Saturday, April 9, 2011

The Best Open Source Graphics Programs


GIMP


The GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) is one of the oldest and most successful open source applications. It's widely used by photography enthusiasts and open source enthusiasts who are looking for an alternative to Photoshop. While it's not quite as full-featured as Photoshop (and enthusiasts can explain in great detail where GIMP has shortcomings for high-end photo editing), GIMP offers just about everything that a small business owner would need for image retouching, editing and so on.
GIMP has a rich set of filters and tools to manipulate photos for print or Web publishing. Whether you need to do some simple re-sizing, heavy retouching or creating images from scratch, GIMP is the tool of choice for working with bitmap images.
If you already know Photoshop, you might want to check out GIMP shop. GIMPshop is a modified version of GIMP that replicates the feel of Adobe Photoshop. It still works like GIMP, but it might be more comfortable for people who have experience with Photoshop, but don't want to pay the stiff license fees for it.
Here's another reason to love GIMP. It has a comprehensive user manual and a fair amount of help online. GIMP is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X -- though you'll need to be sure you have X11 installed as well. I believe X11.app is installed by default on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and 10.6 (Snow Leopard).