The Adobe Photoshop family of products can give you everything you need for your best digital images. But it may also give you much more than you need, very complicated and with a price to match. Fortunately, there are many powerful alternatives that also have tons of features. Irving TX Printing can show you a look at four of the best.
GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP)
GIMP is well known and well-loved for more than a few reasons. It’s incredibly powerful, packs as many features as Photoshop itself, and is cross platform, supporting Windows, OS X, and Linux machines with ease and feature parity. It has a completely modular and customizable interface, so you can keep your most often-used tools at hand. It also features image correction utilities that make photo manipulation and retouching easy. Oh— and it’s completely free. It has some issues, notably with interface and usability when first used. Some people love it, others do not, but everyone acknowledges that it’s difficult to find a comparable feature-packed utility for free.
Pixelmator
Pixelmator is a richly featured image editor for OS X. This Mac tool is not free, but it often appears in bundles and app packs along with other useful utilities, and can be had for less than $30. Pixelmator is remarkably powerful; packing a flexible, customizable interface that’s designed for OS X, multiple layer styles and filtering/editing tools, and an adaptive engine that switches to the right tools or features when you need them. It’s packed with photo and image editing and retouching features, so if you’re looking to clean up photos before posting them to the internet, or getting them printed and framed, this app comes at a fraction of Photoshop’s price and offers many, many useful features.
Paint.NET
Paint.NET is one of Irving’s favorite image editing tools. Part of it is because the app is feature packed, offering layer editing, a customizable interface with plenty of room to work but also plenty of tools at your disposal, unlimited undo, tons of effects and filters, and a community of loyal users. Like GIMP, it is completely free, and for the vast majority of people looking to touch up a photo before they post it to the web, resize or crop an image, or do basic image editing, it’s more than enough. It doesn’t have the same features as more advanced tools like Photoshop or even GIMP, but not every Photoshop alternative needs to have the same breadth of features—just the ones that matter. For those who just need basic tools and want a fast, flexible, and free utility to do it, Paint.NET Is the way to go.
Pixlr Editor
Pixlr Editor is actually part of a suite of Pixlr apps, including Pixelr Express, and the photo filter and tweaking app, Pixlr-O-Matic. Pixlr Editor is a richly featured webapp that offers many features for editing photos and images. It packs adjustments, layers, filters and effects, basic features like rotation, resizing, cropping and editing, area selection, and so on. It’s not as feature-packed or as streamlined as a lot of other tools, but it’s also free. It runs in your browser alone, making it worth your attention and use if you’re away from a computer with a tool you already know is installed.
Irving Printing is very familiar with these and other apps that can greatly simplify your image creations.