If you need to do some serious image editing, such as retouching a digital photo, or creating some good quality artwork for a website or other project, people would usually suggest using Adobe Photoshop. While Photoshop is an excellent piece of software, it’s very expensive to buy the full version. A cut-down edition, called Photoshop Elements is available for consumers at a much cheaper price-tag, and while this is perfectly good enough for a lot of people’s needs, it’s still worth asking: why pay anything at all for a cut-down version when you can get some high quality image editing software for free?
The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free and open source image editing package which provides all of the powerful, professional quality tools you’d expect to find in a commercial package like Photoshop. It’s one of the most widely used and best supported open-source projects around, so there are hundreds of extensions and plug-ins available to provide whatever additional features you might need.
Our only complaint with the GIMP is that it’s interface is still pretty clunky and difficult to get to grips with – especially if you’re used to working with Photoshop. It can be quite difficult for a newbie to work out some of the most basic features, never mind advanced tools, without spending some time ploughing through the documentation. If you’re an experienced Photoshop user, it might be worth taking a look at the Gimpshop project, which does its best to make GIMP work in the same was as its commercial counterpart.
Both GIMP and Gimpshop are available for Windows, Mac and Linux.
You can download GIMP from: www.gimp.org
And you can get Gimpshop from: http://plasticbugs.com/?page_id=294