GIMP Stuff

What is GIMP?

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages. (more...) 

How are you related to GIMP?

The first time I used GIMP was as as a teenager and I loved the simplicity and power it had ^[1]. However, I wasn't the most artistic person, and my love for solving problems, quickly lead me to starting to mess up with GIMP scripts after self-teaching myself script-fu (from this amazingly short tutorial, along with the offical gimp docs).
I made my first contribution to GIMP a year or so later, by fixing the frosty-logo script (see this bug report). Since then I was gradually starting to explore GIMP more and more and I have made many more contributions since then. You can find a partial list of bugs which I'm cc'ed to here.

In the last year (June 2010) I became very active, and I recently got my commit acces to the central code repository of GIMP. On August 2010 I also got a developer status in the GIMP bugzilla - so now I'm also commenting on/closing your bugs reports :D

My recent official projects include:

• Adding PDF export capabilities to GIMP - done! (august 2010)
• Adding support for multi-colored text layers inside GIMP (in advanced development stages).
• Translation of GIMP to Hebrew, and clarifying strings in GIMP for better translation for all languages (translation in progress)
• Adding several PDB procedures (procedures for interactions between plugins and GIMP), some for improving performance and others for usability.
• Adding a palette export script to GIMP which export for many formats, and serves as a framework for writing many more export types easily

In addition, I have written many many guides and tutorials for GIMP over the years. You can find some of them on GimpTalk (on which I'm know as LIMN) and others on my Deviantart Gallery tutorials Section. Many more were never uploaded (I have a folder with dozens of guides).
Probably the best tutorial I ever wrote is the GIMP Path Tool (aka Pentool) Tutorial (when it was hosted on my previous website, it was the most popular GIMP path tool turial according to goole).

Many many of my scripts are scattered across the web and I plan to collect them all one day =)

How do I get started with development of GIMP?
Officially, you can start at the GIMP developer website. You can email me if you want some specific help with writing C plugins and/or script-fu scripts, or if you just want some advice - I'll be happy to help in every way I can. A small note - Google is your friend when it comes to finding information so please search google for an answer for your question before emailing me. My email is <lightningismyname at gmail dot com>.
Other great places to check are the GIMP IRC chat where most of the developers hang out (including me).

Can you help me with GIMP?
I'm willing to try - email me if you have questions about using GIMP. If I get enough questions about the same topic I'll post a tutorial for it. Just keep in mind that Google is your friend when it comes to finding information so please do search for answers before contacting me (see the email address above) - even I have some life of my own =)

Instruction on compiling GIMP on both windows and linux can be found here.

[1] Untill then I created art with MS Word (believe it or not) and MS paint. I learned to appreciate what I have from the time I used it. To prove that "The tool isn't everything", here is an example of what you can do with MS word, MS paint, and lots of will power: Guitar Sig.