What are the benefits of GIMP? I came across a tutorial once that used GIMP to create stencils for Grafitti and that is of some interest to me but other than that? Have I missed something?
GIMP is a very powerful multi-platform image-manipulation tool, and it is free. It is also very, very extendable and customisable with its hooks for various programming languages. Like many other free tools (Blender for example) learning to use it can be a challenge, because documentation can be a bit spotty. If you just want to touch up your holiday snaps, there are probably better choices than GIMP or Photoshop. On the other hand, I am no sort of artist, but I used GIMP to create
some fanart.
I've been using the OS/X native version of GIMP for a couple of weeks now. The "official build" I linked above is... OK. The developers have a lot to learn about how Mac software is supposed to work, and there are some significant user-interface problems. However,
this build seems to have fixed them. Incidentally, if you do download the Lisanet build, and you are still running OS10.6.n or OS10.7.n, ignore the warning in the readme file in the distribution for those OS levels about needing OS10.8. This is obviously someone confusing
Darwin 10.8 (which comes with OS10.6.n) with
OS10.8 (which ships with
Darwin 12.0). I have run across this confusion in several places recently.