GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

It has many capabilities. 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, an image format converter, etc.

GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.

• Full suite of painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, Clone, etc.
• Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high quality anti-aliasing
• Extremely powerful gradient editor and blend tool
• Supports custom brushes and patterns
• Tile based memory management so image size is limited only by available disk space
• Virtually unlimited number of images open at one time
• Full alpha channel support
• Layers and channels
• Multiple Undo/Redo (limited only by diskspace)
• Editable text layers
• Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip
• Selection tools including rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy and intelligent
• Advanced path tool doing bezier and polygonal selections.
• Transformable paths, transformable selections.
• Quickmask to paint a selection
• A Procedural Database for calling internal GIMP functions from external programs as in Script-fu
• Advanced scripting capabilities (Scheme, Python, Perl)
• Plug-ins which allow for the easy addition of new file formats and new effect filters
• Over 100 plug-ins already available
• Load and save animations in a convenient frame-as-layer format
• MNG support
• Frame Navigator (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
• Onion Skin (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
• Bluebox (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
• File formats supported include bmp, gif, jpeg, mng, pcx, pdf, png, ps, psd, svg, tiff, tga, xpm, and many others
• Load, display, convert, save to many file formats
• SVG path import/export