Photoshop Alternatives
Photoshop is a brilliant application, the problem with it is that it is so expensive. If you’re new to graphics design and manipulation are there any cheaper or even free alternatives?
Molly Wood shows you three alternatives to Photoshop. The first is Paint.net which is open source image editing software that lets you do simple editing like cropping, rotating, resizing, adjusting colors and even making collages. It even supports layers that allows you to do more sophisticated editing than a standard image application. The only problems with this application are that it does not run on a Mac and some users have found the ‘red eye’ correction isn’t that good.
Web based image editing tools do run on a Mac and one that has been reported to be the best is FotoFlexer. One of it’s great features is its integration with Social Networks. You can pull in image content from for example your friends’ profiles, add different colors to the image and post them onto your own network. Great fun! It also has a morph feature allowing you to morph for example one face into another as well as a very useful image smart resize feature where it’s possible to alter the size without any distortion, plus you can cut elements out of your picture. It also features layers and the FotoFlexer website offers lots of ‘how to’ videos to get the best out of the program.
And onto what is probably the best solution which again is completely free and that is a program called “Gimp”. It’s open source and has many features comparable to Photoshop, for example it has the ‘Magic Wand’ smart selection tool, it has 150 effects and filters like pixelize, blur, noise, distort and it also has photo specific tools such as distortion correction and red eye fixes. Most importantly it has a customizable interface which is really useful as it isn’t the easiest of tools to use, but it is the most powerful.
Free Photoshop Alternatives
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Adobe Photoshop CS5 (PC) £563.00 … |
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CX3 CREATIVE SUITE. Alternative to Adobe £8.85 A perfect low cost solution. Included on the CD-R is alternative versions of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Encore, Premier etc etc This ROM is Copyright Free… |
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Pro Pixel £6.98 … |
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Asus Eee PC 1215N 12.1 inch Netbook (Intel Atom D525 1.8GHz + ION2, 2GB RAM, 250GB HDD, WLAN, BT 3.0, Webcam, Up to 7hrs battery life, Windows 7 Home Premium) – Black £429.00 … |