Image Software and Tutorials

GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) (http://www.gimp.org/)

GIMP is a free, open-source, cross-platform image manipulation/editing program. 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. Although the GIMP site provides the source code for the program, you will need to consult the proper website to download the executable version based on your operating system: UNIX, Windows, or Mac OS X.

Recommended system requirements:

Operating system Requirements
Windows GIMP 2.8.x should run on Microsoft Windows XP SP3, Vista and 7. Older GIMP versions (2.6.x, 2.4.x, 2.2.x, 2.0.x) could also work with older versions of Microsoft Windows, but they are not supported anymore. The amount of memory can be an important factor, especially if you intend to work on large images. A minimum of 128 MB of RAM is recommended, but the more RAM the better.
Mac OS X 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 XQuartz project provides this functionality. There you can download the most recent version of X11.app.
  • Graphics libraries and toolkits
    Unlike most GNU/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.
UNIX

GIMP runs on most Unix systems using X11 (the X Window System). If your system can run a graphical web browser, chances are that it can also run GIMP. It runs even on relatively old PCs (Pentium 200) or on old workstations (Sun Ultra1). The amount of memory can be an important factor, especially if you intend to work on large images. A minimum of 128 MB of RAM is recommended, but actually you should have 256 MB or more, and several GB does not hurt when you want to edit really large images. In addition to the basic X11 libraries, the following is a list of what you will need to run GIMP on your system:

For the stable version (2.6):

  • GLib 2.16.1 or better.
  • GTK+ 2.12.1 or better.
  • babl 0.0.22 or better.
  • GEGL 0.0.18 or better.
  • PangoFT2 1.18.0 or better. PangoFT2 is a Pango backend that uses FreeType2.
  • Fontconfig 2.2.0 or better.

 

Tutorials:

 

Paint.net (www.getpaint.net)

Paint.net is a free, windows-based image editing program. It allows users to manipulate layers (similar to Photoshop) and is optimized to run quickly on all windows systems.

Recommended system requirements:

  • Windows 7 (recommended), XP SP3, Vista SP1 (SP2 and Platform update recommended)
  • 800 MHz processor (dual-core recommended)
  • 512 MB of RAM
  • 1024 x 768 screen resolution
  • 200+ MB hard drive space
  • Optional: 64-bit mode requires a 64-bit CPU and a 64-bit edition of Windows

Tutorials:

Digital Imaging Tutorials

Color Efficiency Factor (http://munsell.com/color-blog/how-well-can-you-see-color/)

Moving Theory into Practice (http://www.library.cornell.edu/preservation/tutorial/contents.html)

Photoshop Tutorial (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kcTDSJmmos&feature=related)

 

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