Last week, my boss came up to me and asked if I knew “photoshop”. Of course when he asked this I made the assumption that our company actually had a computer with Adobe Photoshop installed on it and he needed some photo editing work done. I was half right in my assumption that photo work needed to be done, but the only photo editing software on my computer was Paint (default with Windows) and a GNU (FREE!) photo manipulation program called GIMP.

With not many other choices, I decided to use GIMP and see what I could make happen. After 20 minutes of instruction from the internet I was able to change the color of an object, throw a decal or two on it and stitch a few photos together, all in a manner that seemed quite professional if I do say so myself. The point of this post is that GIMP is a quite awesome photo editing program that is free, and there are many other alternatives to paid and quite expensive programs that do the same thing.

Do you use any free programs that are less known, rather than illegally using an alternative and get similar or better results? Any paid programs that aren’t duplicated by free software?