Don't have enough money for the Photo? Get the GIMP-Shop instead.

Many of us swear and die by the wonders of Adobe's Photoshop. It's an awesome application for what it does, despite some shortcomings here and there. It has been the de facto standard in the graphic industry for ages, and it will most likely remain that way for ages to come.

Having said all of that, Photoshop costs a generous amount of cash. Truth be told, many people (ahem..) tend to pirate the freaking thing with each new release. Sure we may all have to end up moving to Sealand and talk like pirates in the process, but we do it nevertheless. Why? Because Photoshop is that good, and as I said, it is used everywhere.

But what choices do you have if you don't want to end up living in a platform out the coast of England? Why open-source of course, thus the GIMP is brought into the picture.

The GNU Image Manipulation Program, or GIMP, is a raster graphics editor application with some support for vector graphics. The project was started in 1995 by Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis and is now maintained by a group of volunteers; licensed under the GNU General Public License, GIMP is free software. The latest version of GIMP is 2.2.13, released on August 25, 2006

As told by the Wikipedia entry here. So that's all fine and dandy, except it doesn't really work like Photoshop, the menus are all wrong! Don't worry my pirate friend in rehab, that's why we have GIMPshop.

GIMPshop is a modified version of the GIMP intended to mimic that look and feel of our beloved expensive Photoshop counterpart. It was originally created for OSX (of course), but now you can find ports for Windows, Linux, and even Solaris. Not to mention the OSX version is nowadays a Universal Binary. Hell, these guys are even in better shape than Adobe with the Intel Mac support ;).

As you can see, for a free open-source alternative the GIMP (or GIMPshop) truly makes a worthy contender. Sure it may not have all of Adobe's Photoshop features. It may not look or feel 100% like Photoshop. But for the average Joe, it does all you ever wanted and then more. So if you don't want to feel as much of a pirate , give the GIMP a try. Argghhhhh you won't be disappointed matey!