In 1995, Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis began developing GIMP – originally named General Image Manipulation Program – as a semester-long project at the University of California, Berkeley for the eXperimental Computing Facility.

GIMP is released under GPL-3.0-or-later license and is available for Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows. It is not designed to be used for drawing. GIMP ( / ɡ ɪ m p/ GHIMP GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free and open-source raster graphics editor used for image manipulation (retouching) and image editing, free-form drawing, transcoding between different image file formats, and more specialized tasks. In addition, its fragmented interface can be particularly useful because you can always modify the layout of the floating windows to suit your preferences or revert to the classic system to make it more like Adobe tools.Amharic, Arabic, Asturian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Belarusian, Bosnian, Brazilian Portuguese, Breton, British English, Bulgarian, Burmese, Canadian English, Catalan, Central Kurdish, Chinese (China), Chinese (Hong Kong), Chinese (Taiwan), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Dzongkha, Esperanto, Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Kabyle, Kannada, Kashubian, Kazakh, Khmer, Kinyarwanda, Kirghiz, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Low German, Macedonian, Malay, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Norwegian (Bokmål), Norwegian (Nynorsk), Occitan, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian (Cyrillic script), Serbian (Latin script), Sinhala, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Tatar, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Valencian, Vietnamese, Xhosa, Yiddish GIMP can work with virtually all current image formats, such as BMP, GIF, JPEG, MNG, PCX, PNG, PSD, PS, PDF, TIFF, TGA, SVG or XPM.

Plus, the program's functionality can be extended through the use of plug-ins. You can also use GIMP to convert images between formats, batch process files, compose vector images, or edit motion graphics formats. GIMP's features are virtually the same as those of any current image editor: layer system, alpha channels, operation history, selection and transformation tools, masks, gradients, and so on. The app's tools include a brush, pencil, clone pad, and airbrush. You can use GIMP both to retouch images and to create new ones. GNU, (Image Manipulation Program) is a multi-platform open-source tool that lets you perform practically the same actions as paid software.

For years now, GIMP has been one of the best free alternatives for commercial image editing suites like Photoshop or Corel Draw.

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