GIMP is the undisputed king of image editing in Linux platforms, and is next only to Photoshop in popularity in Windows and Mac platforms. With a large community of developers and an even larger pool of users, it is no surprise that GIMP is very popular.
Much like Firefox, GIMP’s strength lies in its plugins, which are developed by the open-source toting community. Since the users themselves develop them, they know all the needs and conceive a plugin for everything.
And what better way for me to endorse GIMP than a list of good plugins? Most of them are aimed at web-designers and photographers, the main users of GIMP. There are also some to fix common problems of GIMP.
You might also want to read our previous posts on GIMP:
ADVERTISEMENT- How to install brushes, gradients and plugins in GIMP
- Best GIMP tutorial websites
- GIMP plugins (part 2)
- Best GIMP brushes
- Free Photoshop brushes(Photoshop brushes work in GIMP 2.4 and above)
- Download Geometric Patterns, a free huge texture pack
GIMP plugins for Web Design
- Anti-aliasing: Smoothen and fix straight lines.
- Adaptive contrast enhancement: Intelligent adjustment of contrast.
- Fourier Transformation: GIMP plugin version of Fourier Transformation.
- Refract/Reflect: Refraction effects to simulate falling water drops.
- Borders: Add borders to your image.
SaveForWeb: Find optimal compromise between minimal file size and acceptable quality of image quickly. Useful for designers. See our tutorials on installing Save for Web plugin in Windows and Ubuntu.- Aqua Bou: Create web buttons in ‘Aqua Bou’ style easily.
- Chrominium: Create a chrome logo with glow and sparkles.
- Liquid Rescale: Content-aware rescaling. Keeps the features of the image while rescaling along a single direction.
- Steel Text: Create a text effect that looks like shiny steel (or gold) and a dropshadow.
Photography plugins for GIMP
- Pandora: Stitch together multiple images to make a panorama.
- Film Grain: Add film grain for a classic feel, to BW images.
- Copyright Text: Add a copyright text to image.
- FocusBlur: Makes an image out of focus with luminosity and depth.
- Lomo: Make photos clear, sharp and crisp. Especially useful for outdoor photographs.
- ISO Noise Reduction: Implements an ISO noise reduction, using different methods (masking the edges, then blurring the individual color channels or the lumimance channel only).
- Photo Effects: A bunch of scripts brought together in one script-fu file. Contains cartoon, color pencil, conte crayon, cutout, Drawing, ink pen, note paper, paint dot image, palette knife, pastel, stamp, water paint effect, wrap effect, angled strokes, crosshatched, chrome image, cross light, funky color, soft focus, solarisation, brick wall, patchwork, stained glass, texturizer, high pass, scroll effects.
- RedEye: Quickly remove red eye effect caused by camera flashes.
- Shadows/Highlights: Eliminate shadows and highlights in photographs.
- Refocus: (Windows only) Opposite of FocusBlur(listed above), this refocuses images. Provides better results than Unsharp masking which is built into GIMP.
- Gradient Along Path: Strikes a vector applying a gradient orthogonally to the path.
- Digital IR: Simulate a black and white infrared image.
- GimpPublishr: Publish images to Picassa and Flickr directly from inside GIMP.
Miscellaneous GIMP plugins
Yin-Yang+: A seemingly useless plugin, but fun nonetheless. Add yin and yang symbols. Also optionally add drop-shadows.
Further GIMP plugin resources
- Writing a GIMP plugin: Plugin guide in PDF, HTML, archive and XML formats.
- GIMP plugin template: A blank plugin template that has the basic structure and reduces the time required to develop a plugin considerably. The direct link is currently here, but may change in future (if it changes, click the link on “GIMP plugin template”).
Yeah…. samples would’ve been nice. Thank you anyways, it’s still very helpful.
@Brian: Sorry to disappoint you, but it is unlikely that the authors would allow it. Anyway, the least you can do is contribute a pageview to the author….
Is there a file I can download that has most, if not even more, of these plug-ins? I am using version 2.6.7 and I’d like to get some nice plug-ins, but if I can save time by downloading just one file instead of a bunch one-at-a-time.Im especially looking for something for tga files.Im new to gimp and want to mod some textures on some fps weapons in an online game.It ha a paragraph as it goes as so———>>>>
Now you can open a .tga file in paint.net or gimp or whatever and edit it. When u have made it look all pretty lol, you need to save it and open DEdit and go to your project. Then Click Textures tab and righ click down there and select import .tga files. Replace = yes.
Is there a file I can download that has most, if not even more, of these plug-ins? I am using version 2.6.7 and I’d like to get some nice plug-ins, but if I can save time by downloading just one file instead of a bunch one-at-a-time, I’d be happy.
I am brand new to gimp and can’t find out how to get the brushes to download can some one be more specific? then /User/username? i don’t even know where to find that screen?
great to find info like this, i do all my design work in gimp, some of the plugins are 10+ years old but still useful.I too shifted from photoshop to gimp.
i’ve been looking for more different logo styles, i just found this resource, i didn’t realise gimp was so huge until today, i’ve been struggling with photofiltre for the past 3 years.
The link to the ISO Noise Reduction plugin is broken.
¿Soporte para CMYK?
GIMP Reflection @ http://code.google.com/p/gimp-reflection/
@nicolaz: They have been tested with GIMP, and you might be able to get them working with GIMPshop, since the core is similar.
@Andrew: Most plugins will work, and the few that do not work will be fixed by the authors soon (unless they’re out of the plugin business and do not update). Patience, dear, patience!
The first one on the list fails with the most recent version. :/
Do they work with Gimpshop?
What hell is this page supposed to be? You supposedly are listing top 40 plug-ins for Gimp but have no example images for illustration purposes? Are you kidding me?
Do you even use Gimp? I bet you only wanted to put up a page that got some good number “hits” and “diggs” … waste of time.
Thank you . im looking forward to shift from photoshop , so this will be very helpful for my shift .
I’m missing some of my favourite plugins. E.g. greycstoration which is wonderful for denoising images, much better than DeNoise.
Or liquidrescale which allows you to change a picture’s aspect ratio without deforming or cropping it.
Yey!
one of my scripts is actually on this list (cloud generating script)
Thanks! 😀
Good list, thank you
CMYK?
Good list of Plugins. I have’nt used GIMP much, Will check out a few.
Since Gimp is now in the 2.4 series of stable releases, plugins and scripts that have been tested for 2.4 are located at http://gimpfx-foundry.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/gimpfx-foundry/gimp-2.4/stable/
@Shankar: Thanks for all the help and support, mate.
@Dan: Most of these plugins work on GIMP. Many of them were updated, and a few are v2.4 exclusives.
I’m curious since I’m starting to use GIMP. I stumbled on this post via digg but out of curiosity
Will these plug-ins work on the new 2.4 release?
Hey, Awesome compilation.
Congrats on reaching the front page of Digg!
The Particle Deposition website redirects to a site that repeatedly tries to force users to download an executable. There is no way to stop it in Firefox besides killing the process, as it will continually pop up Ok/Cancel messages.
#1 – Photoshop
no samples?
Thanks for that -very helpful!