About 95% of my tutorials are Photoshop Tutorials. That is probably frustrating for the less fortunate that do not own Photoshop. It is extremely expensive, I did not spend $900 on it, I didn’t hack it either! My wife is a student so I got the student version of CS5 for $300 registered in her name. For me that is a reasonable price. When I think about it, I probably spend about 40 hours a week on Photoshop so $900 for that much entertainment isn’t bad either, but cheaper is always better. The good news is, there are free alternatives to Photoshop!
I recently took a look at a lot of artists on Redbubble that use Gimp as their primary image editing software. Gimp is 100% free powerful editing software with a very similar feel to Photoshop. I quickly set it up to emulate my template in Photoshop. You can work in layers and do almost every layer blend mode Photoshop does, Overlay, Screen, Luminosity etc. I picked it up and very quickly was on my way to Post Processing some of my HDR images from the Hakone Garden trip my wife and I took. The Gimp website offers many free very helpful plugins as well for it’s users. As soon as I have a couple more hours logged using it, I will create a Gimp Video Tutorial.
The Interface:
The Good:
- It’s FREE!
- It resembles Photoshop very well.
- You can work in layers. Not very often can you work in layers in free photo software.
- With a little bit if poking around and playing, you can find exactly what you want. I have a learning curve because of my Photoshop knowledge.
The Bad:
- It runs a bit slow. I couldn’t figure out how to configure more RAM allotment to the program.
The Bottom Line:
I highly recommend Gimp to anyone on a budget who wants to make clean edits to their photos while using layers and layer adjustments. Very powerful program for the price!
