The Gimp: Photoshop’s Free Cousin

Observing moss.

For those of us too cheap to buy Photoshop, or who want to support the open-source movement, the Gimp is a great little image manipulation program. I use the “Oilify” option a lot to obscure students’ faces. Gimp’s not as sophisticated as Photoshop, but if you’re not heavily into graphic design, and are not too picky, it does a good job.

Jumping the creek. Be careful with the flaming sword; someone might get hurt. (Image created by Piper Ziebarth; photographer Lensyl Urbano).

As a Photoshop clone, Gimp shares many of its basic principles. It also comes from the ImageMagick command line tools, which I’ve used to automate image processing in the past.

Gimp itself is, however, pretty easy to learn. I’ve shown one student how to use it, and we’ll see if and how the knowledge propagates through the class.

Triplets? Clones? Or maybe robots?