GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. GIMP has many capabilities.

GIMP 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. GIMP 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.

GIMP is written and developed under X11 on UNIX platforms. But basically the same code also runs on Mac OS X and MS Windows.

Here are some key features of "Gimp":

Customizable Interface:
· Each task requires a different environment and GIMP allows you to customize the view and behavior the way you like it. Starting from the widget theme, allowing you to change colors, widget spacings and icon sizes to custom tool sets in the toolbox. The interface is modulized into so called docks, allowing you to stack them into tabs or keep them open in their own window. Pressing the tab key will toggle them hidden.
· GIMP features a great fullscreen mode allowing you to not only preview your artwork but also do editing work while using the most of your screen estate.

Photo Enhancement:
· Numerous digital photo imperfections can be easily compensated for using GIMP. Fix perspective distortion caused by lens tilt simply choosing the corrective mode in the transform tools. Eliminate lens' barrel distortion and vignetting with a powerful filter but a simple interface.
· The included channel mixer gives you the flexibility and power to get your B/W photography stand out the way you need.

Digital Retouching:
· GIMP is ideal for advanced photo retouching techniques. Get rid of unneeded details using the clone tool, or touch up minor details easily with the new healing tool. With the perspective clone tool, it's not difficult to clone objects with perspective in mind just as easily as with the orthogonal clone.

Hardware Support:
· GIMP includes a very unique support for various input devices out of the box. Pressure and tilt sensitive tablets, but also a wide range of USB or MIDI controllers. You can bind often-used actions to device events such as rotating a USB wheel or moving a MIDI controller's slider. Change the size, angle or opacity of a brush while you paint, bind your favorite scripts to buttons. Speed up your workflow!

File Formats:
· The file format support ranges from the common likes of JPEG (JFIF), GIF, PNG, TIFF to special use formats such as the multi-resolution and multi-color-depth Windows icon files. The architecture allows to extend GIMP's format capabilities with a plug-in. You can find some rare format support in the GIMP plugin registry.
· Thanks to the transparent virtual file system, it is possible to load and save files to from remote locations using protocols such as FTP, HTTP or even SMB (MS Windows shares) and SFTP/SSH.
· To save disk space, any format can be saved with an archive extension such as ZIP, GZ or BZ2 and GIMP will transparently compress the file without you needing to do any extra steps.

Requirements:

· Apple X11 1.0 or later

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

UI:
· Change the Text Tool to perform text editing on-canvas (GSoC 2008)
· Add support for tagging GIMP resources such as brushes and allow filtering based on these tags (GSoC 2008)
· Separate the activies of saving an image and exporting it, there is now an 'File->Export...' for example
· Port file plug-ins to new export API which gets rid of many annoying export dialogs
· Add a simple parser to size entry widgets, images can be scaled to e.g. "50%" or "2 * 37px + 10in"
· Arrange layer modes into more logical and useful groups
· Added support for rotation of brushes
· Make the Pointer dockable show information about selection position and size
· Get rid of the Tools dockable and move toolbox configuration to Preferences
· Add status bar feedback for keyboard changes to brush paramaters
· Add diagonal guides to the Crop Tool
· New docks are created at the pointer position
· Add support for printing crop marks for images
· Move 'Text along path' from tool options to text context menu
· Change default shortcuts for "Shrink Wrap" and "Fit in Window" to Ctrl+R and Ctrl+Shift+R respectively since the previous shortcuts are now used for the save+export feature.
· Make Alt+Click on layers in Layers dockable create a selection from the layer
· Allow to specify written language in the Text Tool

Plug-ins:
· Map the 'Linear Dodge' layer mode in PSD files to the 'Addition' layer mode in GIMP
· Add JPEG2000 load plug-in
· Add X11 mouse cursor plug-in
· Add support for loading 16bit (RGB565) raw data
· Add palette exporter for CSS, PHP, Python, txt and Java, accessed through palette context menu
· Add plug-in API for getting image URI, for manipulating size of text layers, for getting and setting text layer hint, and for unified export dialog appearance

Data:
· Add large variants of round brushes and remove duplicate and useless brushes
· Add "FG to BG (Hardedge)" gradient

GEGL:
· Port the projection code, the code that composes a single image from a stack of layers, to GEGL
· Port layer modes to GEGL
· Port the floating selection code to GEGL
· Refactor the layer stack code to prepare for layer groups later
· Prepare better and more intuitive handling of the floating selection
· Add File->Debug->Show Image Graph that show the GEGL graph of an image
· Allow to benchmark projection performance with File->Debug->Benchmark Projection
· When using GEGL for the projection, use CIELCH instead of HSV/HSL for color based layer modes

Core:
· Make painting strokes Catmull-Rom Spline interpolated
· Add support for arbitrary affine transforms of brushes
· Add support for brush dynamics to depend on tilt
· Add aspect ratio to brush dynamics
· Add infrastructure to soon support vector layers (GSoC 2006)
· Rearrange legacy layer mode code to increase maintainability
· Drop support for the obsolete GnomeVFS file-uri backend
· Allow to dump keyboard shortucts ith File->Debug->Dump Keyboard Shortcuts
· Prepare data structures for layer groups
· Remove gimprc setting "menu-mnemonics", "GtkSettings:gtk-enable-mnemonics" shall be used instead
· Remove "transient-docks" gimprc setting, the 'Utility window' hint and a sane window manager does a better job
· Remove "web-browser" gimprc setting and use gtk_show_uri() instead

General:
· Changed licence to (L)GPLv3+
· Use the automake 1.11 feature 'silent build rules' by default
· Lots of bug fixes and cleanup