GMIC

Description

G'MIC (an acronym for GREYC's Magic for Image Computing) is a free, cross-platform, open-source framework for image processing.

G'MIC is also known as a powerful GIMP, Krita, and Paint.NET Plugin that allows you to add and make use of over 500 free extra filter effects. G'MIC enables you to use several user interfaces that you can use to manipulate, convert, filter, or visualize generic image datasets. If you would like to take a quick look to see what you can achieve with G'MIC, take a look at the "Image Gallery" and check the impressive amount of images.

According to G'MIC, official site user interfaces are:

1. gmic - a command-line tool that allows you to use the G'MIC image processing features from a shell.

2. libgmic - tiny, portable, thread-safe and multi-threaded, C++ image processing library to be linked to third-party applications. Its API allows programmers to add all G'MIC features in their software without much effort.

3. G'MIC-Qt - a popular plugin that enables you to make use of G'MIC capabilities in other famous software such as GIMP, Krita, and Paint.NET. The plugin contains over 500 filters.

4. G'MIC Online - is a web service that allows you to upload an image from your computer and apply different filters - all in a web browser.

5. ZArt - a Qt-based interface for real-time processing of video streaming coming from webcams or video files.

GMIC Features

• according to the team: "focused on the design of possibly complex pipelines for converting, manipulating, filtering, and visualizing generic 1D/2D/3D multi-spectral image datasets."
• G'MIC contains a substantial set of pre-defined image processing algorithms and pipelines (more than 1000)
• multi-threaded native software
• cross-platform (it runs on Windows, macOS, UNIX)
• capable of processing many image types, including multi-spectral, 3d volumetric, 3d vector objects, and image sequences.
• image manipulations and interactions can be done grouped or only on certain items.
• efficient visualization modules for exploration/viewing of 2D/3D multi-spectral images, 3d vector objects or 1D graph plots
• highly customizable - users can design their image processing library

G'MIC has many use cases when it comes to image processing. The official site has an impressive amount of help (videos, wiki, image gallery, etc.) which is available under the "Resources" section.

The fastest way to take a look over some of its capabilities (apart from visiting the "Image Gallery") would be to try the online web service. You can upload an image and play with the filters.

Another option would be to download and install the G'MIC plugin for GIMP, Krita, or Paint.NET. This tip is available if you already use one of these image retouching and painting programs and want to test the plugin.