As I’ve mentioned many times before in this space, I’m a HUGE fan of free stuff. I’m an even bigger fan of getting something for free that you usually have to pay for.

(Note: I’m not talking about piracy or theft here…digital piracy is just as bad as real piracy, and you don’t even get to wear the cool eyepatch.)

Anyhow, in the interest of giving back I’ve decided to start a series of posts on Fridays about free stuff I’ve found. Most of the stuff will be related to communications or the church, since that’s what I’m most involved with.

They probably won’t be every Friday, but often enough that it will still be pretty regular.

Today I’ve decided to save you all $1000 dollars and introduce you to GIMP.

GIMP: The GNU Image Manipulation Program

What It Is: GIMP is an open-source alternative to Photoshop. While it is not as powerful or feature-laden as Photoshop, if you know what you are doing you can use to achieve many of the same things as you would with your $1000 copy of Photoshop.

Where You Can Get It: You can get GIMP for PC at http://www.gimp.org/ and for Mac at http://gimp.lisanet.de/Website/News/News.html.

What I Use It For: Pretty much 95% of all the graphic design work I do on GIMP. Every once in a while I have to use Photoshop, but generally I can get by with GIMP on the stuff I’m doing. All the graphics for this site were created on GIMP.

Awesomeness Scale: 9 out of 10. This is pretty amazing. Like I said before a copy of Photoshop CS5 costs about $1000, so you’re saving a TON of money here, and it’s a great tool for anyone who’s not a graphic designer by trade but still finds the need to do graphic design every once in a while.

Hope you all enjoyed the first installment of my Free Friday Posts!