GIMP: A Free Photoshop Clone

Recently I was asked to provide an up-to-date family picture. Those that know me know that I hate taking family portraits. I prefer to get the family together on vacation or while we are skiing and have someone take a quick snapshot. Well it has been a while since we have all been together and I don't really have a recent picture of us. I am reminded of the scene in "Cheaper by the Dozen" where the father, played by Steve Martin, tells everyone that he will just Photoshop the absent oldest child into the family portrait they are about to take. The most recent portrait we have is missing our oldest daughter who is away at school and so I was hoping I could just Photoshop her into the picture.

The only problem is that Photoshop is a $700 piece of software. Luckily there is a free alternative called GIMP. It is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. That covers about all home computing environments.

GIMP is an acronym that stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. Seeing as "gimp" is a word that is generally a friendly yet derogatory term we use with one of our friends who has recently injured an arm or let, I would probably have used a different acronym. However that is is the name the program was given and it is anything but a handicapped tool.

One of the first uses you may have for GIMP is to remove that annoying "red eye" effect you get when taking a picture of someone using a flash. Simply go into the "filter" menu and under "enhance" is an option for red eye removal. Doing a quick scan of the other filters reveals a number of really cool effects that you can add to your photographs. Just be sure to always work on a copy instead of the original. We have one screwed-up family picture where we tried to remove our dog's "green eye" effect (people have red eyes but dogs have green eyes when their pictures are taken with a flash) and didn't save a copy of the original.

There are a lot of classes, books, and Internet tutorials devoted to Photoshop. A lot of this teaching material translates to GIMP because the two programs are so similar. However there are some differences and so you will want to see if there is a tutorial specifically built around GIMP first. One of my favorite GIMP-specific tutorials shows how to make really spectacular buttons to use on a website (one is shown below).



My oldest college-aged daughter was doing some work for me this summer and I taught her some basic GIMP tricks. At the end of her day, she would hang around on the computer after work to do some image editing for herself. She built complex animated graphics of ballerinas dancing around the screen as well as collages of all her friends. When I asked her what she thought of GIMP she told me that she had been searching for an image editing program and was glad I had showed it to her.

While it is fairly easy to steal yourself a copy of Photoshop and avoid paying that $700 price, it is still stealing. Since a free version of a comparable product exists there is no need to become a software pirate.