Meet Wilber

Have you met Wilber? If you have not, remember that Wilber is a good friend for a photographer.
For those of you who do not know, Wilber is the mascot for the GIMP, or the GNU image manipulation programme. Why does Wilber feature here? Because the GIMP is FOSS, and an excellent alternative for those of you who cannot shell out $ 999 for a copy of Adobe Photoshop. The GIMP is free, as are updates for the GIMP; but it is just as powerful as any of the proprietary software out there.

So, how exactly do you "learn" the GIMP? There is just one way to do so, and that is practice, practice and practice. If you already use Adobe Photoshop, but cannot afford the upgrade, congratulations, you'll find using the GIMP much easier than most others. The only thing you'll have to learn is to do things slightly different.

From the point of view of a blog, I find it difficult to introduce the GIMP in just one post. So, I thought I'd just provide some links that would help you start with the GIMP. Specific tutorials will follow.

The GIMP can be obtained at www.gimp.org. However, this website only releases source code for the GIMP, compiled versions are difficult to obtain for latest releases, especially if you are a Windows user. In that case, I would recommend heading over to Partha's Place to get a compiled version.

Tutorials for the GIMP can be obtained at www.gimp.org/tutorials. Alex Standiford too has excellent tutorials at gimpedblog.blogspot.com.

Meet Wilber

That's all folks!!! Now that you've met Wilber, remember that the next posts will involve using the GIMP to manipulate images.