Free Photoshop Alternative

Adobe Photoshop is arguably the most popular image editing software in the world.  It is a very mature and complete product.  However, the down-side to the software is its price tag of around $500.  This is out of the reach of most schools.  I use an alternative in my computer lab called GNU Image Manipulation Program or “GIMP” for short.  It has most of the features of Photoshop and it’s free for anyone to use.  You can download it at www.gimp.org.  It runs on many platforms, so download the version for your particular operating system.  GIMP runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.  I teach a Photoshop class and one of my students used GIMP to do all the assignments because they wanted to work at home.  The results and concepts were the same.  Take some digital photos and give GIMP a try.  There are some video tutorials on www.designyourownweb.com and Amazon sells book about the program.  Let me know what you think.