It can perform everything from basic edits like cropping and brightness adjustment to more complex editing tasks including clone stamping/healing and image liquify tools. GIMP is a raster image editor, which means that it can create and edit pixel-based images. If you want to learn more about the history of GIMP, including some truly ancient history, there’s some interesting (and extensive) reading available on the official About page. The development of GIMP took on a life of its own when large portions of the code written specifically for GIMP were adopted for use as general-purpose Linux GUI development toolkits ( GTK). Since then, GIMP has gone through a huge number of revisions and even total restructuring. The first public release of GIMP was made available way back in 1996, although the beginnings of the GNU free software movement had taken place even earlier at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1983 when Richard Stallman announced the project’s founding on several Usenet lists. The project is under active development and regularly releases new versions. GIMP is a powerful image editor designed to provide professional-level editing tools for the Linux environment at zero cost, although it was eventually released for both Windows and macOS platforms.

In this case, GNU refers to a free software movement rather than an antelope. It is a software program that is designed to create and edit raster images – though surprisingly enough, not only images of gnus. The name GIMP is an acronym that stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program.

Gnu image manipulation program mac