GIMP is a digital photo manipulation tool for Windows (and many other platforms) that’s considered to be the open source (free) answer to Adobe Photoshop. Like Photoshop, GIMP is suitable for a variety of image manipulation tasks, including photo retouching, image composition, image construction, and has many other 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, and so much more.
GIMP is amazingly 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 GIMP"s strengths is its free availability from many sources for many operating systems. So, if you don’t want to pay the price for Photoshop, GIMP is definitely the app for you!
GIMP features:
- Full suite of painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, Clone, and more – including the support of custom brushes & patterns
- Extremely powerful gradient editor and blend tool
- Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear, flip, and more
- Supports a variety of selection tools such as rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy, and more
- Supports many file formats – including bmp, gif, jpeg, mng, pcx, pdf, png, ps, psd, svg, tiff, tga, xpm, and more
- Advanced path tool doing bezier and polygonal selections
- Supports a virtually unlimited number of images open at one time
- Load, display, convert, and save to many different file formats
GIMP 3.2.0 RC1 changelog highlights:
- New splash screen featuring the Orion Nebula by astronomer Mark McCaughrean.
- Significant improvements to link layers and vector layers: clearer “Rasterize” and “Revert Rasterize” operations, applied also to text layers.
- Fixed link-layer monitoring bug on Windows (workaround in place while upstream patch is pending).
- On-canvas text editor can now be moved around the screen, making text work in tight areas easier.
- Added shortcut (Shift + Ctrl + V) in on-canvas text editor to paste unformatted text; earlier shortcuts for bold/italics/underline already in place.
- Added “Swap Tools” shortcut (default Shift + X) to toggle between current and previous tool (e.g., brush↔eraser); works with filters too, returning to previous tool after applying.
- Continued enhancement of non-destructive filters; one can now simulate “adjustment layers” by using layer groups set to “Pass through” and masks.
- UX/UI improvements: drag-&-drop of files onto the image tab bar for easier multi-image open in Single Window mode.
- Replaced many Spin Entry widgets with newer Spin Scale controls for better user interaction.
- Color history swatches now support drag-&-drop properly (previously focus issues prevented this).
- On macOS: restored missing features in the App Menu (hide GIMP, hide others) and improved “Quit” to link to closing code to reduce losing unsaved data.
- Document History dockable now supports multi-selection (open or remove multiple image previews at once).
- New format for color drag-&-drop code: now includes colorspace information, replacing older application/x-color which assumed sRGB only.
- Installer improvements: Windows .exe installer now supports Dark Mode (for Windows 10/11) via Inno Setup 6.6.0. [full release notes]
Download: GIMP 3.2.0 RC1 | 291.0 MB (Open Source)
View: GIMP Website | Screenshot
