GIMP
Revision as of 19:05, 16 February 2009 by Jdsmith (talk | contribs) (→Panoramic photography related gimp plugins)
The Gimp is the GNU Image Manipulation Program, a sophisticated cross platform image editor. The Gimp is Free Software.
The Panorama Tools Plugins are available for the Gimp as the Panorama Gimp plug-in.
The Gimp is available for Windows, OS X and Unix. For Photoshop users, there is an experimental GIMPshop with a similar menu layout to Photoshop.
- pandora plugin allows you to spread a series of photographs into a multi-layer image for easy editing.
- Panorama Gimp plug-in is the gimp version of the full Panorama Tools Plugins by Helmut Dersch.
- phfluuh plugin arrange photographs into a multilayer image, correct barrel distortion and map from rectilinear Projection to cylindrical Projection.
- Wideangle plugin corrects lens barrel distortion.
- Stitchpanorama plugin lets you pick control points and distort photographs to fit.
- Save Layers in separate files. Little Helper for Multilayer TIFF. If you are using multilayer tiff with GIMP for optimizing blending with enblend, you might need this script for saving every layer to a seperate file. Download continous_save.zip
- save-layers-tiff is a GIMP script which makes it easy to edit multi-layer TIFFs and send the results to enblend; see Multi-Layer TIFF editing with the Gimp.
- resynthesizer is a very useful plugin that can be used for filling-in missing parts of stitched images.
- exposure-blend, a script-fu to perform Contrast Blending of bracketed exposures.
- GREYCstoration is a plugin for sophisticated Noise Removal.
- Refocus-it, a plugin for sharpening images based on a minimum of the error function using a Hopfield neural network.
Notes for panoramic imaging
A single layer of an equirectangular panorama generated using standard techniques can easily consume more than 100 MegaBytes of memory, whereas the default gimp cache size is more suitable for single photographs. So to speed things up for panoramas, in File -> Preferences -> Environment -> Resource consumption change Tile cache size to a significant portion of your available memory.
Gimp drawbacks
- The gimp doesn't currently support greater than 8 bits per channel, ie. it doesn't support high dynamic range images, though this is a target for future versions. However, there is a fork of the Gimp called Cinepaint that already supports 16 bit depth and HDR images.