One of the themes of this site has always been to focus on low cost (or free) game development technologies. As a result, you will tend to find content here tends to focus more on products like Blender or Wings instead of 3D Studio Max or Photoshop. I will of course share any game development related news regardless to price tag, but I tended to focus on the tools available to the most people, especially when it comes to tutorials. As a result, one product certainly comes to the front of the pack, GIMP. While Paint.NET is nice, the GIMP is really the only affordable (free) product that comes close to feature parity with Photoshop.
When I first started this site, I looked at compiling a list of resources for getting started with the GIMP and noticed well… it was a bit of a wasteland. There were a couple books, mostly far out dated at this point. Today on Safari Books, this title(Safari link), The Artist’s Guide to GIMP(Amazon link) was just added, although it was published a few months back. So I decided to take a look at how well the GIMP world is represented in books since I last looked a couple years ago. The answer is, surprisingly well. So what follows is a list of books about GIMP, in chronological order of release date:
| Book Title | Publish Year | Safari Link | |
| The Book of GIMP | 2013 | Link |  |
| The Artists Guide to GIMP | 2012 | Link |  |
| GIMP For Absolute Beginners | 2012 | Link |  |
| GIMP 2.6 for Photographers | 2011 | Link |  |
| GIMP 2.6 Cookbook | 2011 | Link |  |
| GIMP Bible | 2010 | Link |  |
| Beginning Digital Image Processing using Free Tools | 2010 |  |
There are more books of course, but these are the ones released in the last 2 years. Anything much older would be rather out of date at this point.
I have to admit, the body of work available for GIMP is vastly improved, as has the GIMP in general. If you haven’t checked it out in a couple years, you really should. The UI is a lot nicer now, although it still has a ways to go.