GIMP

A PhotoShop? clone.  Its layout and general means of operation (select area, apply filter, layers) is almost identical to a slightly older version of PhotoShop?.  Many people, of course, consider this a very good thing.  It is heavily organised around plugins.  (I believe, in fact, that the Gnome UI toolkit evolved from it, rather than the other way around)  There is a good selection of plugins available.  Being an open source project, it has, of course, forked.  There are versions which allow 16 bits per channel (IEEE FloatingPoint?, four channels) and another version which is set up to be more use for movies than for single images.  These may be of use to you.  One notable omission from this project is GIF support, due to problems with patents.  These patents have now expired, and anyway those of us in Europe could legally download a plugin for it.

One other notable problem is support for GraphicsTablets.  Whilst it does have support, it is flaky excpet for a few very specific models.  The rest it treats as mice, if you are lucky.  It expects precisely four axis of freedom, and doesn't like pens with less.

In all, a very impressive piece of image editing software.  Though I prefer PaintShopPro for everything except exporting to png.  --Vitenka

It is? I found it far less intuitive than I found PhotoShop? (and my opinions on that piece of... software should be clear). However, I also found it much easier to use than PhotoShop?, after a bit of fiddling. It lacks a number of small things I find very useful in PSP, or if it doesn't lack them, then they're hard to find. PSP also has a different approach to foreground and background colours that I like very much and haven't found anywhere else. JOOI, what's wrong with PSP's exporting to png? I've only ever exported to gif - SunKitten

Well, you have to like the PhotoShop? way of doing things to like GIMP at all.  It may get nicer with fiddling - as I said, it's very modifyable - but it seems pointless to me to modify it to be identical to PaintShopPro 5 when I coiuld just use that directly ;)  Even so - it's power is impressive and for some tasks (Photo manipulation, mainly) second only to PhotoShop?.  Having two colours available on the mouse is, indeed, wonderful though.  Should be pluginnable to gimp, but I've not heard of it.  As for png export from psp - it's ok but not wonderful is all.  It tends to make very large files, or if you set hih compression extremely broken up files.  It also handles transparency in a somewhat random fashion.  Gimp just seems to have a better export.  Personally I use things like tiff2png instead anyway.  --Vitenka (And have given up and gone to jpeg now)