The newest installment of Photoshop is now available, but the price tag is probably out of reach for the average consumer. While Adobe undoubtedly delivers incredibly reliable and versatile products--not to mention user-friendly--there are free alternatives that can get the job done without breaking the bank. Take Gimp, for instance. This open source image retouching and graphics editing tool can emulate most of Photoshop's features at absolutely no cost to you. It recently became available for the Mac OS X operating system and now we're here to help you get acquainted.

The thing with open source applications is that, because they have so many developers coding away at them at once, they can be confusing at times. We've compiled a small selection of tutorials to give you a basic introduction of all the essential tools in Gimp--and show you what this free application can really do.

Before you get started, you can download Gimp here.

Clone Yourself

Oh, how we wish we could be in two places at once! Fortunately, photography and the magic of image editing programs can aid in producing this kind of trickery to get your friends believing that not only were you there, but you were here as well, and over there, and maybe even over there. For this tutorial, you'll need a tripod, as taking your photos from the exact same angle and location will make creating this facade a pain-free process.

1. Place your tripod, with camera attached, in an area where you can be seen and nothing will fly in front of a camera--like your extremely hyperactive kitty. Take a couple of photos of yourself in different areas of the scene with your camera's self timer. Then, upload them to your hard drive and open them as layers (Ctrl + Alt + O) in Gimp.

2. Hide the first layer of the photo set by clicking on the eye next to it in the layers dialog window.

3. Then, take the Scissors Select Tool (which is located in the tool box on the left-hand side of the screen) to select the person in the second layer. You can also use the Free Select Tool to keep the selection close to the main subject in your photo.


4. If you need more room around the subject, increase your selection by going to Select > Grow. Enter in any size pixels you wish to capture in you're selection. Make the first layer visible by click on the eye icon next to it, but do not deselect the other layer's selection. You should have something that looks like the screenshot.



5. Right click on the Background photo and select Add Layer Mask, then choose White at full opacity. You will then see that there is another white layer tacked on in the Layers dialog box.

6. Right click on the layer mask and then select the Bucket Fill Tool from the toolbox on the left-hand side of the screen, making sure that the foreground color is on the default settings (black and white) and the selection of the other layer is still selected (as exhibited in the screenshot below).



With the Layer Mask selected, click with the Bucket Fill tool inside your selection from the first layer ON the Background layer. and the thumbnail in the Layers dialog box will show you that your selection has been blacked out.



Click the eye next to the layer that you hid. Your twin in the bottom layer should now become visible.

7. It's now safe to let go of the selection. However, there might be some sharp color changes around the photo that you copied. Fix this by blurring the layer mask a bit under Filter > Blur > Gaussian and selecting the radius to something less than how much we grew the selection; anywhere between 20 and 25 pixels.



Right click on the layers to flatten your image, then export and save.

Clone Wars