Photo editing woes?

Greetings! I am in a cheery mood, despite a meeting earlier this afternoon with my principal who told me that I should not count on getting Photoshop software on my computers for my digital darkroom class.

This digital darkroom course will be for one semester and I will have three sections a day x 28 students. That sounds like a lot of students with nothing to do.

Thankfully, there are people out there who do not want to make a profit off of everything they do, and after some searching I cam across some FREE software that looks to be very powerful - coming very close to what I do with Photoshop CS3, and did I mention it is free?

The software is called GIMP. It's an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It runs on both PC and Mac, as well as (I think) Linux etc. If you are looking at wanting to have some control over the images, and you have no budget, I would say give this a try.

It has tools that Photoshop has - like cloning, quick selection, layers, unsharp mask, levels, curves, and so much more.

I did mention that it is free, didn't I?

Also, for those of you that like to shoot with high quality, there is a second piece of software called UFRaw that can open raw files (though I am not sure how current of Nikon cameras they support - my D200 and D80 files open fine). And then you can import the image directly into GIMP, or you can save the file as a JPEG with basic exposure corrections and color balance changes.

Even though it is free, if you feel guilty about using somehting this cool for nothing, or you feel generous, they do take donations . . .

Jeff Jones

Gallup, New Mexico