4 Open Source Alternatives To Adobe Photoshop

I still see people claiming there are no good replacements for graphics applications popular in Windows. This article lists three that work brilliantly in Linux. I'm very glad to see this on a page that is aimed at businesses rather than the tech community.

I've been a fan of GIMP for about forever and I still have my circa 1998 copy of "The Artists' Guide To The GIMP" which really helped me get started way back when. I see Inkscape as more of a replacement for Adobe Illustrator, but it is an excellent piece of software.

I've never tried Pixia and after reading this article I might just have to give it a good look.

Gimp has been my workhorse graphic package and has served me well over the years.

My only complaint has been that the earlier versions were limited 8 bit/channel resolution. That worked fine for most color applications, but didn't give enough dynamic range to handle monochrome images well. Since version 2.6, however, we have partial implementation of the gegl engine which offers 16 bit and 32 bit per channel support.

Full implementation of 16 and 32 bit fixed and floating point per channel is planned for the next version (2.10).

When they finish the full implementation of deep color, I'll probably have to start getting more serious about the GIMP.

Pixia is not open source though as far as I know.

It also appears to be Windows-only. Nevermind.

Paint.net's source code is also something I can't find anymore. I know that they had released the source for it at some point and that it was under an MIT license in the past.

Quoting:Paint.net's source code is also something I can't find anymore.

I don't use it, It appears to be Windows-only. Anyway, I did find this:

Quoting:Paint.NET is no longer open source, but the last open source version was forked, and is available as OpenPDN

I don't mind that GIMP is available for a whole bunch of OS platforms, including various Linux distros, the BSDs, Solaris, Mac OS X, and Losedow$. I really DO mind that if I really want to use GIMP efficiently for Adobe Photoshop-like tasks or for more professional-like work, it is practically *mandatory* to go a through a whole bunch of docs and tutorials to do these right (say it now...."High Learning Curve"!!)

2c

I would like to see an alternative to paint.net. Pinta is not there yet and is, in my experience, highly unstable. This is a very important gap in my linux experience, together with the lack of good gui media players (cmus is good for cli, deadbeef comes close...ish for gui). Foobar2000 and Paint.net are incredible applications with no linux "true" alternatives.

That said, Gimp, Inkscape and Mypaint are all incredible tools that should be on all machines.

While I'm on the topic of missing applications, I just want to say that image viewers are also quite anemic on linux. The best image viewer/organizer for people who don't rely on automagical sortings is xnview. Even then, xnview doesn't get a first class treatment on linux. Gwenview is close, but nowhere close to the power of xnview or irfanview.

With all that, I want to celebrate my one year without booting Windows with much joy.

Minor niggle - technically Inkscape is more an alternative to Adobe Illustrator than Photoshop. They're different types of applications that do different things.

GIMP has a high learning curve. PhotoShop also has a high learning curve. Having an extremely powerful tool requires a degree of complexity.

If anyone actually wants a cr@ppy .Net graphics program, there's always Pinta.

A nice light program albeit with an ancient interface is Xfig. It is aimed at the technical market (say scientists) but it is easy to use and the results look quite good with minimal effort.