Adobe Photoshop is probably the most popular image manipulation program. Many schools have begun purchasing copies of it for their art programs and even elementary schools have begun investing in Photoshop Elements packages (Elements being a simplified version of the full Photoshop program). Adobe Photoshop is used in many graphic communication fields: printing, advertising, and graphic design.

However, not every school can afford a site license for Photoshop, and even a personal copy of a new Photoshop program (such as the new CS3) can run you $650 or more!

So, if you are looking for a free image manipulation tool with a lot of options, you might want to try GIMP.

GIMP: the GNU Image Manipulation Program 

http://www.gimp.org/

GIMP stands for the GNU Image Manipulation Tool and is a popular art program for those who are into open source programming. The general belief of open source groups is that software should be distributed for free and its code should be distributed freely so that anyone should be able to peer review it, add to it, and improve it. Open source programs are programs that are usually developed by a collection of people who work on the program in their spare time and often they develop the program for free UNIX systems such as Linux.

http://www.linux.org/

The Open Source Initiative has a longer definition of what “open source” means:

http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd

Basically GIMP is a freeware, open source program that has some options that are similar to Photoshop. It supports layers and has many familiar tools. It can even open Photoshop files.

Although ideally, an open source program like GIMP would be run in a totally open source environment (such as Linux), the good people at gimp.org thought about the rest of us and created versions of GIMP that not only run in Linux, but Windows and Mac OSX and they even made versions in different languages!

The program itself takes some getting used to. If you already know Photoshop and are expecting to just dive in and use GIMP, it’s probably not going to happen. The tool set is a little different. Naturally, all the icons are different and some functions have other names. 

But like Photoshop you still have access to things like channels and layers.

GIMP has gone through several revisions and is always getting better. I have had some difficulty running previous versions of it in the past (as well as some other open source programs). However, my computer did work with the most recent version of GIMP so maybe some of the old bugs have been worked out.

I think the only thing that really irritates me about the program is that you have three windows open: the layers/channels, the tools and the image. If you made the image window full screen, every time you click on the image the other two windows end up behind it, and then you have to click on the other windows from the task bar to bring them back. I didn’t see any options that set those windows to be “always on top” so this may be something they may pursue in the future (or maybe someday I’ll figure out how to make them float on top, if that is possible).

For someone who is looking for a free alternative for photo and image manipulation, GIMP is a great find. However, if you decide to introduce your classroom or school to GIMP, you should contact your ETs first and make sure that your district will allow it. One problem with any open source program is that anyone has access to the source code, which means that it is easier for people to find and exploit loopholes in the programming. Although most hackers tend to leave open source people alone (because most computers in the world use Windows, and if you want to hurt a lot of people real fast you write a virus for the most popular OS) it still poses a potential risk and it should be discussed with the technology team before it is implemented.