Photoshop Withdrawal as I Gimp along

Part of this blogs mission statement says that it and its accompanying website will be built using free, and preferably open source tools.  One of the single most important components of building a site and to an extent a blog is to be able to manipulate your images.  Like many others I've long used Adobe Photoshop, however since this conflicts with my mission statement I will not be using in on this blog or the site I'll be building.  To take over the role of Photoshop I have been exploring Gimp.  Gimp is an open source image manipulation program that has many similarities to Photoshop.  It has layers and most of the tool suite that is available in Photoshop.  However some of its terminology is different for example instead of the magnetic lasso of Photoshop, Gimp calls theirs the scissor select tool.  Also Gimp functions differently than Photoshop and on some levels is less intuitive.  The most annoying part is that certain basic features that are available in Photoshop such as drawing an arrow requires finding, downloading, and installing an extension.  The learning curve has been slowing how quickly I am able to edit images where something might have taken me five minutes in Photoshop (or less) I now sometimes have o spend half an hour figuring out how to do a comparable action in Gimp.  So I've been going though a serious Photoshop withdrawal, that said some of the features in gimp I have taken a liking to after I've figured out how to utilize them it just a matter of spending time with the program until I've become relatively proficient with it.  I do have to say that for someone who struggles with technical aspects of computing might struggle installing extensions in Gimp this is because it has no wizard to put the extensions in the correct location this is left up to the end-user.  I will most likely look into other image manipulation programs at a latter date as well.