The GIMP.

During my first year of university, I was exposed to Photoshop for the very first time. On a Mac, no less. I loved tinkering with images, and making my own little text headings for my online “diary” (it was 1993, people) and it was fun to use all the swirls and distortions to make patterns.

I am not an artist. I do not play one on television.

(But I can scan an image and I can manipulate it (well, the basics at least!) and I can make little doodads for a blog if I’m desperate.)

Fast forward to a few years later and I had Photoshop on my PC at home. I used it for essentially the same purpose – simple designs and scanning and cropping photos. It seemed like overkill, sure, but anything was better than PaintShop or, even worse, Microsoft “Paint”. The problem, of course, is that it’s hard to justify spending a billion and one dollars on a program and then only use 2% of its power.

Flipping over to linux, I was intrigued by the built-in, comes-with-the-OS, graphic program The GIMP. Coffee assured me that I wouldn’t miss Photoshop and that I might even come to LIKE The GIMP if I played with it a little. He hadn’t used it very much, but he had been impressed by the things he HAD done.

I confess that the first few times I used it I simply cropped a few photos I had taken.

A few days ago I stumbled across a site that had some pretty cool add-ons for The GIMP, and, in typical linux style, they were all free for downloading. I grabbed a few of them and installed some stuff, and started to experiment.

Holy Cats, Batman!

The GIMP is absolutely, without question, WAY better suited to me than Photoshop. Me, the non-artist. Me, the one with zero talent for creating digital art. Me, the one with very little patience to screw around with things.

Don’t get me wrong – Photoshop is a completely different beast and serves a very important purpose for those who manipulate digital images for a living. But for someone like me, GIMP is faaaaar superior. I love that it’s easy to use – and has a built-in tutorial to teach you how to use it. (I plan to spend some time one day this week taking some of those ‘classes’ and seeing what I can make/do/create.)

On WNET, we talked about GIMP vs Photoshop, and Melle posted a link to this article comparing the two. I agree with everything the author said. It’s worth a read if you’re pondering purchasing the very expensive Photoshop or if you’re considering whether a free software download will be sufficient for you.

GIMP is available for Windows, too, if you want to give it a shot.

I’m looking forward to playing with the various effects and the neat-o tools that I’ve recently added to GIMP. If anything turns out, I’ll post it here. My first task, however, is going to be the creation of a new header image. I’m so jealous of Kelly‘s new one that I can hardly stand it!