You Don’t Have to Be Rich to Own Great Software

by Becky

Stick a free badge on it and you’ve piqued my interest. Like most people I love quality free stuff, but unfortunately most free stuff bites the big one. By now we’re so used to thinking that free automatically means that they couldn’t sell it that we’re unwilling to give free or open source software a chance. Fortunately for those of us who don’t want to spend the cash on expensive programs the online world of open source and freeware means that we can snag some quality apps to do all the things that pay-to-play programs do. There are so many great alternatives to paid software and I wish I could name them all, this months installment of the multi-part series on free alternatives focuses on graphics software. From Adobe to Inkscape I’m downloading and installing free programs in a bid to find you the best bang for your buck. Put away your wallet, there’s no need for cash today.

From Adobe to Inkscape I’m downloading and installing free programs in a bid to find you the best bang for your buck. Put away your wallet, there’s no need for cash today.

At a $1000 for the extended edition (the basic edition is only $649), Photoshop is a very pricey chunk of software and is more than what most of us need. Before you go to an illegal torrent site to download Photoshop take a second to stop and think about what you use it for. If all you need is something to resize images, remove Uncle Joey’s redeye and mock up a design for your blog then you probably won’t need all the features that Photoshop offers. Most of us don’t and unless you’re interested in becoming a professional designer Photoshop is just too much program for the average user. Even if you would rather go with the wallet friendly Corel Paint Shop Pro (a steal at $80) it, too, can be a bit much for those of us on a budget.

Raster Graphics Editors

I wish that I could test all the programs here, but unfortunately at the moment I only have access to Windows. If you have tried the other alternatives please consider taking a few minutes to send me a short review of them via email, I’d like to publish them at the end of this series (with full credit to you, of course.)

You’ve probably heard of The GIMP, but have you heard of the hacked up interface known as GIMPshop? GIMPshop tries to replicate Photoshop’s interface so that The GIMP actually makes sense. You have to wonder why The GIMP’s interface is so poorly set up , but if you take the time to dig past the bajillion or so windows that it requires you to have open (seriously, what is with that?) you’ll find that it’s quite a powerful program. It’s certainly more than enough to rival Photoshop for casual users. If you need some help getting started check out Help Developer’s list of 22 Great GIMP Tutorials and the follow-up 10 Fantastic GIMP Specific Tutorials.

If you need some help getting started check out Help Developer’s list of 22 Great GIMP Tutorials and the follow-up 10 Fantastic GIMP Specific Tutorials.

A word of warning, though for you tablet users: Wacom support, at least in Windows, is rather finicky. When I set up The GIMP and GIMPshop to use my older Wacom Graphire tablets, the eraser on the pen functioned as the pen tip and the pen tip didn’t function at all. In GIMPshop touching the pen tip (or eraser) to the tablet crashed the program. I did a bit of research and couldn’t find a solution to my problems (which seem to be happening amongst other tablet users), so if you’ve got a solution by all means send it to me and I’ll edit this to include it so that everyone can use The GIMP.

Paint.NET may not be as full-featured as The GIMP, but if you’re in the market for a nice simple image editor then I urge you to take a good look. I played around with it a bit before writing this and found it easy to use with its Photoshop-like interface. One feature that I especially liked were the semi-transparent tool boxes, in minimized mode it made using the whole canvas a lot easier. Unfortunately the most notable missing feature is the pen tool (called the path tool in The GIMP), but if you aren’t planning on doing anything but mocking up layouts and the aforementioned photo retouching then I don’t see any reason to not use it since the free vector program Inkscape fills that void quite nicely. The interface is familiar and comfortable and it uses many of the same keyboard shortcuts as Photoshop.

Active Pixels is an alternative to Paint.NET, though I would recommend Paint.NET over Active Pixels any day. I didn’t care for the interface nor did I care for the quality of the brush and pencil tools. It’s basically a step up from MSPaint, if for some reason you don’t care for the other programs I’ve suggested then this is an option.

Vector Graphics Editors

I don’t really use vector-based programs, so my opinion on these will be short (unfortunately, only one program is available for Windows). When I need a vector program I usually turn to Inkscape because it starts up quickly, I like the interface and it’s easy to use. Of course, so is Illustrator, but Inkscape is free!

Inkscape
Xara Xtreme (Linux)
Skencil (Linux, Unix)

I wish I could have tried Xara Xtreme, but it is available only for Linux and tentatively for Mac. The Linux version, however, is free and if you’re interested in testing the software on Mac then you may contact the developers.

Stay tuned for the next part about free alternatives to Adobe Dreamweaver and Microsoft Frontpage.

Becky is the owner of Babblative.com. Read more articles by Becky.