While we’re all busy hightailing it into the digital age, photographers everywhere are also rediscovering the charming aesthetics of the analog days gone by.

Lomography--or casual, snapshot photography using Lomo cameras made in Russia--is getting hot (yes really--check out lomography.com for more). But having to purchase a separate camera for the sole purpose of taking slightly out-of-focus, high-contrast photos seems a little drastic. So if you already own either an affordable point-and-shoot or a fancy DSLR and have access to Photoshop, why not just apply a few simple filters to give that trendy look to your digital photos?

The newest installment of Photoshop is now available, but the price tag is probably not too attractive to the average consumer. Though Adobe undoubtedly delivers incredibly reliable and versatile products--not to mention user-friendly--there are free alternatives that can get the job done as much as their pricey counterparts. 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.