Gimp is the oldest and most complete rival to Photoshop. It has dozens of filters such as whirl and pinch, oilify and many others. I use it as the front end to Xsane, my scanner program. But once I scan the image in I cannot resist resizing it, changing the dpi, cropping it and so on. Yesterday I picked up a digital shot to be used as the cover background for my latest e-book. After the usual manipulations I added a canvas texture, which blurred the details just enough to keep the photo from distracting from the title of the e-book.

The big drawback to Gimp is its current lack of the CMYK color model. The user can however “soft proof” the document with optional marking of out of gamut colors. there is a newer product, part of the KDE Koffice suite, called Krita. With much fewer features than Gimp Krita does have the vital (for print) CMYK capability. Possibly these two can be used in tandem. Stay tuned.

John C.

Self and small publishers need to be aware of the excellent software available free from the Open Source Community, including Context, Scribus, Gimp, Inkscape and Krita. This blog invites discussions of any and all such software products.