GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software suitable for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It is an extremely capable piece of software with many capabilities which can be used as a simple paint program, a expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, a image format converter, etc. GIMP is extremely expandedable and extensible, 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.

A full suite of painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, Clone, etc. are included as is tile-based memory managent so image size is limited only by available disk space.

Other features include:

• Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high quality anti-aliasing
• Full alpha channel support
• Layers and channels
• A Procedural Database for calling internal GIMP functions from external programs as in Script-fu
• Advanced scripting capabilities
• Multiple Undo/Redo (limited only by diskspace)
• Virtually unlimited number of images open at one time
• Extremely powerful gradient editor and blend tool
• Load and save animations in a convenient frame-as-layer format
• Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip
• File formats supported include gif, jpg, png, xpm, tiff, tga, mpeg, ps, pdf, pcx, bmp, and many others
• Load, display, convert, save to many file formats
• Selection tools including rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy, bezier and intelligent
• Plug-ins which allow for the easy addition of new file formats and new effect filters
• Over 100 plug-ins already available
• Supports custom brushes and patterns
• Much, much more!