You don’t need to be a tech wiz or a graphics expert to know, when it comes to image manipulation, Adobe Photoshop monopolizes the market. But, there is one down side to the famous program, and that is it’s well known price tag. Most people can’t afford spending £630, and especially not in these economic times. So, we look to freeware for the answer.
I am a graphic enthusiast and have been using the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) for just under a year now and have seen two updates, 2.6.7 being the latest stable release, and I have been very impressed.
As I have an interest in this field of technology I have used Photoshop many times and now on a weekly basis and I have found no other program that has the same functionality and likeness to Photoshop for a free and legal download.The GIMP has a fairly clean interface and is highly customizable with themes freely available to download and install. One of the great things I have found is that almost any Photoshop brush can be fairly easily imported into the program without any added features.
The Internet is full of tutorials for GIMP and I myself share mine on YouTube. And, if you see a Photoshop tutorial you find particularly interesting, they can be easily reproduced in GIMP (although a little knowledge of the programs tools/ functions is needed).
Downsides: the user interface can be a bit fiddly at times when minimizing/ maximizing as there is 2+ windows to deal with. As with many free programs, documentation is not downloaded with the software, only available online – especially useful with no Internet.
I have grown to love the GIMP as I don’t have the money or want to illegally download Photoshop and soon after watching and reading tutorials online I learnt all I needed to know and begun sharing my knowledge with the rest of the GIMP community. GIMP, like Photoshop is available on most operating systems, and has a free portable version available to put on a flash drive for when GIMP isn’t installed.
4½/5 – Great features and closely resembles Photoshop for free!
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Good review. Easy to understand and straight to the point. GIMP can be a little hard to use at first.
> So, we look to freeware for the answer.
Yes, the gimp is no-cost (free of charge), but more importantly it is Free Software, governed by a Free Software license (GPL), meaning you can share this program with your friends and you can modify it (if you know how to code, which I don't but I appreciate the significance of this). Imagine of Adobe let us look at their CS4 suite's code? Ha! We can't even get them to open up Flash so that the community can fix and improve the code there, and *that* app is somewhat critical to the WWW as a whole.
Welcome to a world of Free and Open Source Software! We have OSes, mail clients, office suites, games, tools, and all kinds of stuff just waiting for those who will take the time to explore…
Great review, I like gimp.
another down side of Adobe Photoshop is its size; it's getting bloated in recent years. My co-worker, who bought the whole CS4 suite, is getting tired of waiting for several minutes to bring up Photoshop while sometimes she just needs simple resizing/retouching, whereas GIMP can be ready in less than 10 seconds.
to echo lefty.crupps: it's not the software that's free; it's you
Well this program is just same as the Photoshop.I use photoshop for image editing as it gives a good image quality result.This one looks convincing so I want to know if there are any good features than photoshop in this.
I'd also say that this program is the same as the use Photoshop.I photoshop image editing, which bought the entire CS4, is tired of waiting several minutes to download Photoshop