Don’t have the budget to purchase Adobe Photoshop?

Then The GIMP might just have everything you need to edit your photos.

What is GIMP?

GIMP is short for: GNU Image Manipulation Program and comes with a customizable interface, photo enhancement features and advanced digital retouching techniques.

Operating on a wide range of platforms (PC, Linux, Mac and more), GIMP is licensed under a cost-free GNU license and comes with multiple languages.

Though it can be used as a photo retouching software, The GIMP is more of a modification, creation and composition tool for images.

What definitely makes the power of  The GIMP is the hundreds of plugins available!

GIMP provides sophisticated paint and editing functions as is evident in these various dialogs and palettes. (Image courtesy of Carey Bunks, www.gimp-savvy.com)

CNET’s Review :

“The volunteer developers of The GIMP have been working hard to develop a polished, user-friendly, and freely distributed image editor. Although the separated palette windows may disturb those users who are used to more traditional layouts, your comfort level should grow exponentially as you discover how pain-free the program is.
One of the most powerful general-purpose image editors around, the upgrades makes the GNU Image Manipulation Program eminently comparable to Photoshop. Older features include channels, layers and masks, filters and effects, tabbed palettes, editable text tools, perspective clone, improved printing, and color operations such as levels.

New improvements include GEGL integration for 32-bit color support, dynamic brushes, and more options for the free select tool. It even has regex-based pattern matching for power users.

The application provides professional tools that can stand against the big boys without the hefty price tag. Even the installation process has gotten simpler, with no need to download and install the GTX Runtime Environment separately.

Extremely powerful and easy to work with, GIMP is ideal for both amateur and pro photographers, Web designers, or anyone who wants to create and edit professional-quality digital images on a budget.”
Source: http://download.cnet.com/GIMP/3000-2192_4-10073935.html

The project’s mascot is named Wilber.

Gimp.org

(Beginner, Intermediate, Expert, Photo Editing, Web, Script Authoring)

Gimp-Tutorials.net

( Users Tutorials, Effects, Icons & Buttons, Photo Manipulation, Website Layouts, Painting Text Effects… )

GHUJ.com (Drawings,  Special Effects, Tips & Tricks, Photo Manipulation, Featured Articles…)

MaximumPc.com ( Bring Out the GIMP Part 1: GIMP Basics….)

Carol.gimp.org ( Change size, Make Jpegs smaller,Crop,Change Mode,Flip,Rotate…)

Publisher’s description

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a freely distributed piece of software suitable for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition, and image authoring. It is a powerful piece of software with capabilities not found in any other free software product. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert-quality photo-retouching program, an online batch-processing system, a mass production image renderer, or an image-format converter. GIMP is modular, expandable, and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image-manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.

Version 2.6.7 is a bug-fixing release.

http://download.cnet.com/windows/gimp/3260-20_4-87737.html?tag=mncol

Awesome…jump over and download the newest version of the software.

Has anyone already experienced the software?

Share your opinion by leaving a comment below. Would be delighted to know about it.

Talk soon!

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