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PHOTO EDITING SOFTWARE

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Reviews of some useful, FREE, photo related software..

Gimp | unix win mac

Free Photoshop Replacement?
Virtually everyone in the photography and design industry uses Photoshop, and sure, if you can afford a copy yourself or have a copy of the cut down version “Photoshop Elements” then go use it! Photoshop is complicated to learn but it is fair to say ‘the best’ and certainly the best supported and widest used. If you want a simple-to-use interface then there is a myriad of other, horrible (my opinion), image processing tools that can be downloaded or found on the front of a magazine. I’m not going to waste my or your time here reviewing ‘photo-magick-live-tool-wiz 5.0’ most of them are crap. (If you are just learning then they are often fun to play with and learn by, so go have fun until you grow out of them!)

If you want the meat but don’t want to fork out for Photoshop then I would heartily recommend gimp. The oddly titled gimp (GNU Image Manipulation Program) has been developed on the UNIX platform for many years, and is a full featured professional quality image processing tool. It has for several years now also been available for windows and mac.

What is GNU?
gimp is GNU, (you can go away and google about GNU licenses if you want to read more) but this basically means its freeware even for commercial use. It is supported by a small army of enthusiastic freeware programmers, and is well documented.

Gimp v Photoshop
Daily, I’m a Photoshop user, but I have used gimp on Solaris (unix) where Photoshop is simply not available, and found it to be very capable. Just like Photoshop it is not easy to get straight into, it uses layers and tool pallets which to the first time user are confusing and somewhat frustrating. There are some excellent tutorials on using gimp available on the net. If you learn the gimp interface then you will find a transition to PhotoShop (or vice-versa) fairly straightforward.

It’s free, this surprises a lot of people, but it is free. There are no catches and unlike this site its not even ‘ad supported’. Its has no add pop-up clutter, nag screens, no spam, just image processing! View our video tutorial about gimp

You can download gimp for free at gimp.org

Picasa | win unix

Catalogue and Sort
One important feature of the photoshop suite many people miss is the bridge, it is a very versatile 'centre point' from where you can catalogue, sort and catalogue not just your images but all of your files (specially those from the rest of adobe creative suite) there is, in fact there are many freeware image cataloguing solutions available. you might (like me) prefer to sort your own images into directories/folders, but some people sware by using a separate piece of so called DAM (digital asset management) software, these range in cost from free to thousands of dollars. choose one that is suitable for you size of collection (on this site we are talking about efficiently arranging a collection of your images or web designs etc). View our video tutorial about picasa

Find your images easily!