Photoshop alternatives

Photoshop is a popular graphics editing program used by many professionals, and is regarded as the industry standard tool for image and graphic editing. This makes Photoshop very costly. I have provided a list of free open source alternative to Photoshop.

Picasa

This is basic image editing tool provided by Google.

The features include:

• Locate and organise all the photos on your computer.
• Edit and add effects to your photos with a few simple clicks.
• Share your photos with others through email, prints and on the web : it’s fast, easy and free.

Paint.NET

This is an open source bitmap drawing and editing application.

The feature include:

• An intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers.
• Unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools.
• An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials and plugins.

CinePaint 0.22

CinePaint is a deep paint image retouching tool that supports higher color fidelity than ordinary painting tools

The features include:

• used to retouch feature films and in pro photography.
• CinePaint opens high fidelity image file formats such as DPX, 16-bit TIFF, and OpenEXR, and conventional formats like JPEG and PNG
• It supports 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit color channels, HDR and CMS.
• Gallery-quality printing. B&W photographs have only one color channel and degrade quickly when manipulated as 8-bit images. CinePaint has higher fidelity and offers a 16-bit printing path to the print-head using GutenPrint.
• Innovation. CinePaint offers features that go beyond ordinary painting tools.

Krita 1.6.1

Krita is a painting and image editing application for KOffice.

The features include:

• 16-bit image support, High dynamic resolution images.
• Krita supports many managed colorspaces, like rgb, grayscale, cmyk, lab, ycbcr and lms, in 8 and 16 bits per channel.
• Krita can import RAW images in 8 and 16 bits per channel and load and save the usual image formats: tiff, png, jpeg.
• Krita has a large array of tools
• Krita has image layers, group layers, adjustment layers and the innovative part layers
• Krita is scriptable in Python and Ruby and offers a small, but useful DCOP interface. Krita 2.0 will also be dbus-enabled.
• There is a rich set of filters for image enhancement, color enhancement and artistic reinterpretation of your image.

Gimp 2.4

Probably the oldest and most well-known open source graphic application - GNU Image Manipulation Program or Gimp was started in 1995 and has since then grown to the status it has today.

The features include:

• Customizable Interface - allowing you to change colors, widget spacings and icon sizes to custom tool sets in the toolbox.
• Photo Enhancement - imperfections can be easily compensated for using GIMP
• Digital Retouching - ideal for advanced photo retouching techniques
• Hardware Support - includes a very unique support for various input devices out of the box
• File Formats - The file format support ranges from the common likes of JPEG (JFIF), GIF, PNG, TIFF to special use formats such as the multi-resolution and multi-color-depth.

Gimpshop 2.2.11

GIMPshop is a modification of the free/open source GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), intended to replicate the feel of Adobe Photoshop. Its primary purpose is to make users of Photoshop feel comfortable using GIMP.

The features include:

• It shares all GIMP's advantages, including the long feature list and customisability, while addressing some common criticisms regarding the program's interface
• Supports all GIMP's own plugins, filters, brushes, etc. remain available.
• many Photoshop tutorials can be followed in GIMPshop unchanged, and most others can be adapted for GIMPshop users with minimal effort.