The E-learning Curve at Edublogs

The second open environment authoring tool highlighted in this series is a flexible image editing application called the GNU Image Manipulation Program.

The GNU Image Manipulation Program, or GIMP, is a freely distributed raster graphics editor used to process digital graphics and photographs. Typical uses include:

• creating graphics and logos
• resizing and cropping photos
• colour management
• combining multiple images
• removing unwanted image features
• converting between different image formats

GIMP can also be used to create simple animated GIF images. It is often used as a software replacement for Adobe Photoshop.

GIMP has support for opening and saving to a large number of different file formats. Its native format is XCF.

Figure 1. A screenshot of the GIMP UI

GIMP has read/write support for popular image formats such as BMP, JPEG, PNG, GIF and TIFF, as well as the proprietary file formats of several other applications such as Autodesk flic animations, Paintshop Pro images and Adobe Photoshop Documents. Other formats with read/write support include PostScript documents. GIMP can also read and write path information from SVG files. GIMP can also read/write ICO Windows icon files.

GIMP can import Adobe PDF documents and the raw image formats used by many digital cameras, but cannot save to these formats.

References:

GNU Image Manipulation Program Home Page: http://www.gimp.org/
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