GIMP Photo Editing: A Practical Guide for Beginners

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is the most capable free photo editor available. It handles everything from basic crops to multi-layer compositing, runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux, and costs exactly nothing — forever. No trial periods, no feature gates, no subscriptions.

The current stable release is GIMP 2.10.38 , licensed under GPLv3 — genuine free and open-source software. You can inspect the source code, modify it, and distribute your changes. GIMP 3.0 is in active development and will bring a modernized interface with GTK 3 support, but 2.10.38 is what you should install today.

This guide covers the photo editing tasks you will actually use: cropping, resizing, color correction, background removal, sharpening, and exporting for web.…