Gimp my pic

Photo: GIMP

Have you noticed anything on my recent photographs in this blog? Yes, they’ve been Gimped!

GIMP or GNU Image Manipulation Program is software that’s freely distributed in the web. It can be used in photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. (Source: http://www.gimp.org/)

I first came across GIMP a few years ago when I bought a Dell Mini 9 Linux version. It was the in-built image editing program of the netbook. However, I hardly used it for two reasons: first, I don’t feel the need to and second, it was difficult to understand.

I became interested with Gimp again because of my desire to watermark my photographs. These days I fancy myself as a ‘serious’ beginner photographer. Serious enough that I want to put my mark on my photographs!

I've scoured the internet for tutorials on creating watermarks for my photos. Then I came across Michael Scott’s blog, Scott Photographics. His post ‘How to make a simple watermark in GIMP’ has been most helpful to me. It was written in simple terms that were enough for my simple brain to comprehend.

What convinced me more to download Gimp was the review I read from the Photography for beginners magazine. In its maiden issue, the magazine made a rundown of five of the most suitable image-editing programs for beginners and those on a budget:

• Corel Painter 12
• GIMP
• Adobe Photoshop Elements 9
• iPhoto
• Google Picasa

Photography for beginners magazine gave GIMP a five star rating and awarded it the Editor’s Choice Award. The magazine described GIMP as:

... a free image-building program. It is primarily employed as an image retouching and editing tool and is freely available online for most operating systems. As it’s a freeware program there is also a large amount of online support – as well as frequent updates – which means users will be able to build up their skills quite easily.

I downloaded GIMP 2.6 which I now used primarily for image retouching and watermarking. Scott Photographics also has other GIMP tutorials that I’ve read and tried (or will try) like:

• How to Fake a Tilt-Shift Miniature Photograph in GIMP
• How to make a photograph Lomographic in GIMP
• How to make an ‘Obama’ HOPE Poster in GIMP
• Zoom Blur Effect in GIMP – GIMP Tutorial

Of the above tutorials, I’ve tried the Lomographic effect on a couple of my photographs. You can find it in Flickr here and here.

So, what about you? What type of image-editing programs do you use for your photographs?