G’MIC is abbreviation of Grey’s Magic for Image Computing. It is a full-featured powerful image processing framework. It is available for many platforms in form of command line tools. But they have also made packages that can be installed as plugins for some popular image editing software. For example G’MIC is available as plugins for GIMP called G’MIC-Qt.
G’MIC includes a large number of tools and filters using which you can add professional effects to your photos. We can compare G’MIC to other advanced image processing tools such as ImageMagick. While the CLI version of G’MIC is very powerful, it is better to install G’MIC-Qt plugins into GIMP and use it from there.
Here is how we can easily install and use G’MIC-Qt plugins for GIMP on Windows:
- Download and install GIMP from https://www.gimp.org/. At the moment the latest version is 2.10.34.
- Launch GIMP at least once so that it creates all the usual folders then close it down.
- Download and install G’MIC-Qt plugins for GIMP from https://gmic.eu/. You have to use the EXE installer for Windows. The installation automatically finds the GIMP plugins folder and copies the files there.
- Launch GIMP and let it load the new plugins. Open any image in GIMP for which you want to apply effects. Select Filters from the menubar and then select G’MIC-Qt.
- In the new window that opens, you can choose the available filters , change their properties and values etc. You can then apply the selected filters to the image. There over 589 filters available through G’MIC-Qt.
So this is how easily you can install and use G’MIC-Qt plugins for GIMP. The process is exactly the same for other platforms as well. On some other platforms such as Linux, you might have to manually copy the plugin files to the GIMP plugins folder but you can use them similarly.