The Artist's Guide to GIMP, 2nd Edition

Introduction

I’ve been writing about Linux and GIMP in particular since 1996. I’ve written for every kind of publication, ranging from countless print articles and magazine columns to website musings and multiple books. In 2001, I wrote about how Linux and GIMP were starting to make waves in the special-effects industry with the article “Linux Goes to the Movies” in Salon.com. Open source has come a long way since then. And so has GIMP.

When GIMP was first started as a class project at the University of California, Berkeley, it was built on top of the venerable Motif toolkit, which at the time was really the only full-featured software library for X11-based windowing systems. Version 0.54 was my first taste of the GIMP in this form. Later, the ...