Gimp 2.8 is coming with Awesome features. Single window mode, Rotating Brushes, On canvas Editing, Calculation on variable boxes are great new features. But lot of people think that it is not as Professional as Photoshop. It is not true we can use Gimp for Pro  with some help of plugins. There are lot of great plugins available in Gimp and lot of great Bruses also.

Some essential plugins for a web designer and developer are listed here. There are Lot another Just go for a short search.

Gimp Resynthesizer

One of the flagship feature of Photoshop CS5 is content aware fill. But we got this feature long back on Gimp with the help of a plugin called Resynthesizer.

• Creating more of a texture
  (including creation of tileable textures)

• Removing objects from images
  (great for touching up photos)

• Creating themed images
  (such as the Resynthesizer logo above)

You can simply install this plugin

Install Gimp Resynthesizer in Ubuntu

Just type on Terminal – Put your password

sudo apt-get install gimp-resynthesizer

Install Gimp Resynthesizer in Fedora

IN terminal as Root

yum install gimp-resynthesizer

you can read Photoshop CS5 Content Aware Fill Vs. GIMP Resynthesizer.

That is All You got the Awsome CS5 Content aware fill effect in gimp

Gimp Save For Web

This is a replacement for Photoshop save for web. Save for Web allows to find compromise between minimal file size and acceptable quality of image quickly. While adjusting various settings, you may explore how image quality and file size change. Options to reduce file size of an image include setting compression quality, number or colors, resizing, cropping, Exif information removal, etc.

This is a must have plugin for every web developer.

There is a deb for ubuntu and you want to make install in fedroa

sudo apt-get install gimp-save-for-web

For windows you can download from save_for_web_0.28.6_win32.zip51.19 KB

This is the source of the plugin gimp-save-for-web-0.29.0.tar.bz2125.24 KB

You can get more information here

Liquid Rescale GIMP plugin

This is another great plugin for gimp. This plugin will resize images with aware of content. If you scale a photo and a good object on foreground this plugin will detect that and resize the photo according to the background by preserving the forground object. This is a great tool for resizing photos to different sizes.

This plugin resizing pictures non uniformly while preserving their features, i.e. avoiding distortion of the important parts.
The plugin supports manual feature selection, and can also be used to remove portions of the picture in a consistent way.
Since version 0.6 it also supports real-time interactive scaling.

Fedora Gimp Liquid Rescale

To install the plugin in Fedora, use a package manager, or open a terminal and type:

yum install gimp-lqr-plugin

The dependencies will be resolved automatically.

Debian and Ubuntu Gimp Liquid Rescale

The plugin is included in Debian and in Ubuntu, in the package “gimp-plugin-registry”, which also includes some other great plugins.
To install it, you can use the Synaptic Package Manager, or open a terminal and type:

sudo apt-get install gimp-plugin-registry

The dependencies will be resolved automatically.

Gimp FX Foundary

This is great set of tools for gimp. You can just install it as a gimp addon plugin.

These scripts allow GIMP graphics to be endowed with special effects, such as blurring or distorting them in certain ways. This package has 117+ new scripts for GIMP that are not part of the graphic software’s standard installation. Among them are the Roy Lichtenstein effect script to render graphics in the pop artist’s style, the Planet Render script to create a planet of your choosing and desired size and dimension. and the Old Photo script to give existing photos that antiquated touch.

There are lot of great plugins like

1. Pencil Draw

2. Auto Rotate

3. Motivational Poster Maker

4. Phoca Save Icons

5. Draw Arrow

etc…

Related articles

• GIMP 2.6 for Photographers (oreilly.com)
• How to Batch Process Files in Gimp (maketecheasier.com)
• Plans for Gimp 2.8 and beyond (gimp.org)
• Top 20 GIMP Plugins (brighthub.com)
• Make GIMP look like Photoshop with GimPhoto (en.onsoftware.com)
• 5 Useful plugins for gimp