Basics

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G'MIC is an interpreter for the image processing language of the same name. It lives in terminal emulator command shells and has no GUI. It is never present on Windows or Mac systems unless you have already put it there. The G'MIC download page furnishes installation scripts and binaries for Windows, Mac, Debian, Ubuntu and generic Linux. These packages provide both the command line tool, gmic, and the gmic_gimp plug-in. If you use a GNU/Linux distribution, the standalone G'MIC interpreter and Gimp G'MIC plugin are very likely in your distributor's repositories. These have been tuned and integrated with the distribution and could be a better fit than the generic binaries at the download site. Use apt-get, emerge, yum or whatever else manages your distribution's repository.

There is also a small but very fine community of packagers who take great pains to integrate Gimp with its large train of plug-ins and extras, including G'MIC. They strive for installations that “just work.” Go to the G'MIC home page and, among the contributors, look up those who have the ‘packager’ specialty by their names. Many names in this list link to distribution web pages where you can find further pointers and instructions. I can't/won't say who is best; I don't think that is possible. Each packager brings a fine technical and aesthetic sense to his or her product and each product reflects that sensibility in its makeup. Just remember, if you experiment with a few packagers, to fully clean up one candidate installation before installing the next. Debris from one installation interfering with another is a common source of packaging misbehavior.

Finally, you can just get the sources and build, my personal favorite approach. You can get a tarball of the latest stable or development releases from the download page or fork from github.com. Gentoo is the Linux flavor to which I am partial, which renders source builds routine, but the gmic build environment is straightforward and builds take place on all manner of Linux, Mac, and Windows machines.

If you are absolutely new to G'MIC, I heartily recommend installing both Gimp and the Gimp G'MIC plug-in and putting in some time with those tools first. You're not ready to spend much time at this site yet. By and large, the plug-in “just works” and has strong supporting communities. Some of the more popular ones are GIMPChat/G'MIC, G'MIC at Google+, G'MIC at Flickr, and Pixls.us. According to the survey, more than 85% of the people who use G'MIC at all use the gmic_gimp plug-in. That, of course, is the tip-of-the-iceberg of survey-respondents, resting on a much larger population of users beneath the surface, many of whom think that G'MIC is the plug-in and the plug-in is G'MIC. It probably seems contrary of me then to tell you up front, here and now, that there is hardly any documentation here at all about the plug-in. Outside of the few filters I've written myself, you will not find any Gimp G'MIC filter documentation here. Nada. Nihil. None. How churlish of me, going so against the grain.

Indeed, these pages are resolutely for the less than five percent of you who use the command line executable, gmic. The reason for this is plain (I think). It is from gmic that gmic_gimp stems. Every one of the four hundred and forty some filters in the plug-in are pipelines written in gmic, with a bit of UI wrapper code to solicit arguments and present some sort of preview. The future of good quality gmic_gimp filters depends on a community of people who know how to write gmic pipelines. That, to my mind, makes the case for gmic documentation before plug-in documentation. But there is one more good reason.

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