The GIMP is a software package that everyone who does light photo editing at home should have, and more than a few photo retouching, image composition and image authoring professionals could make good use of. Seriously: there is very little that you might want to do in a high-priced program like Photoshop that you cannot do perfectly well in The GIMP, and the controls are intuitive and easy to learn.
Enhance images, adjust color saturation, crop, alter the size or pixel count, cut and paste into an image collage — there is even a menu of esoteric filters allowing you to convert color images into black and white, simulate brush strokes for various different painting styles, apply a drop shadow, or create the appearance of 3-D distortions. It is really a professional-grade package, but, being produced by the GNU Image Manipulation Project (GIMP — yes, I know, it's a terrible name, but don't let that prejudice you against the product!) it is available FOR FREE, and which is cross-platform compatible, meaning it will run on Windows, Mac or Linux operating systems.
Although as of this writing Amazon is listing it as "Currently unavailable", do not despair. It is easy to simply go to The GIMP website and download it from there: [...]
Gregndebra 
D. Edward Farrar