The GNU Image Manipulation Program, commonly known by its acronym GIMP, is a free and open-source raster graphics editor used for image manipulation (retouching) and image editing, free-form drawing, transcoding between different image file formats, and more specialized tasks. It is extensible by means of plugins, and scriptable. It is not designed to be used for drawing, though some artists and creators have used it in this way.
Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe for Windows and macOS. It was created in 1987 by Thomas and John Knoll. It is the most used tool for professional digital art, especially in raster graphics editing, and its name has become genericised as a verb although Adobe disapproves of such use.
CinePaint is a free and open source computer program for painting and retouching bitmap frames of films. It is a fork of version 1.0.4 of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). It enjoyed some success as one of the earliest open source tools developed for feature motion picture visual effects and animation work. The main reason for this adoption over mainline GIMP was its support for high bit depths which can be required for film work. The mainline GIMP project later added high bit depths in GIMP 2.9.2, released November 2015. It is free software under the GPL-2.0-or-later. In 2018, a post titled "CinePaint 2.0 Making Progress" announced progress, but, as of 2024, version 2.0 has not been released.
Digital Negative (DNG) is an open, lossless raw image format developed by Adobe and used for digital photography. It was launched on September 27, 2004. The launch was accompanied by the first version of the DNG specification, plus various products, including a free-of-charge DNG converter utility. All Adobe photo manipulation software released since the launch supports DNG.
Raster graphics editors can be compared by many variables, including availability.
The Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) is an ISO standard, originally created by Adobe Systems Inc., for the creation, processing and interchange of standardized and custom metadata for digital documents and data sets.
GIMPshop was a modification of the free and open source graphics program GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), with the intent to imitate the look and feel of Adobe Photoshop.
A camera raw image file contains unprocessed or minimally processed data from the image sensor of either a digital camera, a motion picture film scanner, or other image scanner. Raw files are so named because they are not yet processed, and contain large amounts of potentially redundant data. Normally, the image is processed by a raw converter, in a wide-gamut internal color space where precise adjustments can be made before conversion to a viewable file format such as JPEG or PNG for storage, printing, or further manipulation. There are dozens of raw formats in use by different manufacturers of digital image capture equipment.
Little CMS or LCMS is an open-source color management system, released as a software library for use in other programs which will allow the use of International Color Consortium profiles. It is licensed under the terms of the MIT License.
Linux color management has the same goal as the color management systems (CMS) for other operating systems, which is to achieve the best possible color reproduction throughout an imaging workflow from its source, through imaging software, and finally onto an output medium. In particular, color management attempts to enable color consistency across media and throughout a color-managed workflow.
Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ50 is a superzoom bridge digital camera by Panasonic.
dcraw is an open-source computer program which is able to read numerous raw image format files, typically produced by mid-range and high-end digital cameras. dcraw converts these images into the standard TIFF and PPM image formats. This conversion is sometimes referred to as developing a raw image since it renders raw image sensor data into a viewable form.
Windows Imaging Component (WIC) is a COM-based imaging codec framework introduced in Windows Vista (and later available in Windows XP Service Pack 3) for working with and processing digital images and image metadata.
Rawstudio is a free and open source stand-alone application software to read and manipulate images in raw image formats from digital cameras. It is designed for working rapidly with a large volume of images, whereas similar tools are designed to work with one image at a time.
RawTherapee is a free and open source application for processing photographs in raw image formats such as those created by many digital cameras. It comprises a subset of image editing operations specifically aimed at non-destructive post-production of raw photos and is primarily focused on improving a photographer's workflow by facilitating the handling of large numbers of images. It is notable for the advanced control it gives the user over the demosaicing and developing process. It is cross-platform, with versions for Microsoft Windows, macOS and Linux.
WebP is a raster graphics file format developed by Google intended as a replacement for JPEG, PNG, and GIF file formats. It supports both lossy and lossless compression, as well as animation and alpha transparency.
Darktable is a free and open-source photography application and raw developer. Rather than being a raster graphics editor like Adobe Photoshop or GIMP, it comprises a subset of image editing operations specifically aimed at non-destructive raw image post-production. It is primarily focused on improving a photographer's workflow by facilitating the handling of large numbers of images. It is freely available in versions tailored for most major Linux distributions, macOS, Solaris and Windows and is released under the GPL-3.0-or-later.
LazPaint is a free and open-source cross-platform lightweight image editor with raster and vectorial layers created with Lazarus. The software aims at being simpler than GIMP, is an alternative to Paint.NET and is also similar to Paintbrush.
High Efficiency Image File Format (HEIF) is an international standard defined by MPEG-H Part 12, first published by ISO in 2017. It is designed as a container for photographic images in any image encoding. HEIF is a special case of the general ISO BMFF format, in which all data is encapsulated in typed boxes, with a mandatory ftyp box that is used to indicate particular file types. The initial specification for HEIF provided usage details for three compression schemes, the widely supported JPEG encoding for still raster images and two video encodings that are also applicable to still image items, namely Advanced Video Coding and High Efficiency Video Coding.
AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) is an open, royalty-free image file format specification for storing images or image sequences compressed with AV1 in the HEIF container format. It competes with HEIC, which uses the same container format built upon ISOBMFF, but HEVC for compression. Version 1.0.0 of the AVIF specification was finalized in February 2019. Version 1.1.0 was finalized in April 2022.
