Wilbur, the GIMP mascotI have always marvelled while watching a skilled photographer or graphic designer practice his trade with Photoshop, retouching a photo or creating graphics that are not just images but art. Because of my work with the Vintage, their trade has become more familiar, but it is still only slightly less mysterious than alchemy. One cannot learn a trade for which he does not own the tools, and the difficulty is that a program like Photoshop—or especially the entire Adobe Creative Suite—is very expensive. For someone who is a professional, the cost is merely a necessary investment; for someone who only wants to make their personal photos look better and to do some graphics work for churches or friends, it is prohibitive.

But not any longer. Tonight I discovered The GIMP. The GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program, a GNU image editing program. I doubt that it’s quite as feature packed as Photoshop, but its price tag doesn’t pack quite the same punch either. The GIMP seems to have as many features as an amateur could ever need: layers, brushes, palettes, selection tools, curves, filters, paths, transformations, and more. In short, it’s far more powerful than the puny image editors that ship with Windows. Especially important for an amateur: the program is well documented, and there are several free books and tutorials to teach you how to use the program. And it is available for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux.

I hope that the graphics and photographs that I produce will soon be of a much higher quality, thanks to the GIMP. And you can get the GIMP too.