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 add more thanks to GIMP plugins and scripts.
This plugin introduces a function from Photoshop into GIMP, and it’s very practical if 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 installed, you can access this plugin from the “Layers” menu.
3. Beautify
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Sometimes photos turn out blurry and out of focus. Maybe you’ve taken them in a hurry, or your hands were really shaky. Doesn’t matter, because Refocus will try to fix them with a special method called FIR Wiener filtering. You can adjust the parameters in the plugin dialog and preview what the final image will look like.
8. UFRaw
G’MIC is probably the most popular GIMP plugin – and rightfully so. It’s an image processing framework that contains hundreds of presets, filters and effects you can apply to your images. You can access them in the “Filters” menu, and if you’d like to test G’MIC before installation, there’s a completely usable online version that runs in your browser. How cool is that?
13. Save for Web
This valuable collection of photo filters is something you can’t work without if you’re a professional photographer, and even average GIMP users will be delighted by its versatility. Included is the famous “National Geographic” photo effect that will give your photos a classy touch. You can download and install all scripts at once, or just choose the ones you like from the plugin website.
