The Gimp Graphic Software

The Gimp is an acronym for GNU image manipulation program and is a free piece of software which can be used as a replacement for Adobe Photoshop. Started in 1995 by two guys called Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis it has gone on to become a widely used piece of graphical development software in tasks such as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. The primary sponsor of this open source project is the Free Software Foundation.

The gimp has many features that you can benefit from such as 48 standard brushes and the facilities to create your own ones along with 150 standard effects and filters. I use The Gimp to build header graphics for some of my Web-pages and I can tell you from experience it's easy to use. This is one of the major benefits as to why I use The Gimp compared to Photoshop. There are a lot of free tutorials kicking around on their website and all over the web. When I first opened The Gimp I didn't have a clue. I used a $12 video tutorial to show me how to build a header and the rest as we say is history. After mastering some very basic commands it was easy enough for me to figure out how to a lot of other great stuff with the application. It's quite difficult to completely mess up as well because you can undo pretty much every edit so this leaves you a lot of wiggle room to be able to play around for a bit.

It's able to run on Windows, UNIX and Mac platforms as well as many others so it reaches a broad spectrum of users. Supported by volunteers world wide there is also a lot of places you can contribute if you feel the desire such as programming, de-bugging, translating and writing tutorials etc.