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Oak point clubs: we have plenty of room for your pictures and announcements! See Clubs for more information.

The Gimp is a free photo and drawing editor. It can be run on Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. You can use it to improve your digital photos and as a digital drawing tool.

Is it as good as Photoshop? No, or at least it's probably not as good as the $999.00 professional version of Photoshop, but very few of us need those fancy features either. Now I don't mean that the Gimp is low powered, basic, toyish.. it definitely is not. You can get a quick overview at Wikipedia and full manuals and tutorials are at http://docs.gimp.org/

The big features that the pro's miss are Pantone support and CMYK. They also used to complain that the Gimp only had 8 bit color per channel, but that's been upgraded to 32 bits per channel in the most recent releases. Some CMYK support has been added too.

Personally, I don't know CMYK from CYA or CIA. The Gimp is a powerful and flexible graphics editor and (I repeat) it's FREE.

Here's simple example of what you can do with the Gimp. This picture came from my digital camera. Notice that my black jacket is way too dark..

Using what the Gimp calls the Dodge or Burn tool, I lightened up the jacket area to bring out the detail.

Did you notice that I was a little sloppy? I accidentally ran over the left lapel of my shirt, too. I could easily fix that if it really bothered me.

The Gimp supports Plugins that can help you quickly do common tasks like removing red-eye.

What else can you do with the Gimp? I've used it to make animated banners and for helping my daughter decide where to hang pictures.

Give it a try. Did I mention that it is FREE?

Some of you may need to spend money on heavy duty graphics editors. Most of us can do just fine with the Gimp.

I'll be doing a basic demo of the Gimp at the October 27th (2008) Camera Club Meeting.