Manipulate Your Images with GIMP

Say, you have taken lots of photos using your digital camera and now you want to do some post-editing or manipulation to the photos. Adobe Photoshop can be your best choice, but it cost you money. We can get something similar for FREE.  You can signup an account in Adobe and use the free Photoshop Express to edit your photos. However, you will need to upload your photos to its server before you can edit it. If you just want to edit the color and contrast or some basic editing of an image, you would rather use the light-weight yet powerful IrfanView.

Paint.NET is another good alternative, however the .NET already suggested it is for Windows. Therefore, GIMP is the open source software that you may want to try it out (if you are not using Windows).
GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. From its name, we know that it's a software like Photoshop or Paint.NET. It can do task like photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

GIMP is also:

• a simple paint program
• an expert quality photo retouching program
• an online batch processing system
• a mass production image renderer
• an image format converter

It supports multiple file formats from common ones like JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF to special use formats such as TGA, BMP, XWD, XPM, PIX, CEL, MNG, PPM, PCX, etc. Like Photoshop, GIMP has a list of plugins to enhance its functionality too.

It looks similar to Photoshop but if you will need some time to get use to it (if you have been a heavy Photoshop user).

However, you can always go through the tutorial provided by the official GIMP website to learn how to use GIMP the easy way.

GIMP supports multiple platforms including:

• Linux (i386, PPC)
• Microsoft Windows (XP, Vista)
• Mac OS X
• Sun OpenSolaris
• FreeBSD

Tip: Ubuntu Linux distro has GIMP pre-installed.

Download GIMP.