Configuring Multimedia Apps

Configuring Multimedia Applications

We’ve covered sound and image scanning in this series on multimedia in Linux. It’s time to take a look at one of the most highly-regarded programs available for image manipulation - The Gimp.

The Gimp is the “Gnu Image Manipulation Program.” It’s often been called a freeware Photoshop, and I think the comparison is an apt one. The look and feel is different from Photoshop in many ways, but the fundamental tools are the same and the result of using Gimp can be a truly Photoshop-like end product. For some excellent examples of the capabilities of the Gimp, see the color section of the Gimp manual. This really is world-class image manipulation.

The Gimp was created by Peter Mattis and Spencer Kimball as, well, a Unix-friendly Photoshop program. Since its creation, others have created the program to the Win32 platform. Other have reported some success with The Gimp on the Mac platform, as well.

The feature set is rich. One of the greatest assets of The Gimp is its extensibility - the ability to add plug-ins to handle specific image maniuplation tasks. As you well know, this is precisely in line with the open philosophy of Linux. This extensibility stems from the open nature of the source code. Anyone with an appropriate level of coding savvy can create plugins for The Gimp for, essentially, the good of the community. As a result, there exists a full and broad range of plugins to handle nearly any graphics task.

At a high level, the important features of The Gimp include:

• A full set of painting tools
• Subpixel sampling that results in better anti-aliasing
• The capability to open a virtually unlimited number of images
• File format support for gif, jpg, png, xpm, tiff, tga, mpeg, ps, pdf, pcx, bmp, among others
• A gradient editor and blending tool
• Scripting support
• A full kit of selection tools including rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy, bezier and intelligent
• A full kit of transformation tools including including rotate, scale, shear and flip

It would be impossible to cover all the features and capabilities of The Gimp in the next six months of Penguin Shell issues. So, you’ll need to do further research on utilizing The Gimp on your own. However, there are some excellent online tutorials available. Among them are the official Gimp tutorials page, Tigert’s tutorial on layers, and the Gimp User Group’s tutorials page. Peruse them freely and give yourself plenty of time to learn the ins and outs of The Gimp. It’s well worth the investment of your time.