If you are looking to get more sophisticated in manipulating and creating images, here are two free programs that can rival Adobe's Photoshop and Illustrator, but without the high costs.

The open source community has put such powerful image editors in your reach with the separate creations of GIMP and Inkscape.

Both programs, which are ready to use, are evolving as they are improved by multiple collaborators and released under the GNU free license system.

All this means is you can use the software any way you like, to use, to share, and to modify.

GIMP is a raster graphic editor, in the same category as Photoshop. In contrast to raster (bitmap) graphics editors such as Photoshop, Inkscape stores its graphics in a vector format, such as used by Illustrator.

You need both types, depending on what you want to do, if you want to produce serious graphics. Contrast that to bitmap or raster graphics are always bound to a specific resolution and stores an image as a grid of pixels.

Vector graphics is a resolution-independent description of the actual shapes and objects in the image. You can enlarge or reduce a vector graphic in size and not lose resolution.

Enlarging a raster graphic reduces its sharpness and quality. Raster graphics are usually better for manipulating photographs while vector graphics are more suitable for designs and images with text.

I would advise using the two programs only if you want to do some semi professional production work on graphics. Getting complicated with your images is fun, but ultimately takes a long time.

For basic image work, I use another free program, IrfanView (www.irfanview.com), one of the best free programs available through the open source community.

To step up to a more complicated level, and use more image manipulation tools, try GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program). It can be used to process digital graphics and photographs. You can create graphics and logos, resizing and crop, change colours, get rid of features, and combine images.

Since it is a work in progress it is more limited than Photoshop, which is considered the Mercedes-Benz among graphic artists. But expect to pay about $650 for the privilege.

GIMP currently does not have support for the Pantone colour matching system, support for Adobe Photoshop plugins, and only works fully with RGB and greyscale images. However partial CMYK support is available with a separate plug-in.

GIMP does come with a gradient editor, blend tool, and layers and channel controls.

There is a comparison table between GIMP and other image editors at www.gimp.org.

The site distributes the source code to the GIMP. This is the complicated way to install the program on your computer.

Visit the site for information, the user manual and the directions to useful plug in modules. Then download an executable installer that puts the program on without fuss at http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net.

Note that if this is the first time you're installing GIMP, you will also need to first install a package required to run GIMP on Windows 2000 and newer. A separate package exists for older versions of Windows.

In contrast to GIMP, Inkscape's main role in your editing arsenal is as a drawing tool. Inkscape (www.inkscape.org) uses what is called a "rasterization" formula to determine how to render each line and curve you make at any resolution or zoom level.

"In many projects, you would need to use both Inkscape and a bitmap editor (such as GIMP), for example, to add bitmap effects to an image exported from Inkscape," the creators say on the site.

Inkscape supports layers, bitmap tracing, text-on-path, flowed text, direct XML editing, and more. It imports formats such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and others and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats. See the site for more information.

Inkscape competes with Illustrator, which costs $500.

I have used both Illustrator and Photoshop. For the small amount of testing time I had with both GIMP and Inkscape, I can say they seem like fine programs. I am looking forward to testing them fully over the next few months. I hope you can put them to good use as well.

Contact Ahmed at elamin.ahmed@gmail.com.