Hey Gimpy!

No, it's not the guy with the broken leg, it's GIMP! Or, more appropriately, the GNU Image Manipulation Program. A freeware program that's caught the attention of lots of users. But does it compare to most of the other image editors that are on the web?

What's Inside

I was a bit surprised to see the power behind this editor. It's adaptable to nearly any task, from simple doodles to in-depth picture manipulation. You can use it for tasks like photo retouching, image composition and image authoring, online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.

I was having fun just messing around with the different utilities offered in the program when I started zooming in on a certain picture. I accidentally clicked about 3 times too many and noticed I was around 2000X zoom. This caught me by surprise since most programs don't even go into this much depth and detail. I wanted to see how far it could actually zoom in and so I proceeded to get up to a magnification of… get this, 25,600X. Yes, I kid you not, this program can zoom in as much as a high powered microscope.

Not only is GIMP a powerful program, but it can also view and edit many different filetypes. File formats supported include bmp, gif, jpeg, mng, pcx, pdf, png, ps, psd, svg, tiff, tga, xpm and many others. It ensures that you can save and later use files with different layers with other image editing programs.

Most of all I'm impressed with the company. Their site supports a lot of user needs. They have in depth tutorials for beginners and advanced users alike.

For a product that is freeware, it packs a lot of sustenance and usability.

The Good

You can do nearly everything with this program. From cutting and pasting, to in depth gradient editing and blending, it's got Advanced scripting capabilities (Scheme, Python, Perl) and best of all, this program is 100% FREE! It's worth it.

The bad

What I didn't really care for at the beginning was the sheer explosion of information that was given to me. A lot of icons with no particular order. Aside from the options, I think that the interface still needs a little work. At one point I had 6 windows open, all pertaining to GIMP. Four of them were the picture files I was editing, then I had a separate window for the GIMP tools, then another for the GIMP layers. I would love to see a migration of all these separate windows into one free flowing program. There was a lot of clutter that could be cleaned up.

The Truth

Don't let the sheer amount of information scare you, this program is absolutely worth it. It's free, it's powerful and best of all it's got options to keep you busy for the next century. It has great user support and tutorials. This is definitely worth the download!

Take a glance at some screenshots below.