Gimp and Gimpshop:  Free Ways to Do What Photoshop Does

The computer operating system widely used by the folk who started the internet was called UNIX.  UNIX was developed by some AT&T employees at Bell Laboratories, so it was propriety software, available by purchase only.  UNIX was very stable and lean, but alas, expensive.  So, some rebellious innovators designed a free operating system, like UNIX but which did not contain any of the actual code of UNIX.  This new free operating system came to be called GNU (which stands for Gnu is not Unix).  Many GNU programs are free, including the ones described in this article:  GIMP and GimpShop.

GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program, was one of the first complex application programs developed by GNU coders.  GIMP is a multi-purpose graphics program, a Swiss Army knife of graphics programs.  You can do just about anything with GIMP that you can with the very expensive Adobe program, Photoshop.  But, GIMP is free!  And it runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux (plus some other operating systems too esoteric to mention).  Even if you aren’t very adept with graphics programs, you can use GIMP for simple tasks like scaling digital photos (changing their size for the Web), getting rid of red eyes in flash photos, turning several photos into a collage, combining text with photos, changing the brightness and sharpness of photos, and so on.  There are lots of free tutorials on GIMP, and some good published texts too.

If you’ve had occasion to use the rightfully popular program, Photoshop, but can’t afford to spend $650 to own it, then you may want to download GimpShop.  GimpShop is an adaptation of GIMP to make its menus and nomenclature similar to Photoshop so that Photoshop users will be comfortable with it.  I’ve never used photoshop, but I prefer GimpShop to GIMP because I think its nomenclature and menu structure are just more intuitively pleasing than GIMP’s.  Another advantage of using GimpShop is that there are many, many free tutorials on the Web for Photoshop; and you can use GimpShop with most of those quite well.  You will find that there aren’t many instructional web pages for GimpShop, but that’s because there is little need for them, for you can learn what you need to by using either GIMP or Photoshop tutorials.

If you’re a photographer who prefers to shoot in the RAW mode, you’ll want to try an auxiliary program (plugin) for Gimp or GimpShop called UFRAW.  UFRAW reads raw photos from many different makes of camera, and permits you to change the exposure of your photos, their color saturation, their white balance and brightness and several other qualities, before saving them in the format you wish.

Comments from readers of this article:

IMHO, by using UFRAW and GimpShop serious photographers have all they need for manipulating photos without spending a bundle on Photoshop.

Joemikeb

For Mac OS X users GIMP runs in Apple's X11 windowing environment, but there is another version called Seashore that is GIMP in a cocoa wrapper that makes it fully compatible with all OS X functions and services and does not require the X11 windowing environment. Seashore feels and acts a lot more "Mac-like".

Monday, January 1, 2007 - 08:02 PM

Joemikeb

It also occurs to me that while you are mentioning GIMP you should also mention the open source office suite, OpenOffice. Like GIMP it is freeware, although donations are gratefully accepted, and it is a very powerful and credible replacement for Microsoft Office on Windows, several dialects of Unix, and Apple's OS X. On the Mac Apple's X11 windowing environment is required or you can get NeoOffice which is OpenOffice in a cocoa environment wrapper and like Seashore has complete access to all OS X functions and services. Microsoft Office on the Mac does not have a database module, but OpenOffice/NeoOffice has a very powerful database module.

Most of these and literally thousands of other very powerful applications and utilities for Windows, Unix, and OS X can all be found at http://sourceforge.net/ and all are free. Some projects require compiling the source code and others such as GIMP, Seashore, and NeoOffice are available as compiled binary complete with the appropriate Windows or OS X installer.

OpenOffice is an open source project of Sun Microsystems and can be found at http://www.openoffice.org/

This article (minus the comments) was written by TCDavis

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