I began seriously planning this change last school year, when I realized how fully the current feature sets of free software programs could satisfy the technical needs of the students in my classes. I decided that the time had come to teach our undergraduate art students about free software programs such as the GIMP, Scribus, and Quanta Plus, instead of proprietary programs such as Photoshop, QuarkXpress, and Dreamweaver.

you can use it for simple things like creating seamless, tileable textures, but you can also have it remove any object from a picture and automatically replace it with a synthetic background, with impressively professional-looking results.