Download GIMP 2.8.0

Softworld editor's review - 2011-03-15

A great alternative to Adobe Photoshop

GIMP is one of the best free image editors. Despite being completely free, it comes very close to the paid alternatives such as Adobe Photoshop.

This program can be used as a simple drawing application but also for editing photographs at an professional level. GIMP despite being a free application has included top notch features such as great editing tools, filters and special effects, masks, channels, layers and many others. The best thing about GIMP is that there are almost endless possibilities to expand it. This is because there are available an impressive number of plug-ins and extensions.

Definitely that this is a application that is very easy and enjoyable to be used. However the main problem with it is the install process. GIMP runs on the GTK Runtime Environment an because of this you have to install first this application. The installation process takes a while and from time to time some error messages may appear. But with persistence in the end you will manage to get through this procedure.

If you want a free and also excellent alternative to Adobe Photoshop then definitely that GIMP is the right choice.

Good:

- simple and free to use
- plenty of editing options
- multiplatform

Bad:

- lengthy installation process


Version 2.6.11 reviewed on: 15 Mar 2011

Publisher's description

Great application that allows you to perform tasks such as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.

GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is 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.

Changes on the new version:
*User Interface - Single-Window Mode| - Multi-Column Dock Windows| - More Screen Real Estate For Dockable Dialogs| - Save And Export| - Layer Groups| - Tools Drawn With Cairo| - On-Canvas Text Editing| - Keyboard Shortcut Changes| - Simple Math In Size Entries. *Minor Changes - Added 'Windows→Hide docks' menu item that does what 'Tab' does and also displays its state, which is now persistent across sessions, too.| - Added infrastructure allowing to embed user interface elements on the canvas. This is currently used for text styles in the text tool, and (experimentally) when a color correction tool is invoked while the canvas is in full-screen mode.| - To make dock window titles manageable, only show the active dockable in the dock window title.| - The layer modes have been rearranged into more logical and useful groups based on the effect they have on compositing of a layer. Layer modes that make the composite lighter are in one group, layer modes that make the composite darker in another group, and so forth.| - You can now Alt+Click on layers in the Layers dialog to create a selection from it. Add, subtract and intersect modifiers Ctrl, Shift and Ctrl+Shift keys work too. This makes it easy to compose contents of a layer based on the contents of other layers, without detours.| - New docks are created at the pointer position.| - Removed Toolbox from list of Recently Closed Docks, handle that directly in the Windows menu.| - Allow closing the toolbox without closing the whole application.| - Default to non-fixed-aspect in Canvas Size dialog.| - In the Preferences dialog, only have one setting for the window hint for both the toolbox and the docks.| - Support arbitrary affine transforms of brushes.| - Got rid of the Tools dockable and move toolbox configuration to Preferences.| - A question that often arises is how to change the UI language in GIMP, which has traditionally been a bit cumbersome. Not any longer, it is now possible to change the language in Preferences.| - Added 'Lock content' button to the layers, channels and paths dialogs, made the lock buttons more compact.| - Allow renaming list items with F2.| - Allow binding arbitrary actions to extra mouse buttons.

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