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- About Gimp
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Regarding commercial, multimedia-capable operating systems,
like MacOS or Windows (given you call Windows an operating
system),
Adobe's
Photoshop, without doubt, represents the state of the art
of raster graphics manipulation programs. However, two
points may prevent you from using Photoshop for your daily
work. First, it is not available on many Unix-based systems.
There have been versions for Solaris and Irix, but, as far
as I know, these haven't been developed since version 4.0
of the program. Second and probably even more important,
Photoshop, as good as it is, costs lots of money, at least,
from the view of the private person.
This is where Gimp drops in. Having been written as a
contribution to the free software community and released
under the terms of the
GPL,
Gimp does not cost you anything. You may download it
for free, use it for free and redistribute it at no
costs. You may even prove your qualities and add some
new features to it quite easily, since Gimp is distributed
with its source layed open.
Gimp makes full use of the underlying
Gimp ToolKit on which it is built.
Actually, the two primarily authors implemented the GTK
especially for Gimp. This gives Gimp a consistent and
easy to maintain graphical user interface with interesting
features, such as file and colour requesters, context
sensitive menues or scaling graphical elements.
There have been some other raster graphics manipulation
programs before Gimp, the most remarkable of which was
xpaint, but none of which reached the same majority and
feature richness of Gimp. Gimp, which has been implemented
with modularity in mind, has drawn people and developers
ever since and the user community is still growing.
People often blaim free software for its simplicity and
few numbered features in comparison to commercial
counterparts. In the case of Gimp and raster graphics
manipulation applications this accusation is not true
at all.
- Gimp Links
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The following links represent pointers to further useful resources:
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