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Say you want to add features to your family photos downloaded from your digital camera. Say you want to create logos/images for your personal website. You get lost in the thousand features Photoshop presents to you or are not yet prepared to pay for it. No problem, we have the GIMP, which gives you all the image editing features you can imagine at zero cost.

GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for tasks such as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program or as an expert quality photo retouching program or image format converter, etc.

The magic all started from 2 questions posted to a UC Berkeley newsgroup by Peter Mattis in 1995. From there a few programmers started coding the solution. Since then, more and more programmers have been contributing to the project to make the program more powerful, more stable and easier to use. On-line documentation is available in English, German, French, Swedish and even Chinese.

The GIMP is a freeware shielded under the GNU General Public License. Their official web site is http://www.gimp.org, where you can grab not only the executable version but also the source code. But for common users, be sure that you download the executable version so that you won’t have unnecessary trouble. Currently, the program is available in Unix, Windows and MacOSX versions.

The installation of the GIMP includes two steps. Prior to installing the GIMP program itself you must first install the runtime library. They are separate files and need to be downloaded and installed separately. When you launch the GIMP, you will see a tool bar window and a work area window. The authors try to make everything straightforward, but it still takes some time to be familiar with such a powerful tool. Once you begin to understand it, you will like it. Online and downloadable documentations are available on http://www.gimp.org and there are also a few links to the published books that introduce you the GIMP. There are also several mailing lists dedicated to the GIMP.

So don’t wait, and give it a try.