VIPS
From VipsWiki
What is it?
VIPS is a free image processing system. It is good with large images (images larger than the amount of RAM you have available), with many CPUs (see Benchmarks for examples of SMP scaling, VIPS is also part of the PARSEC suite), for working with colour, for scientific analysis and for general research & development. As well as JPEG, TIFF and PNG images, it also supports scientific formats like FITS, Matlab, Analyze, PFM, Radiance and OpenSlide.
Compared to most image processing libraries VIPS needs little memory and runs quickly, especially on machines with more than one CPU. See the Speed and Memory Use page for a simple benchmark against other similar systems. We have a How it works page with a brief technical explanation of how VIPS calculates pixels.
It comes in two main parts: libvips is the image-processing library and nip2 is the graphical user-interface. The libvips and nip2 pages have bullet-point overviews of their features. The GUI aims to be about half-way between Photoshop and Excel. It is very bad at retouching photographs, but very handy for the many other imaging tasks that programs like Photoshop are used for. Both work on Unix (with convenient packages for most popular distributions, see links), Windows (NT, 2k, XP, Vista, Win7 tested) and Macintosh (OS 10.2 and later).
License
libvips is licensed under the LGPL and nip2 is licensed under the GPL. See http://www.gnu.org.
Download
- Supported
- Download and install the current supported version for Windows, OS X or as source code. Most unix systems have vips available through their package manager. See What's New in 7.28 for an introduction to this version.
- Development
- Read about and download the sources for the current development version.
VIPS aims for a six-month development cycle. See the Development pages for notes on how to work on the code yourself.
Documentation
Here are some quick guides to introduce nip2, the VIPS GUI. These guides are part of the nip2 manual: click Help / Contents (or press F1) to view the guide while using the program.
- Quick interface tour
- Runs quickly though some easy stuff to show how the interface works.
- Infrared reflectogram mosaic tour
- Explains how to use nip2 to build reflectogram mosaics.
- Nerd tour
- Goes into some detail about the insides of nip2 and how to program your own widgets.
- The vips blog
- Has posts about using nip2 and the development of the system.
- https://github.com/jcupitt/libvips and https://github.com/jcupitt/nip2
- All of the sourcecode, and the build systems.
The Documentation page has all the docs for nip2 and for libvips. The Contact page has links to the bug trackers (a good place to ask questions too), the news site, the announcement mailing list and the names and addresses of the maintainers.
The Examples page summarises the example workspaces that come with nip2. Several of the HOWTO guides are worked examples.
Site highlights
- http://libvips.blogspot.com
- News about VIPS on the official blog.
- Screenshots
- Various screenshots.
- Documentation
- Documentation for the current supported version.
- FAQ
- Frequently asked questions.
- Contact
- Maintainers and the mailing list.
- Links
- Related sites, pages about VIPS, people who use VIPS.
Other stuff
- What's New in 7.28
- We've just released 7.28, a fancy new version. This page explains what's new in headline form.
- Hello World
- Minimal programs using VIPS, handy for testing.
- HOWTO
- Various HOWTO guides, including building on windows.
- History
- How VIPS came to be.
- Extras
- Add-ons for VIPS.
- libvips
- Quick introduction to the library.
- nip2
- Quick overview of the graphical user interface.
- Benchmarks
- Results from the vips
im_benchmarkcommand. - Python
- About the Python interface.
