What is The GIMP? That's a funny name. How can it help me?

First off, The GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. Now you ask, what is GNU? That's getting in deeper and if you're intersted, see our Acronym Bay for information about this. Moving on ...

The GIMP is a tool to create images, whether they are GIF, JPG, PNG, BMP or others. Also, you can manipulate the same images making enhancements, removing pieces, changing colors, adding effects, and many other actions. A similar program is Adobe Photoshop, but should be well known that it's not a clone, but a replacement. The GIMP has some some things it does differnt, as well as the same. And we want to cover some of those so you have a fast, efficient learning curve, and gain deep experience with it.

We want to explore all the ins and outs of this application and how it can help you in your efforts. For us, it's a great tool and has been very cost-effective. Yes, that's not a hard statement to say when it's free. But when some of it's shortcomings exist and you can learn to deal with them, the statement becomes much stronger.

As we provide tutorials and chapters in our book about this technology, help show your support by making this a thoroughly documented, helpful site for the application by providing us with questions about how to do things. We love the challenge.

We have used Adobe Photoshop, and we love the application. There are some very power features that are not in gimp, but when 80-90% of your work can be accomplished for free. It's hard for us to justify it's cost to others. Adobe is a top 10% user community application. We don't want to leave out any types of applications because that would void our mission.

If you can't get done what you need to do in The GIMP, then gradutate to Photoshop. But at least, gave it a shot. We want to make that right decision for youself.