Slashdot Mirror

There's such program for Mac called Little Snitch, it reports about every program trying to access internet and you have options to deny it or allow forever. And that's the most basic and important problem with today firewalls, they won't allow outside traffic hitting your computer, but they will allow anything from inside going out... -- Photoshop on Linux? Wine? No. http://www.kanzelsberger.com/

http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/ I used a few early betas of this and although not free is probably the closet thing to photoshop out there. From the news it looks like a publisher has picked it up and it will be available 'real soon now' in Linux, MacOSX and Windows flavours.

Photoshop Replacement - The GIMP

So the GIMP supports my $300 in Photoshop plugins now? Not. Because Photoshop is an art tool supporting artistic workflow, not a photo editor with. Color Profiles, while a must are only one of the must have features to be a Photshop Replacement. Personally, I buy Pixel and install it on Linux. It is a photoshop replacement. (Also, this example disproves the all Linux Nerds are freeloaders who won't pay for software, but I digress.)

-Labyrinthe configuration utilities and applet

Something like YaST from SuSE or Redhat's Linuxconf, perhaps? The Linux Journal (or even a Google search) will beat stinky-pedia for real, not just made in the last 5 minutes, information.

To the OP,

-Full command line environment (DOS)

Your definition of 'Full' intrigues me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

The technology stuff:
Slashdot
ThinkGeek Clearance
ThinkGeek What's new
Was a promising Image Editor. - Pixel Image Editor
Great discount on technology and sometimes other gear.
More technology discounts.
Latest video tools.
Mac Software discounts.
discounted product sales.
More Mac Software discounts.

A few local feeds:
Durham, NC food reviews. - Carpe Durham
Durham, NC drink specials.
Raleigh, NC drink specials.
Raleigh, NC Photo blog. - Goodnight, Raleigh!
Chapel Hill, NC drink specials.

It's not free but what about Pixel? From Wikipedia: Pixel supports grayscale, RGB, CMYK, CIE Lab and HDR image models, color management, layers, adjustment layers, layer effects, filter effects, web page authoring, photo retouching and animations. Even though it isn't free it isn't expensive either (a loan for Photoshop anyone?). Note that I haven't used it myself but I've read about it in Linux Journal a few months back.

If the only thing keeping office on the market is an undocumented proprietary format, then office isn't worth the prices they're asking for it.

It probably ISN'T worth the price they're asking for it. Introduce and promote a quality competitor at cheaper price and you could probably overthrow Office (hey, Mozilla is doing it with Firefox).

There are hundreds of programmes that produce JPEG format files, but that doesn't mean I can write an Adobe Photoshop clone at will.

The GIMP has been stumbling along for years upon years, and has never really managed to reach a state of usefulness to designers. However, in a very short period of time, two guys wrote an f---ing amazing shareware "Photoshop substitute" for Mac OS.

Pixelmator is okay. It's big time memory hogging issues, the tools are are unrefined, but for the most part, it's good. It's not good enough to get me away from PS yet, but I suspect if he keeps doing the good job he's doing, it will within a year or so.

I've personally been eying Pixel. I haven't giving it extensive testing yet since the programmer hasn't released the OS X version with a proper Mac GUI (which is promised in the next compile). He's also bothered to compile his code on quite a few operating systems, including some that only have like a dozen desktop users.

There's always Pixel... for $38.00, you get:

• Multi-platform support: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and more!
• Extremely small and fast
• Support for layers, paths, channels, masks and selections
• Color Management support for RGB, CMYK, Grayscale and CIE Lab modes (8-bit and 16-bit)
• Realtime live effects for layers (adjustments, effects), sets of live effects can be saved as layer Styles
• Powerful text editing with spellchecking and support for IME/XIM (Asian languages)
• Includes variety of brushes, including full-color brushes and animated brushes
• Complex support for image slicing and image optimizations (GIF, PNG, JPEG, WBMP)
• Import/Export of Photoshop file format
• And much more

There's always Pixel... for $38.00, you get:

• Multi-platform support: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and more!
• Extremely small and fast
• Support for layers, paths, channels, masks and selections
• Color Management support for RGB, CMYK, Grayscale and CIE Lab modes (8-bit and 16-bit)
• Realtime live effects for layers (adjustments, effects), sets of live effects can be saved as layer Styles
• Powerful text editing with spellchecking and support for IME/XIM (Asian languages)
• Includes variety of brushes, including full-color brushes and animated brushes
• Complex support for image slicing and image optimizations (GIF, PNG, JPEG, WBMP)
• Import/Export of Photoshop file format
• And much more

Now I'm wondering what are authors of those Photoshop alternative programs going to do? Will they improve their UI in same way, or just evolve the current thing? I'm talking about Pixel for example http://www.kanzelsberger.com/ ... the best thing on Photoshop UI is, it works when you learn it. Now you're going to learn again something completely different even if it's the very same program :)

What about acquiring something smaller with less troubles and improve application to meet the best Apple standards? I'm talking about Pixel Image Editor ... http://www.kanzelsberger.com/ ... look at upcoming version to be released in near future, looks really polished to me and comparable to Photoshop as well: http://www.kanzelsberger.com/temp/eliquid2a.png

What about acquiring something smaller with less troubles and improve application to meet the best Apple standards? I'm talking about Pixel Image Editor ... http://www.kanzelsberger.com/ ... look at upcoming version to be released in near future, looks really polished to me and comparable to Photoshop as well: http://www.kanzelsberger.com/temp/eliquid2a.png

Look at Pixel: same interface, most of the power, a fraction of the price.

I know this won't win me any friends from the OSS crowd, but the last time I tried using GIMP the GUI was an absolute nightmare, and the application was buggy as Hell, and the documentation was all over the map (some of it well written, most of it garbage that read like it was written by an engineer with English as his second language). Perhaps this has changed in recent years, but a few years ago, it was most defintely NOT comparable to Photoshop. I would compare it more to something like Corel's Paintshop Pro. Personally, if you want something like Photoshop, but without spending the $, I would recommend Pixel.

GIMP/GTK-Quartz screen shot

Cross platform apps cannot possibly adhere to each platforms UI standards and really the GIMP UI is no more "user hostile" than the OSX UI. Dragging a CD to the trash to eject (or opening finder) is certainly not intuitive to someone who never used an Apple machine before. Should I bash the OSX UI for daring to be "violently different"? Not to mention that Adobe and even some of Apples own mid range to high end A/V warez don't have the OSX system look and feel at all.

Maybe the GIMP isn't for you. Have you tried pixel?

Did you guys know, Pixel image editor is written using this FreePascal compiler? Well there's some C and assembler used, but still perfect example: http://www.kanzelsberger.com/

Image editor in StarOffice is not really usable for something else than vectors. They could include something small but powerfull like Pixel image editor from http://www.kanzelsberger.com/ . It's cheap and perfect alternative to Photoshop. It runs on Macs, Windows and even Linux.

There are few apps you can run natively on Linux and MacOSX, one great example is Pixel - http://www.kanzelsberger.com/

You could always try Pixel.

It is not free. It is not Open Source, but it is usable on a wide variety of platforms. From the LJ article last month it seems that the creator is trying to create something better than Photoshop and GIMP.

I have not tried it. I still have PS6 and ImageMagick, so I am good for the little I do nowadays.

Pixel only costs $38, so why not try it out?

Now if somebody invested such money in Pixel, http://www.kanzelsberger.com/

Linux's lack of a standard GUI layer in the OS - modern menus, buttons, lists, even windows - is the primary issue for us.

I don't really understand why this would be a problem. You choose either QT, GTK or whatever. If someone wants to run your application then the libraries are only an apt-get/yum/[insert package manager here] away.

If you distribute your software as deb and rpm packages those pesky dependencies are handled by the package manager. Moreover integration between the widget sets has been getting better: using Firefox under KDE has pretty-much the same look as a native QT application (such as Konqueror) for me. The situation will only improve.

I could understand if you're developing proprietary software though. That stuff doesn't seem to gain much traction in the FLOSS world. Pixel is a good example: great photo editor, low price, but not many people use it. Why? On Windows/Mac everyone pirates/buys Photoshop and on GNU/Linux people would rather use the GIMP than a proprietary product (sorry I don't have any evidence to back that up, just personal experience from reading forums and such).

I just wanted to bolster your argument saying that, for example, I have used Photoshop for 1 job in my entire life. I couldn't get the bevels looking right in The GIMP. I have made a total of probably about $200 doing graphic design in my life, and on the particular job, I am making $0, because it is a)for a friend, and b)building my portfolio. I have discovered Pixel, and given the very little usage I put into a graphic editor, I may just purchase that for $38, rather than use Photoshop for $700 and STILL have to split the work up with the GIMP.

I pirated Nuendo 3, and discovered that I didn't like it AT ALL. I am using Ardour 2, and I have contributed $50, because they requested it. It freaking meets my needs. Had I liked Nuendo, eventually I could have purchased it. They sure as hell weren't looking for my measly $50, though, which would have been too much, given my usage of it.

It's like, I grew up in Mexico, then tried to get work papers so I could work as a computer tech. I was told I had to do timeshare or I couldn't get papers, because I didn't have any credentials, and therefore I was taking jobs away from mexicans. I couldn't explain that they didn't have any places I could get credentials where I grew up, which incidentally where I was being denied papers. So I worked under the table. And there wasn't a single motherfucker who came into that place for 2 years who didn't think I was a Mexican. Kind of bothered me that a)I couldn't advertise for myself so I made less money, and b)they were denying themselves a 10% flat tax on everything I earned, plus some for being a gringo. The only time we immigration was ever a concern was after the shop tried to get papers for me and my brother. But then, that's the price you pay for trying to do the right thing.

People always ask for Photoshop on Linux, I can only recommend Pixel image editor from http://www.kanzelsberger.com/ ... this resembles Photoshop in all details :)

I *strongly* suggest that before you put any money at all down for Pixel, that you read the forums on Pavel's web site. The downloadable demo is the beta 6 release, and Pavel's been promising the beta 7 for months, and it's still nowhere to be seen. He's since decided to skip the beta 7 and go to beta 8 because of new feature additions and because of "endless troubles" with the b7 version. It's my personal opinion that he's got some serious project management issues that he is not addressing at all, and that's just not acceptable for a product he's asking money for.

I'm not saying it's a bad product nor am I trying to disparage Pavel - just be *fully* aware of the situation with Pixel before you take out the credit card.

Not free, but way cheaper than Photoshop is Pixel. I like it; it is rather comparable to Photoshop. Photoshop import/export and support for Photoshop plugins are in the works. I find it much more usable than GIMP. It supports CMYK for your printers.

Yes. Gimpshop is better than gimp. But what about Pixel32? Pixel32 is MUCH like Adobe PS and it's available for multiple-plattforms, too. Check out http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/?page_id=12 or http://pixel32.box.sk/

No doubt that I would agree with the parent 100%. GIMP may be acceptable for casual doodler or cropping photos, but it ultimately a complete waste of time for any professional accustomed to a plethora of serious tools and a myriad of features used daily to make a living. We don't even have to discuss its' intolerable user interface because GIMP's graphic capabilities are not even in the same ballpark as Photoshop.

However, one may be able replace some of the other software depending on how you used it. The original poster framed the scenario as tools for the marketing department to use, which clearly lowers the bar in terms of expectations as to what level of competency will be applied. Marketers are not designers, so it would appear as though if Software X does a reasonable job approximating most tasks of Adobe Y, then one can adopt it.

Photoshop - You're unlikely to replace that one. Although, someone else mentioned Pixel which could possibly cut the mustard depending on your needs. Otherwise, there really is nothing to compare to Photoshop.

Illustrator - Definitely have a strong look at Inkscape. I've toyed with it for 2 or 3 years to keep tabs on its' development, after being fairly impressed during my first run through. These days it has continued to advance and I'd suggest it's ready for the professional world. You can create substantially complex pieces with Inkscape which will probably far out-pace the ability of your Marketing department to bother learning in the first place. While it might be missing a pet feature or two, the bottomline is that Inkscape is ready to be taken seriously as a replacement for Illustrator (and, previously, FreeHand).

InDesign - Professionals already use Scribus to handle multipage full color layouts sent directly to commercial print houses, so it's gotta be worth your time to look at. CMYK separation, PDF generation,and much of the toolsets you'd expect to see in Quark or InDesign; certainly more than enough power for your Marketing department.

Acrobat Pro - If you're heavily using features like annotation, collaboration, form creation, et cetera, then you probably won't be replacing Acrobat Professional. Nothing can touch it. However, if all you need is to be able to allow your Marketing droids to generate PDFs from documents they create in other software, then you can slap PDFCreator on their little Windows boxen. Remember that OpenOffice already has the ability to turn any of their normal documents and spreadsheets into a PDF at a click of a button. Surely, you've dumped MS Office by now.

Dreamweaver - This is a tough one because you should probably rethink your environment to realize you most likely don't really want Dreamweaver to be used. Unless you're just using Slashdot to conveniently survey the geek mindshare, the odds are that WYSIWYG is an old paradigm no longer needed by most scenarios. What you probably want is some kind of content management engine which your key tech person(s) can administer such that your Marketing department can monkey with the website(s). One engine could be adapted to various websites, if you proposed such a need. If I were to suppose someone was trolling Slashdot, then I would mention Quanta Plus before realizing Marketing droids would be helplessly confined to Windows and thus I'd point to Nvu as your capable hero.

But, really, if an evaluation of your technical needs leads you back to WYSIWYG, then you've made a logical error somewhere. The days for that hobbled solution are definitely over.

There you have it! Free and open source software is up to the challenge is most regards. Where there are shortcomings, there are adept proprietary solutions for far, far less than the onerous cost of Adobe

GIMP and CMYK support for The GIMP

It's always funny to see someone who never designed professionally in their life suggest GIMP.

GIMP lacks so basic features such as a usable grid, 16-bit/HDR image support, and requires special plugins with numerical inputs to draw a simple rounded rectangle, let alone something more complex.

The closest I've seen to Photoshop is Pavel's Pixel editor. It works on any OS you can imagine, from DOS to OS/2, Windows, MacOSX, Linux etc. It's very cheap and it's basically a clone software of Photoshop in many regards.

Other than this, there's Corel's Paintshop and Painter, but Painter is more oriented towards natural media art, not synthetic design or editing photos. Yes, neither of them are free, either. That's because people who have a clue designed them, and people who have a clue in the design industry don't work for free.

You could skimp on Dreamweaver, InDesign, Illustrator, but you won't last long without Photoshop, even if when someone sends you PSD next time and you realize that when GIMP advertised "importing PSD" they actually meant more like importing Photoshop 4 level PSD and losing everything else in the design, thus wrecking it in the process.

Comparing Photoshop-GIMP to MS_Office-OpenOffice is extremely unfair. GIMP is really a toy, it has few interesting plugins and crude tools, while OpenOffice is actually quite usable, even if it lacks some features, it definitely has the basics right, and working.

I have both OpenOffice and GIMP installed here, next to MS Office and Photoshop. I use GIMP only to run the texture resynthesis plugin when I need a tileable texture.

Gimp of course is pretty cool - probably the best free graphics software there is, but it's tough when you're used to Photoshop. Here's something I found in a Linux Magazine:
http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/?page_id=12
It's called Pixel, and it's available for Windows and Mac as well. It looks a lot more like Photoshop, has CMYK support, and it's low cost. You can also get a 30 day trial.

Here it is: Pixel http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/?page_id=12. And it is developed by one person. And it costs 1% of Photoshop price. And it does have a sensible UI, very similiar to Photoshop. Try out the demo. I've bought it and it was worth every cent, even if its still in beta version.

And yes. It does run on Linux. And on BSD. And on Mac. And on BeOS, and dozen other OSes.

Although I don't use the GIMP either, because it lacks a lot of features that I need and use (adjustment layers and layer styles are important, as well as a few other things) there is a plugin for RAW support based on dcRaw called "UFRaw". http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/ I've only used the standalone version, but it reads my files just fine, I assume that the GIMP plugin would be just as useful.

There's also a very cheap, multiplatform image editor out there that may someday be a competitor to photoshop for people with alternative OS choices. It's called Pixel Image Editor and you can get a trial here: http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/?page_id=12 I haven't personally paid for it, because when I used it under linux a few things were very buggy and crashed the app, but if the author keeps plugging away at it, it may be exactly what linux needs to be taken seriously. Unfortunately it isn't open source, but the author has expressed the possibility of it being open sourced in the future...

I wonder if headlines like this are contrived to (continue to) mask competitive products such as Pixel and GIMPshop?

Ok, I haven't tried all of these programs, but I'm quite confident they are similair enough to make my comments valid anyway:

Desktop publishing in LaTeX? Yeah, I imagine a lot of news magazines, design students, birthday-card-designers and whatever to use LaTeX... Or not. I use LaTeX where it fits but it would suck to make a whole magazine in it, you can't even see and place stuff exactly where you want to, you just trust LaTeX putting them in a good place for you.

Openoffice, abiword, koffice? A word processor isn't a DTP tool, also I would say all of those tries to be Microsoft Word so much that they suck just as much as the later one does. Word documents look like shit due to wide margins, small text and waaay to many letters per line. Sure you can change that, but regular people doesn't. In any case you can't design a whole magazine in Word either...

This is just a very cheap office replacement package from Apple but check out what it does before you give any suggestions: iWork Pages quicktour.

Scribus looks decent from the first page I saw. Xara might be ok to, is it really available for Linux to? The webpage sucked so I only found downloads for Windows..

Inkscape would be a worthy competition against a commercial package for vector graphics? Riight.. Gimp is just as good as Photoshop? Riiight.. Krita seems very lame aswell.
You could have mentioned Pixel.

http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/?page_id=12

It's $32 bucks to buy while it's in beta with a free upgrade to the final release and later to 2.0. It's free to try either way. It's closed source but very cheap. It'll go up to $79 later if you were to wait to buy it until the final release. Paint Shop Pro by Corel is a very capable image editing program and you can usually find it on ebay or other places for under 50 bucks. I found it for $45.

How to use Gimp ... use Pixel Image Editor and help support alternatives to the overprice PS.

You may want to try the also-mentioned Pixel instead. That one already has both those features you mention. It's not open source though, but shareware.

Wow, I was totally unaware of that program.

Here's a link to his actual page (with screenshots):
http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/?page_id=5

It looks fairly impressive. The interface is honestly a clone of Photoshop, which is a huge plus in my book (nothing to relearn), it supposedly has CMYK support, works with TWAIN and SANE scanners, even does JPEG-2000.

Not bad for $32! The license lets you run it on multiple platforms also, and he's got versions for MacOS, MorphOS, Linux (x86 and PPC), BSD (x86), and a list of others.

I'll have to look into it more, but I might be cutting this guy a check soon, if it's for real and as good as advertised. I don't mind terribly the fact that it's not open-sourced, that's his choice as the developer, although it'd be nice to have some sort of promise that if he decides to stop developing it that he'll release it so it doesn't become abandonware. I suspect though in order to implement a lot of those features that there's a lot of licensed/patented code inside.

Pixel Image editor surpasses the Gimp. Of course it's not free, but it has excellent features that even the Gimp doesn't have. Also, it's available for many different platforms.

http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/?page_id=12

Possibly this: http://www.kanzelsberger.com/

One office program that costs money, which is available for Linux is ThinkFree. It may not be free, but the compatibility of MS Office documents is great! It beats OpenOffice hands down.

http://www.thinkfree.com/

Don't ignore a program because it's not free on Linux.

Another awesome graphics program available for linux is Pixel Image editor. It is a excellent graphics program, I'd say better than the Gimp.

http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/?page_id=12

Together with Pixel should be a cool tool for digital camera users...

http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel

i heard that pixel image editing package will be distributed by yellowtab to attract users, it's kinda very similar to photoshop and exists on more platforms including linux.

http://www.kanzelsberger.com/

is it true? i cannot find any info on their website.