Free Open Source Alternative To Adobe Photoshop

Chuq Von Rospach is an Adobe Photoshop veteran. Recently he had series of bad experiences with Adobe Photoshop customer support. In essence what was promised on Adobe’s site wasn’t honored by Customer reps, what customer reps said wasn’t honored by another group, resulting him paying much more for the software than he should have. I was reading through the rather rambulatory article, the pain I can sympathize with (as it is common to many other customer support divisions including but not limited to BSNL, AOL etc.) but not his decision to still end up purchasing the software. Adobe Photoshop has a very nice and capable alternative which allowed us, and we haven’t regretted it since, fully migrate from Windows to Linux.

Did I mention GIMP before? The Gimp is a popular (mostly in Linux community) alternative to Adobe Photoshop. Don’t get fooled by its Linux fan base (mostly associated with Geeky crowds). The Gimp, and I speak from experience, is a very capable and versatile piece of software.

Recently an intern in our company worked for a couple of months on Gimp and he swears by it. He is now a 100% Gimp fanboy.

Here is the official blurb:

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.

Obviously their marketing campaign needs some caffeine. But their software doesn’t. I have seen and used some nice features of Gimp. Have you tried their scripting capability? It is very powerful and flexible. Give it a try and let me know.

BTW: I once interviewed with one of the original creators of Gimp during the dotcom boom; very sharp dude.

Take a look at Gimp quickies to know few things you can do upfront with Gimp. In my experience if you know Photoshop then you also know Gimp, at least say 80% of it. After all Gimp was created initially to get Photoshop like features in open source. Their autocrop feature is pretty accurate and takes the pain of manual cropping.

Here is their full list of tutorials targeted from beginner to experts.