Photoshop look-alike

[bbrafman]

Will you guys be introducing a photoshop look alike or does that already exist. Please tell me where to find a free, and very good photo editing software.

Barbara

[acknak]

Have you read the Forum Survival Guide?
What OS are you using?

There are many free (of cost), and even a few that are free (as in freedom), image editing applications, but obviously which to recommend depends a lot on what OS you're using it on.

OOo can already do some basic transformations on an image (brightness, contrast, color-shifting, etc), but there are no plans to include an image editor in OOo.

[keme]

The GNU Image Manipulation Program is at least a Photoshop "workalike", similar in functionality and complexity. Official builds are for Linux only, but it's easy to find third party builds for Windows and Mac-OSX. If I'm not mistaken, you'll find it for any other OS platform as well...
I do not consider myself an advanced user, but FWIW, while using the GIMP I've never missed Photoshop.

[EdH]

The [url=http://www.gimp.org/]Official builds are for Linux only, but it's easy to find third party builds for Windows and Mac-OSX.

Windows versions have actually been official since 2.0 but are listed on a different SF project.

GIMP is very good but is not a PS clone, a lot of people forget this. There is a project called Gimpshop which aims to make GIMP look like PS. I personally would never use PS having had to fix so many bloated compressed files made in it. For such an expensive product it has no clue how to produce JPEG files.

[keme]

Windows versions have actually been official since 2.0 but are listed on a different SF project.

Quote from the GIMP download page:
The GIMP team doesn't officially provide any Windows binaries. You can, however, install GIMP easily using the Windows installers by Jernej Simončič.

[AndrewZ]

I've installed those Windows GIMP binaries many times on many systems. They work fine.

[Caracalla]

There's a version of the GIMP that is supposed to closely resemble phtoshop, called Gimpshop. I've never worked intesively with either so i cannot say how close the resemblance is. Either way, you can find it here. You have to scroll down a bit for the Windows verion.

[RGB]

Just a comment (or warning...) about the Gimp.
If you are happy editing jpg images (for example, the digital photos from your compact camera), gimp is just perfect. BUT if you need something more professional, like 16 or 32 bits per colour channel (jpegs have only 8 bits per colour channel) or to work on several different colour spaces, gimp is not for you... yet. 32 bits per colour channel is in the to-do list for the Gimp project, but it is not yet implemented.
Free programs that support up to 32 bits per colour channel are:
CinePaint (an early fork of the Gimp project): it is used on the cinema industry. I think versions for Windows and Mac are available.
Krita: This amazing program is part of the koffice suite. koffice version 2 will be available for Windows and Mac.
For small (and not so small) works, imageJ.
But again, if you only need to edit the last birthday photos, the Gimp is just perfect.

[AndrewZ]

Caracalla : GIMP Shop has not been updated in two years, so I wouldn't recommend it.

RGB: GIMP 2.5 has implemented GEGL to provide 32-bit color depth. It's not in the final release stage yet, but it is implemented.