Re: I found the learning curve so steep as to be nearly vertical
To be fair, you'd find the same with Photoshop, except that you'd be paying $60 a month to be bemused. Professional editing software (for tis wot The GIMP and PS is be) is very powerful and complex.
As such, it takes some time to learn and a lot of time to master. PS has a few tools to "get you started", but it's still a fair old learning curve if you want to get the most out of it.
To be honest, if your needs are less intense, you could do worse than Paint.Net for touching up, and canon's excellent little Digital Photo Professional (free if you have a Canon product - I imagine Nikon & Sony will do something similar). Shoot in RAW, make wonderfully creative and beautiful edits in DPP, output as a jpeg and crop/rotate/oversaturate in Paint.net.
After a while, you'll get used to workflows and the sort of edits you regularly make, and you'll be in a better position to move up to the GIMP and maybe Raw Therapee.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
