I came across an article on TechCrunch about Adobe’s release of free, ad supported online version of Photoshop in six months. A quote from TechCrunch:
One of the risks of trying to find a niche to build a startup is that the big guys can land on your face at any time. That’s why all of these startups are going to be in serious trouble when Adobe releases
a free, ad supported online version of Photoshop
in six months.
Adobe Photoshop has it’s place in the professional photo editing world. But, its not in mine when the full version costs $650.00. For an amateur photographer as me, the free tools like Picasa does the trick most often. But, if you are a serious photographer and use the advanced features provided by Photoshop, maybe it is time to save some of that money maybe for one of those sweet IS (image stabilization) lens you have been wanting for your camera!
GIMP is just amazing and it is FREE! It has a lot of the advanced features you would find in PhotoShop. Here is an excerpt from their About page:
GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. The terms of usage and rules about copying are clearly listed in the GNU General Public License.
It is written and developed on Unix platforms but the it runs on both Windows and Mac OS X.
Download it from here: http://gimp.org/downloads/ 
I am a big fan of open source software and I will share in future posts more of the free, open source software that I have come to use instead of the paid proprietary software! Hope you enjoy it too..
Sorry Mastercard, but I couldn’t resist doing that in the title!!
GIMP is very good software. But now Adobe release Adobe Photoshop CS3 that more powerfull than GIMP, but expensive.
We have a photo studio in our town and Adobe Photoshop is our primary software for photo editing. .