Since we recently covered the best Photoshop plugins, it’s only fair that we round up the best plugins for GIMP, too. After all, GIMP is the most popular image editing application for Linux and the biggest open source competitor to Adobe Photoshop. Despite some differences in appearance and functionality of the two, GIMP is often recommended to Linux newcomers as “the Photoshop alternative “. Many popular Linux distributions offer GIMP as a pre-installed application, but if you feel that the basic version lacks some features, it’s easy to feature greater thanks to GIMP plugins and scripts.
[ad type=”banner”]GIMP plugins are typically written either in Python or as Script-Fu extensions. Some plugins can be installed from the repositories, some ought to be compiled, but most are definitely easy to install: you simply reproduction the plugin (with .py extension) or script file (.scm document) into your /home/$USERNAME/.gimp/plug-ins or /home/$USERNAME/.gimp/scripts folder, respectively, and restart GIMP.
Note which you want to put in Python support for GIMP (the gimp-python package; should be available in your distro’s repositories) if you want to use Python-based plugins.
As you can already tell, this article is focused on the Linux version of GIMP, but Windows users can also use all these plugins; the installation instructions can be found on plugins’ official websites. Of course, all GIMP plugins on this list are absolutely unfastened to down load, install and use.
1. Layer via Copy/Cut:
Layer via Copy/Cut
This plugin introduces a characteristic from Photoshop into GIMP, and it’s very practical in case you’re a designer or if you often work with layers. It can copy, move and cut selected areas from one layer or a group of layers, and create new layers from selected areas. once it’s mounted, you can get admission to this plugin from the “Layers” menu.
2.BIMP – Batch Image Manipulation Plugin:
BIMP – Batch Image Manipulation Plugin
BIMP is considered one of my preferred GIMP plugins – it’s incredibly practical and simple to use. It will save you time if you need to edit multiple images at once. You could resize, crop, rotate, rename and watermark as many snap shots as you need, and changes may be previewed inside the plugin dialog.
3.Beautify:
Beautify is a plugin that aggregates several photo effects and editing options into a single, straightforward interface, and turns your GIMP into a image retouching studio. You may use it to offer your photos a dash of glamour, correct color and contrast issues, and apply Instagram-like filters to your selfies.
4.Contrast Fix:
Contrast Fix
Badly lit snap shots take place greater often than we would love to admit. Whether your photo is too darkish or too vibrant, Contrast Fix is a GIMP plugin that can save it. Experiment with the settings for the best result, and don’t forget that you may run the plugin more than once on the equal image.
5. Lensfun:
Lensfun
This useful plugin will help your restoration lens distortion in your pix. It detects the type of your camera and the lens you used by reading the EXIF data, but you can change these settings in the plugin dialog. After you’ve installed the plugin, you can find it in the Filters – Enhance menu.
6. Refocus
Refocus
Once in a while pictures turn out blurry and out of recognition. perhaps you’ve taken them in a rush, or your hands were sincerely shaky. Doesn’t remember, because Refocus will try to repair them with a special approach called FIR Wiener filtering. you may modify the parameters inside the plugin dialog and preview what the very last picture will look like.
7.Stitch Panorama:
Stitch Panorama
There are great standalone Linux tools for making panoramic images, but if you want to do that directly in GIMP, this plugin is your best bet. You can stitch together multiple images, and perform blending, distortion matching and color correction if necessary.
8.UFRaw
UFRaw is a excellent GIMP plugin for professional photographers. It provides support for editing RAW images in GIMP, and you can use it to control exposure, color balance and temperature, and perform various image corrections. The plugin also has a batch workflow mode in which you could edit many pix at once.
9.Liquid Rescale:
Liquid Rescale
Liquid Rescale is a powerful plugin for GIMP that lets you resize any image without distortion, as well as remove selected parts of the image. If you’re familiar with Photoshop’s Content-Aware Scaling feature, you’ll understand what this plugin is for. There’s a helpful preview window within the plugin dialog which you can use to interactively tweak the parameters. When installed successfully, Liquid Rescale can be found in the “Layers” menu.
10.Separate+:
Separate+
Separate+ is a simple but essential GIMP plugin, especially for designers. It lets you convert between different color spaces (RGB, CMYK…), set the ICC profile of your monitor and perform some color-related adjustments on images.