Want a freely distributed piece of software for all your image composition, photo retouching and image authoring needs? Want one that works on many operating systems and that supports many languages? Then look no further, the GIMP or GNU Image Manipulation Program can do all of these and more!

Image batch processing, image format converting, rendering, expert photo retouching or even a simple paint program, the GIMP has capabilities to fit any of these needs.

Painting features include:

• All popular painting tools such as Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, Clone and more
• High-quality anti-aliasing due to the GIMP’s sub-pixel sampling
• Advanced and powerful blend tool and gradient editor
• Support for custom patterns and brushes

Photo manipulation features include:

• Full alpha channel support
• Support for layers and channels
• Any number of undo/redo commands are supported
• Text layers
• Rotate, scale, shear, flip and other transformation tools
• Selection tools with predefined shapes such as rectangle, elipse, free, fuzzy and intelligent
• Advanced path tool doing bezier and polygonal selections
• Transformable paths and selections
• Quickmask

Animation:

• Animations are loaded and saved in a frame-as-layer format
• Support for MNG

GAP ( the GIMP Animation Package) also supports:

• Frame navigator
• Onion Sking
• Bluebox

System and file handling:

• Image size limited only by available disk space do to tile based memory management
• Able to open any numer of images at one time
• Support for all popular formats such as bmp, gif, jpeg, mng, pcx, pdf, png, ps, psd, tiff, tga, xpm, svg and more
• SVG path import/export
• Easy to load, display and convert between file formats

Extensible:

• Plug-ins allow for addition of new file formats or effect filters easily
• Advanced scripting capabilities include (in Scheme, Python, Perl)
• Over 100 plug-ins already available

Yes the GIMP can do all of this, and more, and it’s absolutely FREE, so if you have not tried it until today, what are you waiting for?