6 Free Graphics Software Gems

by Sam Dean - Mar. 04, 2008Comments (10)

GIMP, which stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program is a free, open source image editor with a powerful set of tools. It was developed at U.C. Berkeley and first released in the mid-90's, and the amount of time that open source developers have spent improving it shows. I've used it on both Windows and Linux, and it can do most everything anyone needs to do when editing images, although a product like Photoshop does offer some high-end extras. There are a lot of nice touches under the hood, such as dockable palettes, so that you don't have all your tools in the way when you're working on an image.

IrfanView is actually my main image editor that I reach for, even though I have Photoshop. It loads in an instant, and has a very rich set of tools, including mutlipage TIF support, support for multiple animated GIFs, and you can choose to use a bunch of useful plug-ins. The application isn't open source, it's freeware (and, yes, this blog will include discussion of freeware if best-of-breed applications live there), but the developers improve it every year and you may get things done much faster in it than in Photoshop.

MWSnap is a free screen capture program with a rich set of tools. It provides a lot of granularity in terms of what portion of a screen you want captured if you don't want an entire screen. For example, you can easily snap active menus, highlighted windows or individual controls. InstantShot is a free application for the Mac that is good at the same things.

If you frequently convert graphic images to many different file formats, give XnView a try. It supports more than 400 file formats. You can also get a free version for Windows, Linux or Mac OS X.

JPG Cleaner is an interesting, free utility that strips out all non-picture data from JPG images. You'd be surprised how much non-picture data many graphics programs save along with picture data in a JPG. Photoshop, for example, is notorious for inserting non-picture data into JPGs. With JPG Cleaner, you're JPG files end up smaller but there is no loss in picture quality.

Do you know of any good, free graphics applications?

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10 Comments
 

Inkscape is to Illustrator as GIMP is to Photoshop. It is a great vector graphics editor that should have been in your list!


1 Votes

Paint .NET is a wonderful free and open source alternative to PhotoShop and GIMP. Of course a lot of people will be unhappy because it's written in .NET but it's still incredible. It's easy to use and has many less features but has all of the ones you need 90+% of the time.


0 Votes

Actually, I have had a number of people rave to me about Paint .NET. I will give it a try.


Sam


0 Votes

Always knew there was some meta data in jpg files, never knew how much till I tried JPG Cleaner.

As an example, an icon (48px*48px) saved from Photoshop with "Save for Web..." saved as jpeg optimized, high quality, not progressive and without ICC profile the size is 829 bytes. After cleaning it with JPG Cleaner the new file size is 794 bytes! It lost almost 5%. But it won't matter because it is smaller then the size of a packet, so no bandwidth saved here.


0 Votes

I regularly use the portable version of gimp as supplied by www.PortableApps.com

MWSnap will also run from the USB drive.

The only other graphics utility that I use is portable CamStudio to allow me to record screen grabs.


Ross

http://www.RossGoodman.com


0 Votes

Faststone Capture (www.faststone.org) is another free screen capture program


0 Votes

Hi, I just found this new software called Cylekx http://www.cylekx.net/, and i'm most impressed. It seems to be a powerfull new player in the graphics field though it is only in version 2 so far, has anyone else used it? John

0 Votes

Great collection of graphics softwares. You can find more by making a search at http://www.wsdcent.com

0 Votes

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0 Votes

You could also mention Blender here. Blender is one of those great programs that make your day.


0 Votes
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