I’m gonna talk today about free photoshop alternatives. I am writing this because i was browsing the other day and stumbled on this page. It’s the popular web shop Amazon where you can buy photoshop for $597, now that is a lot of money. So lets take a look at the alternatives shall we ? The ones I’m gonna review are : The gimp 2.6, Splashup and Aviary. you may notice that 2 of those are web based and all cross platform (Windows, Mac, Linux). The reason i’m not gonna review photoshop express is because it won’t run for some mysterious way. So let’s get on it.
The gimp
The gimp had been in the league a very long time. It is the image editor of choice for people who use Linux. I have used it before a long time ago, so lets see how it has evolved. The first time you open it it looks like this :
The first thing you will notice is that it looks nothing like photoshop, for example the toolbox has the options in them. After a bit of searching you will notice that everything is there, it is actually really complete. After some further exploration you will notice some differences, like the pen tool; it works the same but for some reason it feels smoother than photoshop. Another difference is the filter menu, now I’m normally am not a real fan of filter over filter use, but these are quite cool. Filters like the page curl or the film strip can come handy sometime. So, is there only good? No, it misses some things. Things like placing images or blending options, although it could be I just didn’t find it. Also what bothers me is the interface, it seem so inlogical, but that could be because I normally work with photoshop. Now there is a 3th party plug in called Gimpshop that recreates the photoshop interface.
After some playing around with it I decided is actually really liked it. although it isn’t as professional as photoshop it has some playfulness to it, it just invites you to play with it. Keep up the good work gimp team
Splashup
Next up, Splashup. Like mentioned before it is web based and free. It’s made in flash so it has no right mouse button and it looks like this :
What realy catches the eye here is that i does look like photoshop, a Gothic photoshop that is. I don’t really like the blackness here but that could work for other people I guess. When creating a new document you will notice that splashup is not made to Handel big images or print images, there is nowhere to set dpi and the biggest you can go is 1500 x 1500 pixels. If you want to open a photo you will notice something new: web 2.0′ness. You can import from flicker, facebook, picasa… you even get a shortage space on the web server for your files. Now the rest of splashup is quite featureless but I don’t think this is bad, This is no competition for photoshop nor do I think it wants to be. This is more for simple modifications on the fly, it’s easy and get the job done.
Aviary
Aviary is a rising star in the web image editing world, I have been following it for some while now. It is not just a pixel editor this is a package of tools, but i’m just gonna talk about Phoenix. It looks like this :
Although it also has nowhere to set dpi and has a maximum space of 2800×2800 pixels, it has shortcuts (the same ones that also work in photoshop), has blending options, masks … This is really impressive for an online tool. It also has a great community with some really skilled artists that openly share there works in .egg files (the avary psd). It really works nice and has that same playfulness that the gimp also has, the urge to create.
Please don’t take my word for these great program’s. Try em yourself see what you think about them. So go out and create!