8092 Open source high-end image-editing software is an unlikely concept when you think about it. For one thing, anyone who really needs an industrial strength image editor for professional purposes can probably afford and will have the undisputed king-of-the-hill in bitmap graphics software - Adobe's Photoshop CS, and most users - professional or amateur, will for that matter rarely test the limits of even Adobe's much more affordable Photoshop Elements.

However, Photoshop CS is astronomically expensive at its MSRP of $649.00 (although Elements 4.0 for Mac is more than a bit of a bargain at just $89.95), and if you are on a tight budget and really need advanced, full-featured image-editing capability, there is a robust and powerful freeware image editor alternative to Photoshop with the cumbersome moniker of GNU Image Manipulation Program (the GIMP, for short), an advanced open source bitmap imaging program available free for the downloading. Like Photoshop, the GIMP can be used to correct and retouch photographs, compose multiple images, and create artwork from scratch.

The GIMP Is the image-editing standard for the Unix world, and because Mac OS X is Unix-based, you can run it on a Mac as well, but there is a major caveat, namely that the GIMP does not run in OS X's Quartz/Aqua user interface layer, but rather in X Windows under X11 - a program that enables X Windows applications to run under OS X.

X11 is an option that can be specified during an OS X install, and the a standalone X11 installer is also downloadable for free at:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/X11/

The GIMP is also a free download, but a mighty big one - about 120 MB, can you can also download the GIMP HTML manual at:
http://www.osxgnu.org/software/Xwin/applications/gimp

X11 is addressed through a Unix command line, although after the initial setup, you can configure the GIMP to be launchable without command line intercession.

The GIMP's Graphical user interface is more spartan (and Windows-ish) than OS X Aqua, and there are no Mac OS X menu bars. Rather the program depends heavily on contextual menus. To print from the GIMP, you will need Gimp-Print and ESP Ghostscript software installed.

New in version 2.6.8p2:
• The sort order bug in the filechooser, which only occured on Snow Leopard has been fixed.
• Re-enabled the TWAIN plugin to give you back support for various scanners. It was erronously dropped, since I never got it up and running with my Canon scanner. Shortly after I had removed the plugin I ve found out, that the problem with Canon scanners is a 64 bit vs. 32 bit issue and that is related only to the Canon TWAIN drivers. The plugin itself works well
• Added a modified plugin which gives you access to scanners and digital camers by calling Image Capture. This will enable support for those Canon scanners too.
• There are two new plugins.
- dds: this let s you load and save dds files
- wavelet-denoise: a very powerful and fast noise reduction plugin. IMO even better than GREYCstoration.


System requirements:
• Intel Mac running Mac OS X 10.4 or later.
• Apple's X11 windowing environment.
• Universal binary Gimp.app 2.2.11 also available

System Support:
PPC/Intel

Free

For more information, visit:
http://gimp-app.sourceforge.net/

Tags: Software Updates ï Graphics & Design ï Internet ï

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