

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GTK+ 2.4 migration

? Menus use the GtkUIManager to generate menu structure dynamically from XML data files.

? A completely revamped File Chooser is used everywhere in the GIMP for opening or saving files. The best thing about it is that it lets you create a set of "bookmarks", making it possible to navigate quickly and easily to commonly used directories.

? GIMP now Supports fancy ARGB cursors when they are available on the system.

Basic vector support

Using the GFig plug-in, the GIMP now supports the basic functionality of vector layers. The GFig plug-in supports a number of vector graphics features such as gradient fills, Bezier curves and curve stroking. It is also the easiest way to create regular or irregular polygons in the GIMP. In the GIMP 2.2, you can create GFig layers, and re-edit these layers in GFig afterwards. This level of vector support is still quite primitive, however, in comparison to dedicated vector-graphics programs such as Inkscape.

Also . . .

There are many other smaller user-visible features. A rapid-fire list of some of those features is below.

? It is now possible to run the GIMP in batch mode without an X server.

? We have a GIMP binary (GIMP-console) which is not linked to GTK+ at all.

? Improved interface for extended input devices

? Editable toolbox: You can now decide which tools should be shown in the Toolbox, and their order. In particular, you can add any or all of the Color Tools to the Toolbox if you wish to.

? Histogram overlays R, G and B histograms on the Value histogram, and calculates the histogram only for the contents of the selection.

? Shortcuts are now shared across all GIMP windows.

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Running GIMP

Most often, you start GIMP either by clicking on an icon (if your system is set up to provide you with one), or by typing gimp on a command line. If you have multiple versions of the GIMP installed, you may need to type gimp-2.2 to get the latest version. You can, if you want, give a list of image files on the command line after the program name, and they will automatically be opened by GIMP as it starts. It is also possible, though, to open files from within GIMP once it is running.

In most operating systems, you can set things up so that various types of image files are "associated" with GIMP, and cause it to start automatically when icons for them are double-clicked.

If you want to cause a certain file type to automatically open in GIMP, you should associate it with "gimp-remote" ("gimp-win-remote" under Windows) rather than with "gimp". The gimp-remote program is an auxiliary that comes with gimp. If gimp is not already running on the system when gimp-remote is executed, it is started and the image given as argument to gimp-remote is loaded. If gimp is already running, though, the image is simply loaded into the already-running program.

Command Line Arguments

Ordinarily you don't need to give any arguments when starting GIMP, but here is a list of some that may at one time or anther be useful. This is not a complete list; on Unix systems you can get a complete list by running man gimp in a terminal window.

Known platforms

The GIMP is the most widely supported image manipulation available today. The platforms that The GIMP is known to work on include GNU/Linux, Apple Mac OS X (Darwin), Microsoft Windows 95, 98, Me, XP, NT4, and 2000, OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Solaris, SunOS, AIX, HP-UX, Tru64, Digital UNIX, OSF/1, IRIX, OS/2, and BeOS.

The GIMP can easily be ported to other operating systems because of its source code availability.

Language

All being well, GIMP detects the system language. This may fail on some machines and you may want use another language. It is possible to change the language:

In LINUX: in console mode, type LANGUAGE=en GIMP or LANG=en GIMP replacing en by fr, de, ... according to the language you want.

In WINDOWS XP: Control Panel/System/ Advanced/"Environment" button/ In "System Variables" area: "Add" button: Enter LANG for Name and fr or de... for Value. Watch out! You have to click on three successive "OK" to validate your choice.

If you often change language, you can create a batch file. Open NotePad. Type the following commands (for french for instance): set lang=fr cd c:\Program Files\GIMP-2.0\bin GIMP-2.2.exe Save this file as GIMP-FR.BAT (or another name, but always with a .BAT extension. Create shortcut and drag it to your desktop.

Start/Programs/ Accessories/System Tools/System Informations/Tools/System Configuration Utility/"Environment" tab/"New" button: Enter LANG for Name and fr or de... for Value.

Under Window 95 and Windows 98, add the line set lang=fr in the "C:\autoexec.bat" file.

Go to System Preferences, click on the International icon, and in the Language tab, the

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