Attached Link: The GIMP -- like Photoshop only freer.

I've heard several people at various times mention that they can't afford Photoshop, Painter, or sometimes even PSP, often because they spent all their money on Poser and stuff to use in it B^) To aid these people, I'd like to mention a little promotional public service announcement and endorsement that you will undoubtedly like to hear about. There's a free program out there from GNU called the GIMP. Stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. This is not a little hokey program -- it has as many features as things like Photoshop packed into it. The interface was written for X-Windows originally, so both Windows and Mac users will have some getting-used-to with it. I dont't think there's a binary available for MacOS9 and lower, but MacOSX is UNIX, so you can use the normal version though as far as I know you will have to build it from source. There are, however, binaries for Linux, Solaris, and, yes, Windows 95 and up. The Windows version can be found at http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32/ There are heaps of features, it works with tablets, and what's more, you can script the equivalent of Actions using Perl! No, I'm not getting paid to say this. GIMP is open source freeware and can't pay anyone.

To cool - can never have too many free toys, eh? I gotta wait til I get home from work tho argh! L :) Thanks for the info & link.

Thanks, Dodger! For those who don't know, Auto FX has made their Dreamy Photo app available for free. It works as a Photoshop plugin or as a standalone program. It can yield some great postrender effects, and is of course also useable with regular digital photos. http://www.autofx.com/freeplugins/dreamy7.html

Cool. Is AutoFX You? You or they might look into making a GIMP plugin too (it doens't use standard 8BF plugins, not being originally designed for Win/Mac) -- I've heard they are really simple, because they just use standard GNU glibc shared objects, easily compiled with gcc. Oh -- I should mention that the GIMP has some cool features Photoshop hasn't yet bottowed, including a very nice seamlessizer filter.

No, I have nothing to do with them. I was pleased to find the Dreamy Photo app on a cover CD of Computer Arts magazine awhile back. Since then they made it available for free online, so I was just adding to your nice gesture.

I have been using gimp for 8 months now. I'm still finding out new things on it. Great program for the price. Tashar 59

I've been using GIMP for over a year now, and I think it is great! I've been able to use many of the tutorials written for Photoshop (creating denim, etc) using it, though everything is in a different place. Perhaps we should start a GIMP forum and start a GIMP tutorial section. I found it easier to figure out than Paint Shop Pro and even after a year, I still find new things that I didn't know about. One additional note, GIMP also allows Python scripting, so you can write your own scripts to do all the stuff you find yourself doing over and over again. eric

Yes a forum would be great, but I don't see that happening. I don't know if there is a post work forum, would be a better place for it. The gimp faq's are very vague/sp, it would be nice to pass tips around somewhere easy to find instead of chasing around gimps dead-end zones. Tashar 59

Perhaps we should appeal to TPTB? It seems fair to me that Gimp should have an application forum -- PSP and Painter and Photoshop all do... and GIMP is by no means any weaker than the rest of them -- and averyone can get it. Though I agree that a general postwork forum would be a wonderful thing, too!