GIMP - Frequently Asked Questions

GIMP - Frequently Asked Questions
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Frequently Asked Questions
General questions
Is there a company or a foundation behind
GIMP
Can I use
GIMP
commercially?
What’s the
GIMP
’s license, and how do I comply with it?
Someone sold or tried to sell me
GIMP
on a 3rd party website. Is this legal?
Are you trying to develop a Photoshop killer app?
I don’t like
GIMP
’s user interface. Why can’t you just copy Adobe Photoshop?
I don’t like the name
GIMP
. Will you change it?
Releases
When do you release the next version of
GIMP
Why can’t you announce dates of future releases?
Aren’t you interested in doing paid development of
GIMP
via crowdfunding?
Will you release
GIMP
for Android or iOS devices?
Features
I do not recognize
GIMP
’s user interface. It’s different from what I see in all tutorials. What do I do?
When will
GIMP
support
HDR
imaging and processing with 16bit per color channel precision?
When will
GIMP
support any kind of non-destructive editing like adjustment layers, layer filters, and/or full-blown node-based editing?
Will
GIMP
open raw (.
NEF
, .
CR2
etc.) files from my camera?
I do a lot of desktop publishing related work. Will you ever support
CMYK
I don’t like some changes you introduced in recent
GIMP
versions, like the Save/Export separation. Why can’t you add a checkbox to disable them?
Why doesn’t
GIMP
use
GTK4
Tips
How do I draw a straight line?
How do I draw a circle or square?
Troubleshooting
My graphic tablet doesn’t work on Windows/Mac. Does
GIMP
support advanced input devices such as Wacom?
Under MacOS
GIMP
fonts are garbled
Contributing
I’m a developer. How do I help you?
I’m not a developer. Can I still help you somehow?
General questions
Is there a company or a foundation behind
GIMP
No. We are a diverse group of volunteers from around the world who work on this
project in their spare time. Code-wise most of project contributions come from
Europe where the current
GIMP
maintainers live. Our translators are an even
more diverse group of contributors, since
GIMP
is available in more than
80 languages.
Can I use
GIMP
commercially?
Yes, you can.
GIMP
is free software, it doesn’t put restrictions on the kind
of work you produce with it.
What’s the
GIMP
’s license, and how do I comply with it?
GIMP
is distributed under terms of General Public License v3 and later. In a
nutshell, this means:
You are free to use
GIMP
, for any purpose
You are free to distribute
GIMP
You can study how
GIMP
works and change it
You can distribute changed versions of
GIMP
Note that once you distribute modified version of
GIMP
, you also must publish
your changes to the source code under GPLv3+ as well.
Someone sold or tried to sell me
GIMP
on a 3rd party website. Is this legal?
Yes, under terms of the General Public License this is perfectly legal,
provided that the seller also gave you the source code of
GIMP
and any
modifications they introduced. Please see
this page
for more information.
Are you trying to develop a Photoshop killer app?
No. Most generic image editors look like Photoshop simply because Adobe’s
application was among the first image editors as we know them now, so
developers tend to stick to what people know — in general terms.
What we aim to do is to create a high-end image manipulation application that
is free to use and modify by everyone, ever.
Feature-wise, the proposed “high-end” status does automatically put
GIMP
into
direct comparison against Photoshop, but we don’t think about competition
much. We have too many ideas of our own to implement, and too many things to
improve before the notion of competition begins to make the slightest sense.
We do, however, acknowledge the fact that people will treat
GIMP
as Photoshop
replacement no matter what we tell them, and that’s all right with us. You
own this software, it’s up to you to decide how you make use of it.
I don’t like
GIMP
’s user interface. Why can’t you just copy Adobe Photoshop?
In the past
, the development in the project was somewhat erratic
with regards to taking usability into consideration, which is rather
typical for free software projects in their early years.
Between 2006 and 2013
, we worked with Peter Sikking of Man+Machine
Works, a professional usability architect, who helped us shape a first
project vision for
GIMP
, interviews professional users to better
understand their workflows and demands, and wrote functional
specifications for various
GIMP
features.
This collaboration
resulted in major improvements of
GIMP
’s usability, in particular: the rectangular-based selection/cropping
tools, the unified free/polyline selection tool, the single-window mode, the
upcoming unified transformation tool etc.
While working on functional specifications, Peter researched how various
features are implemented in applications with a partially matching feature set
(such as Adobe Photoshop), but the final design was made to help actual users
complete their tasks as fast as possible.
Since 2012
Aryeom Han
(animation
film director, fine arts artist and designer) started working with the
GIMP
team, and in particular Jehan, which resulted in many
UX
improvements and new features. Such enhancements include the ability to
select multiple layers, the
Alt-middle click
feature to quick
select a layer from canvas, the
Alt-right click
action to
change brush sizes (and generally the ability to map any action to any
button + modifier), a redesign of
item
locks
, the
specification of the layer effects
interface
we envision, and so many more features that we can’t list them all (so
much that they became maintainers of
GIMP
).
This work with and by Aryeom was the source of the creation for our
gimp-ux
repository
in 2024
, dedicated to gather feedbacks, discuss about
interface, experience and write down specifications of features with
well thought rationals.
This is exactly the kind of approach to designing interfaces that we
consider to be superior to merely copying others’ user interaction decisions.
I don’t like the name
GIMP
. Will you change it?
With all due respect, no.
We’ve been using the name
GIMP
for more than 20 years and it’s widely known.
The name was originally (and remains) an acronym; although the word “gimp” can
be used offensively in some cultures, that is not our intent.
On top of that, we feel that in the long run, sterilization of language will
do more harm than good.
GIMP
has been quite popular for a long time in search
engine results compared to the use of the word “gimp”. So we think we are on
the right track to make a positive change and make “gimp” something people
actually feel good about. Especially if we add all the features we’ve been
meaning to implement and fix the user interface.
Finally, if you still have strong feelings about the name “
GIMP
”, you should
feel free to promote the use of the long form
GNU
Image Manipulation Program
or exercise your software freedom to fork and rebrand
GIMP
Releases
When do you release the next version of
GIMP
We release both updates to the current stable version and development versions.
We cut new updates of the stable version in two cases: 1) some newly introduced
bug is knowingly affecting a lot of users; 2) the amount of improvements and
bug fixes is large enough to justify an update — typically, a few
dozens of each, but there is no rule.
Why can’t you announce dates of future releases?
We are a team of volunteers with day jobs, families, and personal interests
beyond development of software. Given that, we try to avoid the situation when
we cannot deliver a release, because something else at work/in family came up.
Instead we provide a
feature-based roadmap
that roughly outlines, in what order we will be implementing various popular
requests made by users.
We tried a few times to give date estimates but it always ends up as
being taken as some kind of “promises” and relayed in news outlets,
finally backfiring into having people telling us we don’t keep our
promises. Anyone working in software development knows that estimates
are just an attempt to organize. This is why we are wary about
publishing dates in announcements now.
Aren’t you interested in doing paid development of
GIMP
via crowdfunding?
Some developers have jobs they love and contribute in their spare time, while
others actively try to make a living with Free Software development.
GIMP
project actively encourages personal fundraisers by trusted contributors. There
are two such campaigns running at the moment. You can learn more about them on
the
Donate
page.
If you are willing to launch a campaign and develop some features for
GIMP
talk to us about changes you are about to propose. We’ll help you to flesh
out your idea and promote it to a larger community.
Will you release
GIMP
for Android or iOS devices?
Apps for mobile devices imply a different approach to designing interfaces.
Since most of
GIMP
’s source code is related to the user interface one way or
another, it means that we would have to design and then develop a whole new
application. Given the current manpower, we’d rather focus on delivering a
great image manipulation program for desktop users.
However, this has been a topic of interest to several core developers
across the years. We might release some day a
GIMP
-branded image
manipulation program for Android. Though
no promises!
As for iOS, please note that
GIMP
is licensed under
GNU
GPL
v3+ which
conflicts with Apple’s Terms of Service. For a full story, please read
this article
by Richard Gaywood.
Features
I do not recognize
GIMP
’s user interface. It’s different from what I see in all tutorials. What do I do?
We switched to a dark user interface theme and a symbolic icon theme by default
in version 2.10, we also introduced tool groups. If you absolutely want to revert
GIMP
to colorful icons, bright/system user interface, and no tool groups, here is
what you do:
Go to
Edit > Preferences
, in the newly opened window go to
Interface > Theme
and change the theme from
Dark
to
System
Switch to the
Interface > Icon Theme
page nearby and change the theme
from
Symbolic
to
Legacy
Finally, go to
Interface > Toolbox
in the very same
Preferences
dialog and
tick off the
Use tool groups
setting.
Changes will apply immediately. Click
OK
to confirm.
When will
GIMP
support
HDR
imaging and processing with 16bit per color channel precision?
GIMP
2.10 was released in April 2018 and is the first version of the program
to feature processing with precision of 16-bit and 32-bit per color channel.
When will
GIMP
support any kind of non-destructive editing like adjustment layers, layer filters, and/or full-blown node-based editing?
Rejoice:
GIMP
3.0 has non-destructive layer effects! 🎉
It is a first version, with a still basic and limited
UI
. More improvements are
yet to come.
Will
GIMP
open raw (.
NEF
, .
CR2
etc.) files from my camera?
Starting with version 2.10,
GIMP
features plug-ins for using
darktable
and
RawTherapee
to process raw images, as well as a
preference for a default raw processing plug-in.
I do a lot of desktop publishing related work. Will you ever support
CMYK
Yes, better support for
CMYK
has been on our roadmap for a long time. One of the
ideas, how we want to make this work, was introduced by user interaction
architect Peter Sikking at Libre Graphics Meeting 2009 and later —
in his two-part article in his company’s blog:
. Please
take some time to read up on that.
We needed to finalize transition to the new image processing engine,
GEGL
before attempting to introduce features like
CMYK
support. Now that it is
complete, initial work on
CMYK
support has been done in the babl and
GEGL
libraries that
GIMP
relies on. This is partially
funded by the
GIMP
community
you can join in, too.
More work happened in the
GIMP
2.99.12 development iteration, as a
GSoC
project
. This
allowed or improved importing and exporting
CMYK
images in various file
formats (converted to and from
RGB
as storage format) and expose
CMYK
pixel information within
GIMP
(e.g. when color picking) within the
context of a soft-proof color profile.
As for making
CMYK
a core image format (such as
RGB
, Grayscale or
indexed), we have no timeline on this but we also wish it to be possible
some day.
Also, please note that we are not planning advanced features such as
GCR
support
for now. This will most likely require a new dedicated developer in the team.
Should a new developer join the team to specifically work on
CMYK
-related features, we will do our best to help him/her to complete this
project and get it to our users as soon as possible.
I don’t like some changes you introduced in recent
GIMP
versions, like the Save/Export separation. Why can’t you add a checkbox to disable them?
We realize that some changes are disruptive to some groups of users,
especially those who got used to
GIMP
as an image editor for doing quick fixes
to lossy files such as
JPEG
PNG
etc. (i.e. files that cannot store layers,
masks, custom channels, paths).
However, adding a switch for every change we make adds numerous levels of
complexity that we’d rather avoid. Additionally, it would lead to dramatically
changing the way we mean
GIMP
to work. Hence we respectfully disagree to make
extra behaviour switches.
At the same time, if you don’t wish to abandon
GIMP
completely, we recommend
having a look at the
Saver and Save/export clean plug-ins
by Akkana Peck, as well as at various
GIMP
forks on GitHub, although typically
they aren’t maintained up to date with regards to bugfixes.
Why doesn’t
GIMP
use
GTK4
We only just ported
GIMP
to
GTK
+3. Please give us some time to breathe
before starting to pressure us into yet another toolkit port.
Note also that even though following
GTK
evolution is obviously planned,
this is not necessarily a priority for us or our users. Most people
doing advanced usage of
GIMP
don’t care about the toolkit and even have
no idea what
GTK
is. They want to work on image manipulation, and few of
the related features are on the
GTK
side.
Still, it will come someday, and the
roadmap
might be a good place
to look at for reference.
Tips
How do I draw a straight line?
In any of the drawing tools (Pen, Pencil, etc.), click on one endpoint of the
line. Then hold the shift key and click on the other endpoint.
How do I draw a circle or square?
In the Rectangular or Elliptical selection tool, click in one corner of your
square or circle, then press Shift while dragging toward the other corner. Or
enable the checkbox for Fixed: Aspect Ratio in tool options and make sure the
aspect ratio is set to 1:1 before starting your square or circular selection.
Once you have a selection,
Edit->Stroke Selection...
will draw a line the
shape of the selection you just made.
For curved selections, like circles, stroking with the Paintbrush paint tool
will usually give a smoother looking line. You can get an even smoother line
by converting the selection to a path (
Select->To Path
), then using
Edit->Stroke Path...
instead of
Stroke Selection...
As a general rule though, if you mostly need to work with shapes, maybe
GIMP
is not the most adapted tool. This is typically a usage for vector
applications. We recommend for instance
Inkscape
which is a great Free Software for vector imagery.
We are planning to eventually have a shape tool, but having vector
layers (which is also planned) will have to be the first step.
Troubleshooting
My graphic tablet doesn’t work on Windows/Mac. Does
GIMP
support advanced input devices such as Wacom?
Yes,
GIMP
does support graphic tablets and maps pressure, stroke speed, and
other events to its advanced brush engine properties.
Important graphic tablet support improvements happened in
GIMP
3. We
advise you to update to the latest version of
GIMP
, especially if you
are still using a version from the
GIMP
2 series.
Under MacOS
GIMP
fonts are garbled
Some issues were fixed in Pango (the library we use for text layout)
recently
You should update to the latest version of
GIMP
As a general rule, updates of macOS often break previously working
versions of many software, including
GIMP
. You should consider always
using the latest version of
GIMP
(this is true in general, but has
proven even more important on macOS).
Contributing
I’m a developer. How do I help you?
Great! Please check the
developer website
for introduction on
GIMP
development and talk to us on
IRC
I’m not a developer. Can I still help you somehow?
Absolutely! Our community includes artists, designers, translators, documenters,
writers, webmasters and much more!
Please check the
Get Involved
pages for ways you can help.
Here are some of the ways you can help us: