After six years of development, the new final and official version of GIMP has finally come out, the program for editing and creating images and retouching, the first alternative to Photoshop, developed by a team of non-profit volunteers, this being a completely open software source. The latest version of GIMP is the first major release after version 2.8 of the software was released about six years ago, and is available for all computer platforms: Windows, Mac and Linux .
For those unfamiliar with it, GIMP, which means GNU Image Manipulation Program, is one of the most popular open source programs ever, included in practically every Linux distribution, almost a myth that over time has become a real and free alternative to programs such as Adobe Photoshop or Corel Photo Paint. GIMP is a very powerful tool that can be used both as a simple drawing program and as a professional photo editing program. GIMP is also used for the production of icons, graphic design elements and for user interface components. Being expandable with various plug-ins and extensions, it is able to do practically anything in the graphic field, such as Photoshop.
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GIMP 2.10 can be downloaded for free for PC, Mac and Linux systems from the official gimp.org website.
The download of the installer is quite large, but during the installation it is better to use the custom mode to put only the basic editor without other additional packages. At the first start GIMP may seem slow to open, only to load faster the following times.
Those who had used Gimp in the past before 2018 will notice that the interface has changed and that the menus have a new dark theme that supports symbolic icons and HiDPI support. The theme and icons can however be changed from the Edit menu -> Preferences> Interface, to have a clear theme and smaller or larger icons.
GIMP 2.10 has a whole series of improvements over the previous three version which:
- color management functionality without the need for plug-ins (going to Edit> Preferences> Color Management ).
- New blending methods and blending tool for blending.
- New unified transformation tool to perform multiple transformations.
- New warp transformation tool.
- Improvements to digital painting
- Improvements to digital photography filters
- Level and mask improvements
GIMP 2.10 can read TIFF, PNG, PSD and FITS files with accuracy up to 32 bits per channel. The choice of tools is very wide especially for drawing with brushes, pencils, an airbrush, a copy tool, transformation tools including rotation, scaling, cutting and overturning.
Thanks to the availability of a complete user manual in Italian, using GIMP has certainly become easier for all less experienced users and certainly more immediate than Photoshop.
On the Mora-foto.it website you will find a good mini-guide in Italian with exercises on the use of GIMP (even if referring to the previous version).
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