nip2 is a free image processing system, aiming to be about half way between Excel and Photoshop. It's obviously much smaller than these two, but it's not a toy either (about 200k lines of code). It has been designed for scientific image processing, allowing the controlled, reproducible manipulation of digital images. Relative to some of the more common image processing systems it's particularly good with large images (ie. images larger than the amount of RAM in your machine) and for working with colour. Although it is not designed as a piece of painting software it also comes with a simple paint box, which is sufficient for most basic requirements.

nip2 is a user interface for the VIPS image processing library. It is designed to be fast, even when working with very large images, and to be easy to extend.

VIPS (for VASARI (or maybe Virtual) Image Processing Software) is the image-processing library that does all the heavy lifting. nip2 is a graphical user interface for VIPS. Both work on unix, linux, windows (2k and XP) and macintosh (OS 10.2 and later).

VIPS has been used in the EU projects CRISATEL, VASARI, MARC, VISEUM, ACOHIR, ARTISTE and MUSA. It's also used in a number of museums and galleries around the world, mostly for infra-red reflectogram mosaic assembly.

The license of this software is Freeware, you can free download and free use this image processing software.