GIMP

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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. GIMP is written and developed under X11 on UNIX platforms. But basically the same code also runs on MS Windows and Mac OS X.

Here's a list of the GIMP program features:

• Full suite of painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, Clone, etc.
• Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high quality anti-aliasing
• Extremely powerful gradient editor and blend tool
• Supports custom brushes and patterns
• Tile based memory management so image size is limited only by available disk space
• Virtually unlimited number of images open at one time
• Full alpha channel support
• Layers and channels
• Multiple Undo/Redo (limited only by diskspace)
• Editable text layers
• Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip
• Selection tools including rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy and intelligent
• Advanced path tool doing bezier and polygonal selections.
• Transformable paths, transformable selections.
• Quickmask to paint a selection.
• A Procedural Database for calling internal GIMP functions from external programs as in Script-fu
• Advanced scripting capabilities (Scheme, Python, Perl)
• Plug-ins which allow for the easy addition of new file formats and new effect filters
• Over 100 plug-ins already available
• Load and save animations in a convenient frame-as-layer format
• MNG support
• Frame Navigator (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
• Onion Skin (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
• Bluebox (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
• File formats supported (bmp, gif, jpeg, mng, pcx, pdf, png, ps, psd, svg, tiff, tga, xpm)
• Load, display, convert, save to many file formats
• SVG path import/export
• Much, much more! 

Here's is the suggested system requirements of GIMP:

• The GIMP should run on Windows 98/ME/NT4/2000/XP. It is recommended to use an NT-based version of Windows (NT4, 2000 or XP). Starting with GIMP 2.2 and GTK+ 2.4, older versions such as Windows 95 are not supported anymore. The amount of memory can be an important factor, especially if you intend to work on large images. A minimum of 128 MB of RAM is recommended, but the more RAM the better.

Here are some useful links in setting up the GIMP program:

• The first time you run the GIMP - When you run the GIMP for the first time, it will install some files in your home directory and it will show you some dialogs that give you the opportunity to adapt it to your environment.
• How to set the tile cache - The tile cache tells the GIMP how much memory it can use before swapping some image data to disk. Setting the size of the tile cache can be critical for the performance of your system.