On startup, you are dumped straight into the editing interface, and your choices are twofold: learn to swim (i.e. Normally, when you boot up a program for the first time, you might expect a little welcome dialogue, or a quick tutorial to spin you through the basics. Let’s not dance around this – GIMP is not an easy piece of software to learn.

While most users won’t have enough coding knowledge to do that, it means that GIMP is highly modular, and there’s a huge community out there offering downloadable plugins and other upgrades to add features and functions. This means that its code is freely available, and anyone with a mind to can tinker with it to customise the way it works. Completely free to download, with no hidden charges or subscriptions. Most people in the creative world know two things about GIMP – first, as mentioned, it’s free.

The GIMP name has its share of detractors, and there have been calls to change it, but the makers have made it clear they're sticking with it. one that refers to itself, which is the sort of thing that programmers find funny. To forestall your next question, 'GNU' refers to a collection of free software packages, and its letters stand for 'GNU's not UNIX'. First things first, for those who don't know: GIMP is an acronym that stands for 'GNU image manipulation program'.

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