GIMP

I've been using GIMP for years and am very happy with it, it can edit and analyze photos, create pixel art, apply effects, convert formats, there is a lot of useful plugins as well. It has some minor issues, such as lower performance with some effects, inability of plugins to modify the program itself which makes it lack some advanced features, such as a tiling canvas... but there are workarounds for most of these. I suppose the active community will make the program even better in the future. Thank you for this great editor.

At first, GIMP doesn't seem all that user-friendly - especially to someone who is unfamiliar with image manipulation software in general. However, there are a number of tutorials available (which are free and pretty easy to find), and even a compete novice can get the basics down pretty easily. As an educator I have attempted to introduce students to this software, and have found that for middle school students it can be used relatively easily with some well-structured guidance and some templates. I have found that students in seventh grade and higher catch on quickly after being introduced to the application and many find it very enjoyable. GIMP is undoubtedly a powerful piece of software that is very useful in K-12 schools, and there's certainly nothing out there that can beat the price.

I have used the GIMP in the past for studying and editing images such as for resizing, clipping, rotation, color curves, hue, saturation, noise reduction, sharpening, format conversion, studying the histogram, adding text, etc. It is true, among the FOSS Software I have used GIMP stands out as a tool packed with features. It used to be slow to startup loading all the data options and the plugins, but in the latest version it seems to be slow only the first time around. The GIMP and its source code are available to download and install on Windows, Linux and Mac OS.

Create, edit, and manipulate images, text, and graphics with this high quality editor. It is easy-to-use and offers similar features to the high-cost competitor software.

I am not a super user of photoshop but occasionally need to resize or recolor images, convert images to .png files, create esignature images, and make backgrounds of images transparent. So far, GIMP has worked exactly as I needed it to. It looks to have all the functionality that is available in photoshop from what I can tell by looking through the menus. I actually find the icons to be more intuitive than Photoshop. I hesitate to give GIMP five stars only because I just recently started using it, so there may be issues I have yet to discover, or it could turn out to be perfect.