Finding GIMP

We were mindlessly scrolling blogs on a Saturday evening; at slashdot.org we saw this book review reference, “GIMP 2 for Photographers,” and worked the search button to get to the home page for GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program, at www.gimp.org. After downloading the program, I recognized the features of a comprehensive graphic tool in the fashion of Paintshop X2 (which I own) and Photoshop (which is the state of the art and expensive).

The summary of this program:

It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

It has many 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, etc.

GIMP is 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.

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

It is interesting that I have done some previous searching for just this kind of program without much success. My Paintshop program from Corel is quite capable but it does not have a license that allows it to be placed in multiple locations (such as my laptop or at work).

I am able to take photos in the “RAW” Nikon NEF format (maximized photo quality; each image takes about 4-5MB and my 1GB card allows me about 175 images before I need to off-load data) and upload them to my laptop using the Nikon viewer program.  The GIMP program does not accept NEF formatted images (although with some research there may be a plug-in that provides this capability), so I then save them at the highest quality JPG format.  At that point, I open them in GIMP and I have just began to understand what to do next.