Another Open Source and Free to use web design tool – this time we look at GIMP. Graphical Image Manipulation Program. If you can’t afford Photoshop CS5 I would normally recommend Photoshop Elements which is around 70 dollars. If you want to go into the free zone, GIMP is one of the top choices. I had it installed on my laptop right now. Gimp takes a while to learn how to use. Its got almost all the same tools that PS has, but they work a little differently. The time spent learning how to use GIMP is all on the interface.
One of the places I got stuck was during the “save as” phase. The default save will make a huge file like Photoshop does with the .psd files. To save an optimized .jpg you have to go through the steps for “save as” then you manually tag the .jpg at the end of the filename. Whoa. OK well it works so once you know how to do it there is no problem really. It took me about 20 minutes to get that one.
Here is the GIMP Download page:
I found a couple resources to help cut that learning curve down to – say about 1 hour. Check out this video tutorial site for GIMP:
http://www.designyourownweb.com/gimp-tutorial.htm
There are also a couple good ones on YouTube:
This tutorial has almost 500,000 views… check it out.
