GIMP for Free!

So you downloaded Faststone Image Viewer and you made a donation so that the development team can continue to improve the beast and now you’ve mastered all the ins and outs and you just don’t have enough power and you’re thinking hard about buying another Microsoft money maker…

Now I am not anti-Microsoft and I have nothing against Bill Gates making another million or two, but I do prefer free.

And having said the F-word I will go on to demonstrate just what I mean. Before you take that credit card out of your wallet, try GIMP.

http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,23351-order,4/description.html


What on earth is that you ask? I ought to give you the full acronymic explanation, but I won’t, I’ll just tell you. It is a powerful, complete Photoshop-like image processor which will do almost anything that the high priced box will do and you can have it for just a coupla clicks of your mouse.

There is something you must do first, download the downloader, see GIMP was developed for Linux and to run on Windows it has to do some stuff before it loads, but you won’t notice that just follow the instructions and then all will be well.

http://www.gimp.org/downloads/

Yes, that’s the right link and now you can have all of the tricks and treats of Photoshop without mortgaging your home, which is good because in this market you know the appraiser is going to bring in the numbers twenty percent below what you have in it so best not to even worry about buying a photo processor and just download GIMP.

Yes, it is a bear to learn. You could probably carry on a conversation with Stephen Hawking with less background knowledge, but for free? Shucks you can put it on the drive and spend the next four or five years learning how to use it.

And the next time you see one of those manipulated images where the original was a llama and now it looks like the fourteenth green at St Andrews and what’s that strange yellow light and where is it coming from, you won’t have to go into creative envy. You’ll just crank up GIMP and have a whirl at doing it one better.