Nicholas Small

GIMP is an image manipulation program. If you are unfamiliar with the term “image manipulation” you might know it better as “Photoshop”. Photoshop was one of the first and for a long time the best by far software for image manipulation. Therefore when people think of editing photos with a more professional touch they immediately think of Photoshop. Fortunately  there are many photo editing applications that do the same thing such as: Affinity Photo, Sketch, Pixelmator. These applications allow you to do anything from cutting, cropping, and image layering to the more basic options like color saturation and brightness. They also all cost money. Usually lots of money. A new release of photoshop software can start at four hundred dollars. Most people in 2016 rent the software from Adobe.

Unfortunately the majority of the population is very unfamiliar with “Open Source Software”. Open source software is software for computers that is free. It is only free because the coders purposefully make the source code for the application available and editable. Open source code is created to be shared for free amongst the different forms of computer users. Some people use open source products for the product themselves and have no plan to edit or create new code. They want the product for its intended use. Other people download open source programs with intentions of editing the source code to customize a program or operating system to their specific needs and wants. Regardless of the reason all that matters is that open source software is free.

After the creation of Photoshop it was only a matter of time before another computer application programmer wanted to show off their ability to write code for an image manipulation application. And it happened when two college students wanted to present an interesting project to a professor. This project was a “General Image Manipulation Program” nicknamed GIMP for short. After nine or ten months of work they made it public in 1998. From there the software took off. Every open source programmer wanted their chance to make their own version of GIMP in hopes of outdoing the person before them.

GIMP is now approaching its 20th anniversary. It is standard in all Red Hat / Linux Operating System installs. It has recently released one its most successful and productive version (GIMP 2.8.16). This program has been compared to Photoshop CC, which is the newest version of Adobe’s Photoshop. The only difference is one is free and the other costs hundreds of dollars.

So why doesn’t anyone know of this amazing software you might ask. Unfortunately the products best trait is also its downfall. Because its free there is no profits made from the distribution of this product. With no money you can’t advertise the product. Without advertisement your product will only grow if it’s spoken about by its users. As user of both of these programs I can say that GIMP can do anything that Photoshop can with a nearly identical Graphical Interface for the user to work in. If you are graphic designer/ photographer I strongly encourage you to download GIMP for free from “ www.GIMP.org”.