1VIPS's a free image processing system. It aims to be about half way between 2Excel and Photoshop. It's obviously much smaller than these two, but it's 3not a toy either (about 200k lines of code). It's very bad at photo 4retouching, but it's great (much better than programs like Photoshop, I 5think) at all the other things you use photoshop for. It's particularly 6good with large images (ie. images larger than the amount of RAM in your 7machine), and for working with colour. 8