A Few Simple GIMP Questions

I saw in a magazine an unretouched photo of a woman's face on one side with a zit, and a little hint of rosacea (red spots where capillary arteries have expanded close to the surface). On the other side, the skin was free from wrinkles, zits, and rosacea, and it looked GOOD! Can Gimp do that?

Can Gimp remove chromatic aberrations, found in the cheaper zoom lenses' photos?

Can Gimp lighten up vignetting?

Can Gimp straighten distortion from fisheye effect?

If so, we wants it, me precious!

Google "Gimp Skin Retouching" and you'll get 150,000+ hits. Just taking a quick look at the results I spotted this one which seems to address your question.

http://www.youtube.com​/watch?v=dk87KgWGRpg

I used GIMP a bit, and was always happy with what it could do, but I never did any skin retouching so I can speak to that from experience. However, there is a large, loyal and very supportive worldwide user community that provides a lot of information on numerous sites. You can't go wrong by giving it a try. It's a great way to learn a lot of the basics if you don't want to spring for Photoshop right now.

OK. Will do. Right now, I have software from 1998. Time to upgrade, doncha think?

Besides, (*)FREE(*) How could I go wrong?

One last question. Does the file have to be RAW, or can Gimp do that with JPEG?

buffumjr wrote in post #16078106
... One last question. Does the file have to be RAW, or can Gimp do that with JPEG?

Gimp itself ('out of the box') cannot read any RAW formats. You need something else for that. One example is ufraw, which works as a Gimp plug-in. With it installed, you can open a RAW file from inside Gimp, and a ufraw window opens with the file so you can do you adjustments and stuff. When you are done, ufraw closes and the result loads into Gimp.

Gimp can work with many other file formats including JPEG, but has its own native format (XCF), which you should use when working with layers. Gimp can also import and export Photoshop PSD files, but I've never tried that.

For skin re-touching I use the Wavelet Decompose plug-in in Gimp - works great.

Not sure about the other stuff, I do that in the raw processor, but i don't think it can do lens corrections. There may be a plug-in though.

I'd get LR for the lens corrections and raw conversion and use gimp for local edits. If you shoot .jpeg, don't Canon cameras do lens corrections if you want?

Otherwise, for 'free' use DPP for the raw conversion - that should do all the lens corrections except fish-eye.