Usefulness
Functionality
Price
GIMP is a free and powerful program for photo retouching, image composition, and image authoring.
Ever heard of GIMP? No? Well, you’ll be shocked to know that the GNU Image Manipulation Program was originally released in 1995. Unlike the Adobe suite of products, GIMP is totally free. It is also an open-source raster graphics editor and you can use it for image editing and retouching, cropping, re-sizing, free-form drawing, photo montages among many other specialized tasks.
GIMP Photo Editor
One way to quickly change how consumers perceive your brand is with the right image. And for small businesses, using a free photo editing solution is one way to save on the cost of creating that image.
While Adobe’s Photoshop has become the go-to application for photo manipulation, GIMP photo editor is a free alternative with just as many of the essential tools to make this possible.
GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, and it is an open source application for photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.
With the GIMP photo editor, small businesses can create the images best communicating their brand or use the tools to manipulate an existing image to say something else.
The Importance of a Brand Image
The image of your brand, whether it is a logo or something else, identifies your business. It creates the consumer’s first impression of your business so you have to make sure the image is just right.
Your brand image makes a lasting first impression, it creates instant recognition and last but definitely not least it says who you are.
The GIMP photo editor has the necessary tools to create your brand image. The site has tutorials on how to use the many different tools. GIMP photo editor is available in 17 different languages. The platform boasts a large community of users providing an invaluable resource.
A Look at the GIMP Photo Editor
Getting Started
Since its inception, GIMP has come a long way. The most recent version is GIMP 2.8, which they say is a result of three years of collaborative development and hard work. The new version is loaded with a host of features.
Single Window Mode
The new version comes with an optional single-window mode, so you can now easily toggle between the single window and the default multi-window mode. The single-window mode is much cleaner than the multi-window. Images and “dockable dialogs” are all available on the tabbed image window. You can, however, choose to have the “dockable dialogs” in multiple columns. To do this, create a new column in a dock window, drag and drop the dialog on the vertical edges of the dock window.
Multi-column dock windows feature is, however, more appealing to multi-monitor users where you can have the big dock window in one screen and the other dialogs on other displays.
Edit Text on Canvas
While earlier versions required that you edit text in a separate window, the new 2.8 version allows for on-canvas editing. Apart from the usual text formatting features such as font size, family and style, you also get numeric control over baseline offset and kerning as well as the ability to change text color for a selection.
Widget for Tablet Users
GIMP also comes with a widget that meets that requirements of tablet users. The widget combines a numeric value control, a label and a slider that better visualizes the current value and provides a more compact UI.
Resource Tagging
GIMP allows you to tag and group resources such as patterns and groups. Tag resources from their respective dockables. It is also possible to filter resources based on these tags. It is possible to tag multiple resources simultaneously.
Having too large an image that can’t be embedded in a webpage, posted anywhere online, or attached to an email is a common problem. In this case you should scale the image down and GIMP makes this really easy. Open the “scale image” dialog and enter the desired width and height values.
You could as well use GIMP to rotate and flip and image, change file size or crop an image. These are all common modifications that you may need to make as you look to advertise and sell your products online.
While Adobe offers highly-efficient products like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, the costs of such tools is way expensive (starting at $9 for Lightroom CC and Photoshop CC). GIMP may not offer a wide variety of services like Adobe, but it is free, easy to use and will offer you almost all the image editing features that you need.
Image: Gimp
I have been using Gimp for years now. Although there are still some features that are missing (or I just don’t know how to use it well), I can say that it isreally a good alternative to Adobe.
I am using Gimp to teach my students on Photo Editing, it’s a very good Opensource tool that we can implement in the education system in my country, because we don’t need to buy a license in order to use it, especially to teach students at schools, we have to use legally tool. Another important of this tool, it is available in my language that easily to adapt to education.
Gimp is good software for a student in primary school. Thank for sharing.
I taught my sisters Gimp and she loves drawing very much. Gimp has now updated to a newer version which brings more features and improvement. You might want to give it a try.