Page 176 - DCAP303_MULTIMEDIA_SYSTEMS

Multimedia Systems

notes The GIMP has long been toted as the open-source competitor to Adobe Photoshop. Many people
are quick to point out GIMP’s shortcomings, claiming it is not a true Photoshop replacement,
but in the process they overlook what GIMP has accomplished. Without the extremely polished
and commercially driven Photoshop to stand against, GIMP is almost entirely unrivalled
in sophistication. Colour correction, channel mixing, advanced cloning, paths, and layered
compositions are all part of the GIMP package. There is very little the average Photoshop user
does that cannot be done in GIMP, and if you are not working for a company footing the bill for
Photoshop, the free-as-in-beer price tag looks mighty fine.

In addition to detailed image retouching and free-form drawing, GIMP can accomplish essential
image editing tasks such as resizing, editing, and cropping photos, photomontages combining
multiple images, and converting between different image formats. GIMP can also be used to create
animated images in many formats such as GIF and MPEG through the Animation Plugin.

The GIMP’s product vision is that GIMP is a free software high-end graphics application for the
editing and creation of original images, icons, graphical elements of Web pages and art for user
interface elements.
figure 10.11: GiMp 2.6 Manipulating an image

The GIMP originally stood for the General Image Manipulation Program. The GIMP’s original
creators, Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis, began developing GIMP in 1995 as a semester-long
project at the University of California, Berkeley. The first public release of GIMP (0.54) was made
in January 1996. In 1997 GIMP became a part of the GNU Project, and the acronym GIMP was
changed to the GNU Image Manipulation Program. Currently GIMP is maintained and enhanced
by a group of volunteers under the auspices of the GNOME Project. GIMP was originally created
for UNIX systems; GNU/Linux, SGI IRIX and HP-UX were supported in the first release. Since
the first release GIMP was rapidly adopted and a community emerged consisting of users who
created tutorials, artwork and shared techniques. Since the initial release, GIMP has been ported
to many operating systems, including Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X; the original port to
the Windows 32-bit platform was started by Finnish programmer Tor Lillqvist (tml) in 1997 and
was supported in the GIMP 1.1 release.

The GIMP has used three graphical user interface (GUI) toolkits since its inception; GIMP originally
used Motif on the first public release (0.54). Eventually, Peter Mattis became disenchanted with
Motif and developed his own GUI toolkit named the GIMP toolkit (GTK); GTK had successfully
replaced Motif in the 0.60 release of GIMP. Finally GTK was re-written to be object oriented and
was renamed GTK+; this was first visible in GIMP 0.99.

170 LoveLy professionaL University