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GIMP Plugins for Mac OS X: What They Are, Why You Need Them and Where to Get Them



Whether you are a graphic designer, photographer, illustrator, orscientist, GIMP provides you with sophisticated tools to get your jobdone. You can further enhance your productivity with GIMP thanks tomany customization options and 3rd party plugins.




Gimp Plugins For Mac Os X




Here, you will see the address on your computer where GIMP is accessing plugins to run (outlined in green in the photo above). We will need to navigate to this location to install the Resynthesizer plugin.


One of the coolest features of GIMP is the ability to add new features through plugins. You can add new editing tools, new filters, and even more technical features like CMYK support. But not all plugins come with an installer, so many users are unsure how to use their new GIMP plugin.


If you want to skip this process in the future, you could always create a folder on your desktop named My Plugins or something like that, and extract all your plugin files there. Then you just tell GIMP to check that folder for plugins as well during the startup process.


GIMP plugins transform our favorite free image editor from a good program into a near-Photoshop equivalent. Plugins add new features, improve your workflow, and help you customize GIMP to your exact preference.


Like all great things in life, however, installing GIMP plugins can be complicated. They can be hard to find, tricky to install, and you may run into compatibility issues. In this guide, we'll walk you through how to use GIMP plugins and which ones are worth your time.


Installers are platform-specific, so you might find plugins that are only available for Windows, but not Linux or Mac. It's also worth remembering that opening random installers off of the internet can be risky, so make sure that your antivirus software is up-to-date and running properly.


Once you've installed your GIMP plugin, you should see it appear under the Filters menu or another one of the submenus nearby. It may be under Image or Layers, or you may get a whole new menu called Script-Fu. Sometimes, GIMP plugins may run as a separate app, triggered to launch whenever they're needed.


Resynthesizer is one of GIMP's oldest and most essential plugins. It provides a series of tools designed specifically to work with textures. You'll find the most important part under the Enhance menu: Heal Selection.


System-wide script-fu scripts are stored in /Applications/GIMP.app/Contents/Resources/share/gimp/2.0/scripts/. Executable and python plugins are located in /Applications/GIMP.app/Contents/Resources/lib/gimp/2.0/plug-ins/


GIMP plugins can be quite varied, with a few classics having disappeared over the years. Happily, these have been replaced by some truly impressive pieces of software that are ensuring that GIMP remains a viable alternative to Photoshop, Lightroom and Luminar AI when it comes to image processing.


While they both also function as standalone software, both DarkTable and RawTherapee (see below) work relatively seamlessly as GIMP plugins, allowing you to process raw files and make non-destructive changes to images.


Different GIMP plugins are accessed and run in different ways. Some may show up under the Filters menu; others can be accessed by options in the Layers menu or Image menu, and others appear under a menu called Script-Fu.


Some plugins come as software packages that install automatically. Others require you to install them manually by moving unzipped files to a specific location. For the precise steps, see the instructions above.


Adding additional functionally or automation to any application can be extremely useful. Take, for example, the DDS plugin. The DDS plugin is a now stable and reliable plugin to load DDS files, supporting the OpenGL S3TC extension. Of course, GIMP plugins are not limited to file loading. There exists a GIMP plugin for using the CMYK color model!


On Windows, go to the folder GIMP is installed in (usually somewhere in Program Files). Once in the GIMP main folder navigate to lib\gimp\*version*\ where as *version* represents the version of Gimp. Then double click the "plug-ins" folder. Not all plugins will run in Windows if the OS is 64bit.


Locally installing plugins are easiest because they will usually be stored in a hidden folder under $HOME/.gimp-*.* (where you should replace $HOME with path to your home catalogue and gimp-*.* with the version you use (for example 2.6). In this case, however, the plugins you install will only be available to the user who installed them, which may not be what you want.


If you want to install plugins globally, you might have to look around a bit more. Some boxes will have plugins stored at /opt/gnome/lib/gimp/2.0/plug-ins/ (change lib to lib64 if you've got a 64bit OS), others /usr/lib/gimp/2.0/plug-ins/ (change lib to lib64 if you've got a 64bit OS. Running "$whereis gimp" (or "which gimp") in a terminal might help. For example, if the output was /some/place/bin/gimp, then you could check the /some/place/lib (or lib64 if you've got a 64bit OS). In Ubuntu, plugins are located at /usr/share/gimp/2.0/ for both 32 and 64bit. Note that you have to be root to access these files.


One of the nicest things about GIMP is how easily its functionality can be extended, by using plugins. GIMP plugins are external programs that run under the control of the main GIMP application and interact with it very closely. Plugins can manipulate images in almost any way that users can. Their advantage is that it is much easier to add a capability to GIMP by writing a small plugin than by modifying the huge mass of complex code that makes up the GIMP core. Many valuable plugins have C source code that only comes to 100-200 lines or so.


Several dozen plugins are included in the main GIMP distribution, and installed automatically along with GIMP. Most of them can be accessed through the Filters menu (in fact, everything in that menu is a plugin), but a number are located in other menus. In many cases you can use one without ever realizing that it is a plugin: for example, the "Normalize" function for automatic color correction is actually a plugin, although there is nothing about the way it works that would tell you this. Even importing and exporting of images is done by plugins.


With this free availability comes a certain degree of risk. The fact that anyone can release plugins means that there is no effective quality control. The plugins distributed with GIMP have all been tested and tuned by the developers. Additional plugins available online, may have been hacked together in a few hours and then abandoned. Some plugin creators don't care about robustness, and even for those who do, their ability to test on a variety of systems in a variety of situations is often quite limited. Basically, when you download a plugin, you are getting something for free, and sometimes you get exactly what you pay for. This is not to discourage you, just to make sure you understand that not all plugins available online will deliver what you expect from them.


Plugins written for a certain version of GIMP may not always work well in other versions. Though in general the GIMP team tries to minimize changes that affect plugins. Usually the only time you can expect serious problems with plugins, is when the major version of GIMP changes. When a plugin made for an older version doesn't work correctly anymore, it needs to be ported. Sometimes this is easy, sometimes not. Bottom line: before trying to install a plugin, make sure that it is compatible with your version of GIMP.


One is that plugins are generally not as robust as the GIMP core. When GIMP crashes, it is considered a very serious thing: it can cost the user a lot of trouble and headache. When a plugin crashes, the consequences are usually not as serious. In most cases you can continue working without worrying about it too much.


When a plugin crashes, GIMP gives you a very ominous-looking message telling you that the plugin may have left GIMP in a corrupted state, and you should consider saving your images and exiting. Strictly speaking, this is quite correct, because plugins have the power to alter almost anything in GIMP, but for practical purposes, experience has shown that corruption is actually quite rare, and many users just continue working and don't worry about it. Our advice is that you simply think about how much trouble it would cause you if something went wrong, and weigh it against the odds.


Because of the way plugins communicate with GIMP, they do not have any mechanism for being informed about changes you make to an image after the plugin has been started. If you start a plugin, and then alter the image using some other tool, the plugin may crash. Even if it doesn't, doing this may cause incorrect results. You should avoid running more than one plugin at a time on an image, and avoid doing anything to the image until the plugin has finished working on it. If you ignore this advice, not only could you screw up the image, you may also screw up the undo system, so that you won't be able to recover from your mistake.


The plugins that are distributed with GIMP don't require installation. Plugins that you download yourself do. Usually the default location is in GIMP's user directory in a folder under /plug-ins, where the folder name needs to be the same as the plugin filename. You can find the default locations where GIMP searches for plugins in GIMP's folder preferences. There you can also add new locations where GIMP should look for plug-ins. There are several scenarios, depending on what OS you are using and how the plugin is structured.


Most plugins fall into two categories: small ones whose source code is distributed as a single .c file, and larger ones whose source code is distributed as a directory containing multiple files including a Makefile. 2ff7e9595c


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