Gimp Photo Editor Provides Design Alternative to Adobe

Ever heard of GIMP? No? Well, you’ll be shocked to know that the GNU Image Manipulation Program was originally released in 1995. Unlike the Adobe suite of products, GIMP is totally free. It is also an open-source raster graphics editor and you can use it for image editing and retouching, cropping, re-sizing, free-form drawing, photo montages among many other specialized tasks.

A Look at the GIMP Photo Editor

Getting Started

Since its inception, GIMP has come a long way. The most recent version is GIMP 2.8, which they say is a result of three years of collaborative development and hard work. The new version is loaded with a host of features.

Single Window Mode

The new version comes with an optional single-window mode, so you can now easily toggle between the single window and the default multi-window mode. The single-window mode is much cleaner than the multi-window. Images and “dockable dialogs” are all available on the tabbed image window. You can, however, choose to have the “dockable dialogs” in multiple columns. To do this, create a new column in a dock window, drag and drop the dialog on the vertical edges of the dock window.

Multi-column dock windows feature is, however, more appealing to multi-monitor users where you can have the big dock window in one screen and the other dialogs on other displays.

Edit Text on Canvas

While earlier versions required that you edit text in a separate window, the new 2.8 version allows for on-canvas editing. Apart from the usual text formatting features such as font size, family and style, you also get numeric control over baseline offset and kerning as well as the ability to change text color for a selection.

Widget for Tablet Users

GIMP also comes with a widget that meets that requirements of tablet users. The widget combines a numeric value control, a label and a slider that better visualizes the current value and provides a more compact UI.

Resource Tagging

GIMP allows you to tag and group resources such as patterns and groups. Tag resources from their respective dockables. It is also possible to filter resources based on these tags. It is possible to tag multiple resources simultaneously.

Having too large an image that can’t be embedded in a webpage, posted anywhere online, or attached to an email is a common problem. In this case you should scale the image down and GIMP makes this really easy. Open the “scale image” dialog and enter the desired width and height values.

You could as well use GIMP to rotate and flip and image, change file size or crop an image. These are all common modifications that you may need to make as you look to advertise and sell your products online.

While Adobe offers highly-efficient products like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, the costs of such tools is way expensive (starting at $9 for Lightroom CC and Photoshop CC). GIMP may not offer a wide variety of services like Adobe, but it is free, easy to use and will offer you almost all the image editing features that you need.

Image: Gimp

This article, "Gimp Photo Editor Provides Design Alternative to Adobe" was first published on Small Business Trends