May 12, 2008 12:00 AM PDT

Featured Freeware: GIMP

The volunteer developers of The GIMP have been working hard to develop a polished, user-friendly, and freely distributed image editor. Available for Windows and Mac users, and in a portable edition for the PC, the separated palette windows may disturb those users who are used to more traditional layouts. Still, 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 GNU Image Manipulation Program is eminently comparable to Photoshop. Older features include channels, layers and masks, filters and effects, tabbed palettes, editable text tools, and color operations such as levels. New improvements include scalable brushes, revised selection tools, a new color menu, full-screen editing, a new crop tool, improved printing, red-eye removal, perspective clone, lens distortion, and more. It even has regex-based pattern matching for power users.

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.

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Add a Comment (Log in or register) 10 comments (Page 1 of 1)
by tashfeen_m May 12, 2008 1:04 AM PDT
I had no idea The GIMP had a portable version! Thanks for the info.

I don't think it'll ever be a Photoshop-replacement, but it's certainly taking strides.. and in a couple of versions, who knows!
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by adkiller2k7 May 12, 2008 8:07 AM PDT
The GIMP is very powerful. It can make a GIF animation by itself, to do this, create several pictures for the frames, then open the first picture then goto file>Open As Layers, Next, save the new file as SOMETHING.gif then choose the save as animation button
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by jbuck814366460 May 12, 2008 8:58 AM PDT
GIMP is also available for computers running most flavors of Linux - Fedora 8 and Ubuntu 8.04 both have it available in their repositories, or you can download and compile it from source too :)
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by jharrisofkansas May 12, 2008 2:44 PM PDT
Another nice thing about GIMP as with Photo Shop is that you can down load custom brushes others have made...Most of them are free for non commercial use or very cheap if you want to use in a commercial application.I have found deviantart.com to be a very good site for custom brush sets and the install to GIMP is easy.....In the search bar on the site type in GIMP brushes and down load the ones you like....Can do for Photo Shop also but I have not seen too many brushes for Corel products
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by JoyceNgo May 12, 2008 4:13 PM PDT
I tried to use GIMP on Ubuntu Linux and it didn't work out for me. It was a bit hard even though I see and people say it's a free and smaller version of Photoshop. I trust peoples' ratings saying it's a great program but I guess I have to get used to it first.
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by SGillman May 13, 2008 5:44 AM PDT
Once you grasp the interface, GIMP is great. And the portable version gives the same functionality right on my thumbdrive.
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by shareware_author May 13, 2008 12:37 PM PDT
Dear Seth Rosenblatt,

I wish you, that also your job changed someone for FREE. If your children haven't something to eat, and you don't earn no one dollar, then remember my words. Also please forward these words for all your colegue, taht wrote FREEWARE rewiews. Thanks so much. YOU KILL all software industry. Stay live only teens, that eat pizza, live with their mother and have time to made Freeware.
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by Matt Covalt May 16, 2008 5:35 PM PDT
I rarely ever do this, but "shareware_author", your ignorance speaks my point itself. This freeware you speak of that is ruining businesses is actually fueling them. Without competition there would be no need to change the product. For example, Office 2007. Let's see... 97, 2000, 2003... similar interface/feature. OOo+Online Word Processor revolution come, Office 2007 comes. Totally new with online integration comes. Coincidence? I think not. Shut your mouth on subjects you know nothing about and let technology live and strive off of each other. To say that the few that may run a Linux OS that's full of open-source freeware is ruining the software industry... look again.
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by sparksvalley June 27, 2008 12:50 PM PDT
Hey, shareware_author - here's a tip, learn English before posting another demented rant. It makes it extra obnoxious and tiresome. If no one is buying your software, then it probably isn't very good. Don't whine here.
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