Graphics & Photo editing the free way!

9 Feb, 2008 Money Savers, Reviews, Tech

I like to play around with graphic and photo editing and I would love to have a copy of Adobe Photoshop cs3 or Adobe Illustrator but my pocketbook tells me I can’t.

You can easily be spending over $1000 for those 2 programs alone. It may be a great investment for someone who does that kind of work for a living but not for someone like me who just dabbles and plays. I know there are pirated & cracked copies floating around cyberspace but I choose not to go that route. I am always looking for open source or free alternatives and want to share a couple here.

Vector Graphics Editor

Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. It’s open source and free so it won’t have all the features of the paid alternatives. It may also be a little difficult for the noob but it is a decent free alternative for graphic editors when you don’t have the $$’s to purchase Adobe Illustrator.

I’m not by any means a graphic artist or very familiar with the program but stumbled my way through it to be able to do some pretty cool stuff. It’s just like everything else, you just have to play around with all the features to get a feel for what it can do. I’m sure it can be quite frustrating for someone not familiar with these types of programs. If you get stuck on something they have help available on their website.

Inkscape is available for just about all operating systems (Linux, Windows, OSX) and can be downloaded free from their website.

Alternative Photo/Graphics Editor

Adobe Photoshop is probably the most widely known photo/graphics editor out there. You can purchase the cheaper version (Photoshop Elements) for under $100 and do quite a bit with it, but if you want the professional full featured version (Photoshop cs3) you are going to pay big $$’s. The price tag can scare a lot of people away who might have wanted to get started in graphics but didn’t have the money.

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a program similar to Photoshop but it is open source and free. It has alot of the same features and functionality as the high priced photo programs. What you sacrifice by getting it free is some of the user friendliness of say Photoshop, but I will take that over of paying +$500.

GIMP has been around for quite some time now so it’s getting better and easier to use. One of the things I like most about GIMP are the plugins. On the GIMP website you have all these people creating different plugins that are available for download making the program all the better. The website has loads of informations including tutorials and a forum where you can find help. GIMP is available for download on Windows, OSX, & Linux.

Download these programs and try them out, they may not be the best but they are FREE!