Most websites and magazines will talk about Photoshop as being the tool to edit photographs. Unfortunately Photoshop costs US$699, which is out of reach for most people. Adobe does have Photoshop Elements, which is a much less expensive, yet very capable scaled down version of Photoshop.
Personally I use Gimp, which is an open source photo editing software. As far as photography editing goes, Gimp has all of the capabilities of Photoshop that I need, and best of all, it’s free!
The majority of the tasks that I require for photo editing are features of both Gimp and Photoshop:
- Dodging and burning
- Layers
- Cloning and Healing
- Curves adjustments
The interface of Gimp may take some getting used to if you’re familiar with Photoshop, but once you’ve learned to navigate it, it is a very powerful tool. Download it and try it out for yourself.
