Many people enjoy GIMP as one of their favorite open source tools, and with good reason: it's among some of the most developed ones out there. We've covered all sorts of things about GIMP here at MakeUseOf, but we never really gave a rundown of what it can do. Is it just an over-hyped version of Paint, or can you do some serious image manipulation with it?

Editing Tools

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GIMP has many of the tools you'd expect to have, including some slightly more advanced ones such as:

  • color select
  • burn
  • dodge
  • color alterations (hue-saturation, colorize, brightness and contrast, etc.)
  • layers
  • layer masks
  • selections by path and color
  • feathered selections
  • and plenty more

Each tool (both in the menus and the quick buttons in the left pane) have many different settings which you can tweak to get your desired result. Tools such as the paintbrush and airbrush tools also have support for dynamics, so if you're using a supported drawing tablet you can control how thick/strong your lines are, whether the strokes should be smooth, whether jitter should be applied, and more. You can even play with levels and curves, which is something professionals seem to need for all the images they edit.

Filters

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GIMP comes with a large amount of filters that you can apply to your images. This includes blurs, distortions, light and shadow effects, noise generation, edge-detect, rendering algorithms, and plenty more. Each of these are highly configurable so that you get the desired result that you're looking for. For the example shown above, I took a picture of my university's football stadium and applied an edge-detect filter on it. The stands aren't a nice portion, but the building (lower right area of the picture) looks pretty neat.

Plugins

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The best part about GIMP is that it's very extensible, and there are many different plugins available, so your needs should be pretty well covered. One of my favorite plugins emulates the content-aware resizing functionality found in Photoshop. To find more plugins, you can scour the Web for them, but you can also take a look at the GIMP plugin registry first to see if you can more easily find what you're looking for.

Brushes

Brushes are designs that a program such as GIMP can use while you're painting on a canvas. However, GIMP only comes with a modest set of brushes, so you might want to enlarge your collection. You can easily find both GIMP and Photoshop brushes and place them in GIMP's brushes folder. After you restart GIMP, you should be able to use those new brushes instantly, without any issues. That way, you won't have to leave behind your favorite brushes if you decide to switch from Photoshop to GIMP.

File Formats and Compatibility

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GIMP can handle plenty of formats so it's almost impossible to come across a format that you can't work with. The list includes bmp, gif, jpeg, mng, pcx, pdf, png, ps, psd, svg, tiff, tga, xpm, and more natively, with rare file format support through plugins. Usually, the most common plugin people would have to get is to add RAW support as many high-end camera save their photos in that format.

While GIMP has it's own format for saving its "project" files (the ones that hold the information for layers, effects, and so forth, which gets discarded when you export it to a regular image format) called .xcf, it does have good support for Photoshop's .psd files as well.

Compatibility is almost perfect among features that both programs have directly in common (such as layers) but this starts to wane as soon as you stray away from those features toward something more advanced (not all effects translate exactly the same unless the effects are saved as their own layers). Surprisingly, animation translates very well into the way GIMP treats it.

Cross-Platform

Not only do I love that GIMP is completely open source and well-developed, but it's also very cross platform. It has always been able to run well on Windows, Linux, and other Unix-like operating systems, but Mac OS X users had to struggle with setting up an X11 environment so that GIMP would run. However, since version 2.8.2 (where the latest version at time of writing is 2.8.8) it has been able to run on Mac OS X natively. While Photoshop can run on Windows and Mac OS X, it's difficult to get it working on any other operating systems via Wine. That isn't an issue with GIMP, meaning it's probably the best choice for Linux users.

Conclusion

Ultimately, GIMP is a very capable program that can handle almost all image-related tasks you can throw at it. It isn't quite as capable as Photoshop (for those who can't help but draw comparisons), but it is very good for most common people – and even some professionals. You can get GIMP from their download page. Check out plenty of tutorials here on MakeUseOf such as these top 10 beginner tutorial videos or how to trade faces!

What do you prefer (with cost in mind): GIMP or Photoshop? Are there any cool tutorials you can share with your fellow readers?