5 Free Photoshop Alternatives
Free photoshop?
Many users have heard about this famous program for professionals, Photoshop. Photoshop is not free and costs about $650. However, if you are not very complex tasks, you can use the free Photoshop analogs. In this post we will look at 5 programs in order of preference.
1. Active Pixels – free professional photo editor with large number of possiblities:
· Support near 110 graphic formats with large nomber of options (also multiframe ICO and animated GIF).
· Support Photoshop-compatible filters.
· Import/export layers in PSD-format (Photoshop).
· Simple and intuitive user interface.
· Multitasking.
· Filters support (now over 50 filters).
· Alpha-channel full support (transparency) for all formats.
· Layers support with 33 render modes.
· Over 10 algorithm of picture resize.
· Selection by magicwand, lasso.
· Different color correction functions.
· Auto color correction.
· Canvas rotate and transform.
· Fast work with big images (over 5 mPix).
· Brush, pencil, gradient, text and another instruments.
· Different additional functions – tile, crop.
· Color selector is more comfortable (HSB).
· Undo/redo without any limitations.
Active Pixels is the most large functionaly free photo editor, but it can work instable.
2. Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins. It features:
· Simple, intuitive, and innovative user interface
· Layers support
· Unlimited history
· Special Effects
· Powerful Tools (curve and shapes drawing)
Paint.NET requires Microsoft NET.framework. Paint NET work very stable, but require more powerful computer, because of framework.
3. Artweaver is a simple Freeware program for creative painting, i.e. Artweaver offers you all artistic effects which you need for your work.
You can create sketches from photos and experiment with a wide range of brushes. The brush simulation is thereby so realistic as possible.
Advantages of Artweaver
· Support of many different digital brushes e.g. chalk, charcoal, pencils…
· Standard image editing tools like gradient, crop, fill and selection tools.
· Transparency and Layers support.
· Effect filters like sharpen, blur, emboss and mosaic.
· Support for the most common file formats like AWD (Artweaver), BMP, GIF, JPEG, PCX, TGA, TIFF, PNG, and PSD.
· Pen Tablet support for a realistic feeling.
Artweavew is small and good, but have no possiblities, such as Active Pixels and Paint.NET
4. Gimp. Gimp works across several different platform (Linux, Mac, Windows, FreeBSD, Sun OpenSolaris) and is perhaps one of the best free alternatives out there so far. Gimp has a large user community, with great list of tutorials on the official sites. Possiblities are:
* Full suite of painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, Clone, etc.
* Tile based memory management so image size is limited only by available disk space
* Full alpha channel support
* Layers and channels
* Multiple Undo/Redo (limited only by diskspace)
* Editable text layers
* Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip
* Selection tools including rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy
* Foreground extraction tool
* Advanced path tool doing bezier and polygonal selections.
* Transformable paths, transformable selections.
* Advanced scripting capabilities (Scheme, Python, Perl)
* Plug-ins which allow for the easy addition of new file formats and new effect filters
* Over 100 plug-ins already available
* Load and save animations in a convenient frame-as-layer format
* File formats supported include bmp, gif, jpeg, mng, pcx, pdf, png, ps, psd, svg, tiff, tga, xpm, and many others
Gimp is very good, but it interface is non-standart and if you worked in Photoshop – you will not like it.
5. PhotoFiltre – It allows you to do simple or advanced adjustments to an image and apply a vast range of filters on it. It is simple and intuitive to use, and has an easy learning curve. Very simple photo editor. Not powerful as others.