free editing programs

I arrive for my night shift and mom is up working on photo books for christmas.  Darn, I want to be playing with her pictures too, she takes very good ones.  She has photoshop but I don't think she uses it.  I'd love to have time to teach her some stuff on it, but when I get there she goes to bed, and I go upstairs.

She does use a program, I think it's the one that came with her camera.  Usually those are very basic.  I remember way back in my new to computer days, I bought a cute little jam cam that took smaller pics than most phones today.  I was in heaven though.  I took very bad pictures, besides it being a pretty dismal camera.  I went to the library and went to staples and ended up buying a little program called microsoft picture it!  (the exclamation point was theirs).  Does anyone else remember that program?  I still have it installed on this machine, and still have the disc.  I loved that program!  I got fairly good at editing with it, and then it was really hard to switch over to photoshop elements.   I do have to admit I can do much much more with the photoshop products.

I downloaded gimp this month to take a look at it.  It seemed very similar to photoshop, but just different enough where  I know I'd have to play a while to get good at it.  Since I'm just getting to where I really know what all my tools do and when to use one and not the other, I don't think I'm up for major exploration with other software right now.  Unless it were a full version of the latest photoshop.  But I do have some friends that are just starting, so I've been looking for free editing software for them.  I found an article for 20 free programs for photoshop alternatives.  If you don't have a photoshop program, you might want to check some of these out, because that program you got with your camera really is not doing much.