GIMP for Mac OS X: Perfect Alternative to Adobe Photoshop

GIMP is a  multi-platform photo manipulation tool distributed under the General Public License and suitable for a variety of image manipulation tasks, including photo retouching, image composition, and image construction. Look around. All images that you see on Palluxo! have been created by GIMP (GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program).

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, and an image format converter. It is often used as a free software replacement for Adobe Photoshop, the most widely used bitmap editor in the printing and graphics industries.

One of The GIMP’s strengths is its free availability from many sources for many operating systems. Most GNU/Linux distributions include The GIMP as a standard application. The GIMP is also available for Apple’s Mac OS X (Darwin). Typical uses include creating graphics and logos, resizing and cropping photos, altering colours, combining multiple images, removing unwanted image features, and converting between different image formats. GIMP can also be used to create basic animated images in GIF format.

The file format support ranges from the common likes of JPEG (JFIF), GIF, PNG, TIFF to special use formats such as the multi-resolution and multi-color-depth Windows icon files. The architecture allows to extend GIMP’s format capabilities with a plug-in. You can find some rare format support in the GIMP plugin registry.

You can download GIMP from GIMP.org website. Supported Platforms include Mac OS X, Linux (i386, PPC), Sun OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, and Microsoft Windows (XP, Vista).

System Requirements:
GIMP will only run on Mac OS X, not on version 9 or earlier of the Macintosh operating system. There are a number of reasons why it is unlikely that GIMP will ever run on older versions of Mac OS. In addition to Mac OS X, the following is a list of what you will need to run GIMP on your Macintosh:

X Windowing Layer: GIMP uses a separate windowing layer, the X11 windowing protocol, on Mac OS X, which must be installed first. The XDarwin project provides this functionality. Apple used to provide their own version of this windowing layer, based on XFree86. Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) now ships with an X11.app based on the X.Org 7.2 release.

Graphics libraries and toolkits: Unlike most Linux distributions, Mac OS X does not come with the open source libraries upon which GIMP is built. These are typically installed along with GIMP, but can be installed separately. If you want to compile GIMP from source, we suggest that you use MacPorts or fink to install the libraries it depends on.