If you’re like me, you may use a legal version of Photoshop at work. My experience with Photoshop (on Windows) has been quite good over the years and once you are familiar with a professional tool like that, you don’t want to settle for anything less when you have some small project of your own to do at home. You may have been lucky enough to be in a position to bring a copy of this image processing powerhouse home, but if not, Photoshop may be a $700 outlay you may not be able to justify. Well, fear not! There is a viable (and legally free) alternative.



Nothing is ever really free, and this is no exception. You’ll pay with time spent figuring out how to get the “free” program installed, and then you’ll pay again in time learning how to use it. As a linux user for many years, I played around with The Gimp on and off. I was never in a position to completely abandon my Windows environment (dual booting was always an option), so I never really gave The Gimp too much of a real try out. When it was time top replace the old Win/tel machine, I opted for an Apple iBook which pretty much put the kabosh on any option for bringing home software from work. I was lucky and found some kind soul who “lent” me a copy o f Photoshop 5 for OS 9, but frankly working in OS 9 was about as painful to me as learning the Gimp would have been, and it took forever to load. I was hoping to find something that was like Photoshop that either ran natively in OS X or in X11 (X Windows) which loads a lot faster than OS 9.




I wanted to use Fink to install a Gimp package but I was stymied when my first attempts failed due to some sort of error in the configure file. I’ll admit I didn’t spend a lot of time trying to get it to work, but after 2 hours of downloading and compiling and watching the arcane code speed by in Fink’s tiny window, I was eager to find something easier. MacGimp looked promising, but I didn’t like the fact that if I installed it, I might have problems later on if I installed any X11 programs using Fink as some usenet posts suggested. I found lots of useful utilities that did work using Fink including the netpbm packages, but I almost gave up on getting the Gimp to compile. I eventually succeeded by choosing “selfupdate” in Fink Commander when I saw a newer version (1.2.5-1) of the Gimp take the place of the earlier version (1.2.4-11) in the data table and I realized maybe the bug had been fixed. It worked! Although The Gimp doesn’t run natively in OS X either, its far faster to load X11 and choose gimp than to wait for OS 9 to load, wait for Photoshop 5 (what a slow pig) and deal with that older Mac OS’s idiosyncracies.




You can get a copy of the Gimp for Windows but I’ll admit I have not tried it. Although we still have a PC in the house, its in Linux when I’m around anyway.