An online business needs a LOT of graphics… ebook covers, banners, images for your blog, just to name a few.
Many of you will most likely outsource your graphics to sites like Fiverr or Elance. But many times there are just little changes you need to make to images.
Like today… I needed to modify a few banners, so I did it myself! I also created an ebook cover because I wasn’t happy with the last one I got outsourced, buy hey, that’s another story lol.
When you talk about image editing software, most people will immediately think of Photoshop. That is a great product but it is way too expensive for most people.
The graphics software that I like to use is called GIMP. GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program and you can download it and use it absolutely free for either personal or commercial use.
It’s perfect for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.
The GIMP website goes on to say; “It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.
“GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.”
I’ve been using GIMP for several years now and it keeps amazing me on what it can do. Every time I need to do something that I don’t know how, I hop onto Youtube and find a video tutorial on how to do it.
Today I wanted some metallic text effects for an ecover I was creating. It did take a while but I finally learnt how to do it. Next time hopefully it won’t take me as long!
If you’re looking for a great image editor and don’t want to fork out the cash for Photoshop, I highly recommend GIMP. And as most GIMP users will tell you, there’s nothing that can’t be done with it.
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