It can be used as a simple paint app, an expert-quality photo-retouching program, an online batch-processing system, a mass production image renderer, or an image-format converter.

It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything.

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If you are looking for a free alternative to Photoshop, GIMP is excellent image manipulation software with all the tools youd expect.

Gimp Save For Web Plugin Install Them Easily

Use the Photoshop and GIMP Extensions Installer to choose one or more plugins, brushes, scripts, patterns and gradients to install them easily and full-automatically.

The GIMP Extensions Pack installer will overwrite any extension selected that you may have already installed.

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This photo was very underexposed, but because I shoot RAW, I was able to bring it back to life.

In some ways, the camera physically limits or transforms that light.

The lens aperture limits the amount of light that hits the sensor and determines how much of the scene is in focus.

The shutter speed also limits the amount of light hitting the sensor, and effects whether moving objects blur or stay sharp.

Those physical limits are set in stone as soon as you snap the photo.

Whether you chose a white balance setting like daylight, or cloudy, or let the camera guess the light by setting the white balance to auto, the camera will do its best to make everything the right color.

It doesnt contain any information about the way the light was hitting the sensor when you hit the shutter button.

But if youve ever tried to brighten super dark shadows in a photo only to end up with an indistinct blob of gray, you know that those dumb pixels are missing a lot of critical information.

If pixels in the shadow of your image are totally black, no amount of adjustment is going to bring details back because GIMP and Photoshop dont know anything about what was actually in the shadow.

It just sees a group of black pixels that you want to make lighter.

Its literally the raw information about the light that your camera recorded with very little interpretation imposed.

But all of the information the camera had about the light hitting the sensor in that moment is in there too.

What that means for you is that you can open that same photo in a RAW editor and literally change the white balance of the photo after youve taken it.

You can change white balance after you take the picture to make colors more accurate, and you can adjust the exposure of the image really easily.

Instead, the changes you make in a RAW editor (like UFRAW, Adobe Camera RAW, or RAWTherapee) are stored in a side car file.

This file tells the RAW editing program what settings to apply every time you open the RAW file, but it doesnt permanently apply the settings until you export the file to a format like JPG.

Because changes to RAW images are only stored in a side car file, you can go back and re-edit the original RAW file at any time without loss of image quality.

Even if you were using Photoshop, you would have to first work with the file in something like Adobe Camera RAW, and then convert the file to something like a JPEG or a TIFF that Photoshop can recognize to continue working on it.

But you definitely still can use RAW files if youre a GIMP user.

You just have to process them first with a RAW processorconverter program.

When you open the photo in GIMP, it will recognize the image just like any other JPG or TIFF.

You cant exactly undo the changes you locked into the JPG or TIFF, but the original RAW file and sidecar file will still be on your system just in case you want to tweak the settings, or even start over.

If it did, I recommend using that software for your RAW editing process.

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