Open Source Alternatives to Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is a well known raster graphics software suite developed by Adobe Systems. It comes with a host of features that allow for excellent and professional photo editing.

Originally created by a PhD Student Thomas Knoll and his brother John Knoll in 1987, Photoshop has grown to become the most important tool for professional graphic designers. Today, Photoshop is considered as the most feature-rich raster graphic editor and is usually top of every designer’s wish list. The biggest obstacle in using Photoshop is its heavy price tag of $699. This price tag is even higher for the professional graphic designers and companies, the common users who want basic photo editing.

So here is a list of free and open source Photoshop alternatives that will perform almost all of your photo editing tasks excellently.

1) GIMP    

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is an image retouching, image authoring and editing tool. It is the oldest, most well known and most feature-rich alternative to Photoshop. Created by Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis as a college project in 1995-1996, it became a GNU project in 1997.

Gimp is a cross platform software available for many operating systems including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and in many languages. Its features include powerful painting tools, layers and channels support, multiple undo/redo, editable text layers. The recently released Gimp 2.8 introduces a host of new features, most notably, the single-window mode. It also has a powerful plugin system and host of plugins which extends its functionality to varying levels. Gimp is a strong contender to Photoshop and can perform most of the tasks that Photoshop can very efficiently.

Click here to download GIMP

2) Krita   

Krita is a photo editing, digital painting and illustration software tool based on the KDE Platform and Calligra Suite libraries. It offers an end-to-end solution for creating digital painting files from scratch by masters. Fields of painting that Krita explicitly supports are concept art, creation of comics and textures for rendering. It is slightly less powerful than both Photoshop and GIMP, but does possess some unique features. Krita and MyPaint are also considered good alternatives to Corel Painter.

Krita is free software and distributed under GNU General Public License. It was released for the first time as a part of KOffice version 1.4.0, on June 21, 2005. But now, the Krita team together with nearly everyone from the KOffice community has left KOffice and founded the Calligra project.

Click here to download Krita

3) CinePaint   

CinePaint is a professional open-source raster graphics editor used for painting and retouching bitmap frames of films. It is a fork of version 1.0.4 of the GIMP. It enjoyed success as one of the earliest open source tools developed for feature motion picture visual effects and animation work. Under its former name Film Gimp, CinePaint was used for films such as Scooby-Doo (2002), Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001), The Last Samurai (2003), Stuart Little (1999) and others.

Features that set CinePaint apart from its photo-editing predecessor include the frame manager, onion skinning, and the ability to work with 16-bit and floating point pixels for high dynamic range imaging (HDR). CinePaint supports a 16-bit color managed workflow for photographers and printers,

including CIE*Lab and CMYK editing.

CinePaint is currently available for Linux and Mac OS X.

 

Click here to download CinePaint

 

4) Pinta     

Pinta is an open-source, cross-platform bitmap image drawing and editing program. It has typical features of image editing software including drawing tools, image filters and colour adjustment tools. Pinta is lighter and simpler than open-source image editor GIMP and has fewer features than it.

The focus on usability is reflected in several of the main features of the program like unlimited undo history, multiple language support, flexible toolbar and windows arrangement. Unlike some simple image editing software, Pinta also features support for image layers. It is written in C# and uses the GTK+ toolkit and the cairo library. Some code, specifically image adjustment and effect filters, is shared with Paint.NET.

 Click here to download Pinta

 

5) Seashore

Seashore is an image editor for Mac OS X, which was influenced by the GIMP and written using the Cocoa API. Seashore uses GIMP’s native file format, XCF, and has support for a handful of other graphics file formats, including full support for TIFF, PNG, and JPEG, and read-only support for BMP, PDF and GIF. Seashore offers a smaller number of features in comparison with GIMP, including layers and alpha channel support, gradients and transparency effects, anti-aliased brushes, tablet support and plug-in filters.

Seashore lacks many of the features that GIMP has, but Seashore’s purpose is to become an easy-to-use Free Software graphics editor that runs natively on Mac OS X. Seashore is written using the native Mac toolkit, Cocoa.

Click here to download Seashore

 

6) Paint.NET

 

Paint.NET is a free but proprietary raster graphics editor program for Microsoft Windows, developed on the .NET Framework. Paint.NET was originally created by Rick Brewster as a Washington State University student project, and has evolved from a simple replacement for the Microsoft Paint program into a powerful photo editor.

It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, blending, transparency, unlimited undo, special effects, plugins and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. It has an active and growing online community that provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.

Click here to download Paint.NET

 

7) PhotoScape   

PhotoScape is a freeware graphics editing program. The basic concept of PhotoScape is ‘easy and fun’, to allows users to easily edit photographs taken from their digital cameras or even mobile phones. It is a simple image editor like Google Picasa and Apple iPhoto and provides a user interface to perform common photo enhancements including color adjustment, cutting, resizing, printing and GIF animation.

PhotoScape operates in Microsoft Windows systems and Mac. Older versions of the software are still available for the sake of Windows 98 or Me users. It is distributed free of charge for all users including commercial bodies.

Click here to download PhotoScape