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Alternatives To Adobe's Creative Suite?
jsepeta writes "I've been using Adobe products for years, and own several older versions of the products from their Creative Suite: Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, Acrobat Pro, and Dreamweaver. I'd like to teach some graphic design and web production skills to my coworkers in the marketing department, and realize that most of them can't afford $2500 to buy Adobe's premium suite and, frankly, shouldn't need to because there should be competitive products on the market. But I can't seem to locate software for graphic design and printing that outputs CMYK files that printing companies will accept. And I'm not familiar with any products that are better than FrontPage yet still easy to use for Web design. Any suggestions? Our company is notoriously frugal and would certainly entertain the idea of using open source products if we could implement them in a way that doesn't infringe upon our Microsoft-centric hegemony / daily work tasks in XP."
have not switched to Vista yet? =O
Yeah, pirated software is really appropriate for education....
How 'bout GIMP?
GIMP
and
CMYK support for The GIMP
The Gimp is one of the best image manipulators out there. It has drawbacks of not having the user-base of Photo$hop, but it is highly adjustable and modifiable to fit most needs. Plus it's free, and open-sourced.
In addition to the gimp (linux / mac / win ) ... check out scribus which does a pretty good job of reproducing most of what indesign does, and is quite stable.
getpaint.net
You mean people actually buy photoshop?
...the only open source raster graphics program we know.
The one that doesn't support more than 8 bits per channel.
The one that doesn't support anything other than RGB, indexed, and grayscale modes for images.
The one that doesn't have adjustment layers.
Yeah!
I'll get flamed to a crisp for this but there's no alternative to photoshop. Gimp is clumsy and underpowered.
The list goes on, but my fingers got tired.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I'm sure there's got to be cheap/free classes/lessons on the internet for this stuff. If you are teaching this software to the students and they can't afford it, then what's the point as they will never actually be able to use the software? If they are going to use the skills at work, then why won't your company purchase proper licenses for them?
Is there heaven? Is there Hell? Is that a Tuna Melt I smell?-Primus
Every design program worth using should be able to output CYMK TIFFs. And every printing company worth dealing with should be able to use them as a source.
Personally, I use Corel's Graphic Suite. Corel DRAW has been an industry standard right along side Illustrator. Their PHOTO-PAINT is a pretty strong competitor to Photoshop.
The other programs included in the Suite I don't find much use. But getting a Photoshop and Illustrator -like programs for $400 is pretty good. Also check their upgrade eligibility, you may be entitled to the $180 version.
Free Alternatives:
Photoshop -> Gimp
Illustrator -> Inkscape
InDesign -> Scribus
Web Design -> Kompozer, which is a bugfix release of Nvu (there's actually a lot of these, I've also heard Microsoft Visual Web Dev Express, which has a lot of praise from various people)
Not sure of a good PDF editor, but it looks like this claims to do the trick (though i'm sure is nowhere near the level of Acrobat Pro): PDFEdit. Be warned it looks like it's a cygwin port to windows...
I can't guarantee that those will all live up to your expectations, but I am fairly familiar with most of that software, and it certainly gets the job done.
He say 1 and 1 and 1 is 3, got to be good lookin' cause hes so hard to see...
There is a program called GIMP. It is an open source image manipulation program released under the GNU public lecense. It runs on many different platforms and its pretty much better than photoshop. You should try it.
\.
But that's like comparing a Civic to a Ferrari.
I tried Scribus about a year ago, and it was nowhere near as good as InDesign or QuarkXpress. It included only the most basic features, and even lacked some of those. Also, it was far from a professional-level interface - I had a hard time finding the functions I needed, and the interface was far from intuitive. I would put it maybe on par with MS Publisher, but it was nowhere near being in the same class as InDesign and QuarkXpress.
Now, let's be honest: there's no such thing as an alternative to Adobe's creative suite.
There's nothing out there that can compete in ease of use, or power. Someone mentioned superior tools to web design (notepad, for example) and I can agree there. But for the rest of the products mentioned (among them, photoshop, illustrator, indesign etc.) there's nothing else that can hold a candle up to Adobe.
My page.
I've been using it for several years and it's very simple, flexible and cheap http://www.virtualmechanics.com/products/spinner/
Everyone knows if you really want to get work done you buy the Adobe Creative Suite.
Not a Troll.
As a complete amateur I have enjoyed Nvu for its interface.
other alternatives may be
http://www.aptana.com/download_all.php
http://www.inkscape.org/ (quite good, but haven't used it for web applications)
http://kompozer.net/
ZDNet has an article on that very subject.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
I really hope anyone feeling the urgent need to do marketing for money will have to pay $2500 before being able to do it, frankly.
I run 100% on Linux except in this domain. CorelDraw suite is dirt cheap compared to Adobe, has both vector and bitmap (Great CMYK support) and is a solid worker. My graphic artist friends describe it as a production tool instead of a creative tool, but they got work to pay for their copies of CS3. I cannot wait for Xara to finish their Corel import filter - Or for Corel to get back into Linux app market (Yup, I'm a dreamer!). Newer versions with new MS installer isn't working under WINE yet, so I run a copy on XP inside Virtualbox.
But I increasingly create alot of my artwork in Inkscape as vector exported to target size in bitmaps (like glass looking buttons...) that I used to do 100% as bitmap. Makes custom art soooo much faster.
Krita in the KOffice suite has CYMK, nice controls, but lacks the vast the plugin library we have become accustomed to. It will come I am sure.
1 Dachshund + 1 Dachshunds = A Paradox.
My dad was a programmer and thanks to pirates like you now he give homeless men blowjobs on the street in broad daylight for crack and meth. You ruined his life!
For vector graphics, check out Adobe Illustrator's nearest competitor, CorelDraw. For bitmap image editing, check Corel PhotoPaint (part of the CorelDraw suite) or Corel's PaintShop Pro software. For desktop publishing, consider QuarkXpress or the open source app, Scribus. For making PDF files, look into Foxit PDF Creator or PDF Creator. I don't believe there are many low priced or open-source alternatives that are comparable to Front Page or DreamWeaver. However, take a look at Kompozer (an improved version of the open-source NVU). For what it's worth, that's my advice for low cost alternatives to the Adobe Creative Suite.
Raster Graphics (Photoshop alternatives): GIMP - although I only use this for web design which it does a good job of. The aforementioned CMYK plugin looks interesting if you're in a print environment.
:)
Vector Graphics (Illustrator alternatives): I prefer Xara Xtreme (which has an open sourced version available) over Inkscape.
Desktop Publishing (Indesign alternatives): Scribus looks the business, can anyone tell me if Scribus can import RGB Tiff's (for example) and colour separate them for print?
Video Editing (Premiere alternatives): Cinelerra - A pain to install, crashes like a madman and exporting video is trial and error; but it beats all the other simple video editors hands down.
Web Design (Dreamweaver alternatives): There's a few out there, but none as good as Dreamweaver by far. I do most of my web design using PHP and hardcoding the websites with xhtml and CSS. I personally use Eclipse with a few choice plugins for this purpose.
Cinelerra and Scribus only run under Linux (although there may be MacOS versions?). This may not be suitable for your situation, but heck, how much does it take to install a dual boot system on a computer nowadays?
All these apps are pretty good for educational purposes. I wouldn't dare argue they're any good for production purposes, as the closed-source products are simply miles ahead in every way. If you're starting out and can't afford the full packages though, or are only interested in learning the concepts/creating a portfolio etc. then they do the job just fine and dandy
And just for the heck of it, a good 3D modelling/animation program is Blender.
The first rule of The GIMP is you don't talk about The GIMP.
:P
Watch how many moderation points get blown stifling any suggestion that The GIMP isn't up to the level of Photoshop.
Watch how many moderation points get blown on this here comment
Perhaps the CMYK Plugin for the ubiquitous GIMP?
No, it's not exactly in the same league, but for many uses, it's plenty good enough...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
GIMP helped me start web design. I'm generating revenue with a photography site that started out as a mere hobby, and GIMP was used to edit every picture. I've cropped, stitched, layered, made use of transparency, and edited these photos with some pretty satisfactory results. It's a great way to accomplish digital image manipulation without having to risk most other initial monetary investments.
Photoshop --> GIMP http://gimp.org/
Illustrator --> Inkscape http://inkscape.org/
InDesign --> Scribus http://www.scribus.net/
GoLive --> Nvu http://www.nvu.com/
I'll let the others here argue/bash/whine/praise each app.
1.) Someone suggests an open source alternative to [graphics-editor/word-processor/audio-management]
2.) Someone comments on the sheer mediocrity of aforementioned $ALTERNATIVE.
3.)
a. Someone brings up $ALTERNATIVE good points
-or-
b. Someone disses $LEADING_PRODUCT's management, pricing system, ethics, etc.
4.) Someone mentions that aforementioned is irrelevant to the quality of the $LEADING_PRODUCT, then complains more about $ALTERNATIVE
5.) Someone runs out of retorts, says "Go code it for yourself."
6.) Someone comments on how they had sessions of lengthy, drawn-out fornication with your mother; alternatively, your sexual preference.
Hopscotch - an online comic.
CMYK is not a device-independent color space. As such, you CAN NOT safely ship it off to some random printer and expect good color reproduction. Well, I guess you could expect it and then be sorely disappointed!
The proper conversion from device-independent RGB (sRGB unless you like pain) to printer ink is done by the printer driver or press house. It takes into account numerous ugly details of the printing process (exact ink color, dot gain, paper color, drying time, soggy paper concerns, worse...) and several economic/quality tradeoffs.
TIFF is a way to waste disk space. It's used by people who think "300 dpi" (used in place of pixel dimensions) is meaningful for a digital image, and by people who think that abusing CMYK makes you a Real Professional.
BTW, if you press house is so stonage that they prefer some random uncalibrated CMYK over a proper device-independent color space, go elsewhere! You'll get random quality variation from people who are that clueless.
Suggestions...
Web Design:
Dump FrontPage, move to SharePoint designer (in Office 2007) or MS Expression Web Designer. (The products are the same, SharePoint version has additional features for SharePoint sites.) Unlike FrontPage, these push CSS and standards harder than any other web product currently in the mainstream, are still easy, but provide some of the best tools to move developers to CSS and understanding concepts beyond the old HTML tags. (Yes I know these are MS products, but honestly are nothing like FrontPage and have many professional site developers jumping ship from Dream and other products because of their power.)
Graphic Design:
Not so much cheaper, but CorelGraphics Suite (CorelDraw,Photopaint) work as good alternatives to the Adobe products. They are generally more user friendly for complex tasks and you can buy them much cheaper. CorelDraw being the strongest product. (Do not go with MS Expression Graphic Designer or MS Blend unless the people are going to building application interfaces, they are light graphical tools for UI development, not full fledged replacements for AI or CorelDraw.)
I'm sure others will mention OSS solutions, so I will skip my recommends in this area. I also don't have many OSS favorites that I can rely upon fully without hitting a wall for a feature. In contrast CorelDraw can do pretty much anything wihtout having to move over to AI for anything.
I've recently written and self-published a book Zero to Superhero, and it's been formatted with Microsoft Word and OpenOffice, so it's interior is rather plain jane (the cover was done with GIMP and I'm very happy with the results). The problem I've found with Adobe Indesign as well as Scribus is the fact these programs don't understand .doc files. I can't simply import the doc files of my book into Indesign or Scribus and work on them directly.
I'd expect this type of behavior from proprietary software like Adobe, but generally not open source software. Any work arounds I've considered would be too time consuming because of the length of my book.
Believe me you, I've experimented with an assortment of software, and I've come to the realisation that if you want pro looking page formatting - above and beyond what word and OpenOffice can provide - start and finish your project in Scribus.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
Bluefish is a text based web editor which allows far more code-based freedom. For code, frankly, it works better than Dreamweaver. It's not exactly user friendly, but is efficient and works surprisingly well once you know HTML coding. It has tons of Wizards, too, so people can insert things like pictures and charts with ease.
My suggestion: Fire one or more of the marketers, hire a real graphic artist, buy the CS, and save yourself a nightmare of trying to explain to your best and brightest why they should use shortcuts even though all the choices are up at the top. You're going to get better, faster, nicer work that's compatible with every printer/host/etc, and the marketers can continue to come up with catchy slogans targeting bitter mid-30s graphic designers. I could go on about how marketers are a big toilet into which you throw money -as any decent graphic artist could come up with better ideas, but I think I just did. I've made my tiny company hundreds of thousands. Just me, CS, a sense of aesthetics that didn't start with a two year degree in douchebaggery.
It sounds like you are contemplating buying one copy of the entire premium suite for everyone. Probably overkill. Find out which apps they need and buy only those. If you can get the price down you will quickly cross the "unproductivity and training for poorly-documented apps exceeds the cost of commercial apps that have great resources available at your local book store" threshold.
As a designer, I've been working close on 10 years in Photoshop (on a daily basis), and nothing gets close to it, everything else seems clumsy.
There are many alternatives, but none of them offer what Adobe's products offer. Some may argue that many applications are closing in on tools like Photoshop, but I firmly believe that the support for these programs is what makes it so dominating.
I am a professional Photoshop user and have become one thanks to the vast amount of tutorials and discussions that relate directly to Photoshop. I know Gimp and I know Paint Shop Pro, but aside from the fact that none of these tools are quite as extensive as Photoshop, you still want that large community to back you up when you need help.
To answer the question of the main article, I would say that the best alternative to Photoshop is yet another Adobe product: Photoshop Elements. It's a capped version of Photoshop at some $100 in retail stores. This is fully comparable to Paint Shop Pro, which is about the same price.
Full Tilt
"People that don't understand HTML and CSS shouldn't to webdesign in the first place."
Well, that's what WYSIWYG web development programs are for. There's no reason to go through hand-coding a site just in spite of an expensive package that does it for you. People that develop sites for a living don't need to go through that nonsense on every single project. What's better use of time? Typing six lines of code over and over again for some element on a page, or clicking a few times and dragging it right to where you want it?
"If you want to learn webdesign you should learn to design webpages, not learn how to use a program."
The act of designing a web page is different from actually coding it. When typing out all that code, the site should already be designed, otherwise you'd have no basis from which to code.
Using only Notepad to make a site doesn't make sense on any level. Would you use it to make your image files as well? After all-- it would offer the deepest level of control over your image content. Hell, test it in your own W3 compliant web-browser that you compiled by hand in Notepad.
The level of specialized training for any of these tasks are obviously all too redundant and useless compared to getting the software, any software, and focusing on the design of your project-- the rudimentary communicative objectives that must be fulfilled by the project.
I am not a design expert to know about its CMYK support - but I can tell you Xara rocks as a substitute to Illustrator. It is one of the best designed software ever. And it's blazingly fast.
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.
Don't you mean http://www.getpaint.net/ Anyway, Paint.NET is a good program.
Just a thought... You could download the trial versions of Microsoft Expression graphic designer and web designer.
-David
Serif has some good stuff www.serif.com and some cheaper/free stuff (mostly older versions I think) via www.freeserifsoftware.com
As many others will likely chime in, Adobe products really are best of breed. They represent decades of effort, and are simply excellent software. You won't find anything comparable anywhere else. Period.
Now, if you want a more economical way to go, I recommend looking into previous versions (nothing wrong with training on CS1 or CS2 - the differences for the Adobe products aren't that extreme), or look for OEM copies. Or if you can arrange it, student copies are very, very reasonable. You might justify that as training is similar to education.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
It's not dreamweaver, but it's pretty functional. http://www.nvu.com/index.php/
Enjoy Every Sandwich
sorry, been doing design work professionally for over 10 years now, cross platform, try everything new, open source, blah blah, and hate em all - photoshop, illustrator, and indesign kill (except for maybe Quark > indesign [[ducks impending flames ]] ). The only 'real' competition came from Macromedia :)
I would suggest getting older copies of the apps. At home, I still run photoshop 7 and illustrator 9, b/c I really don't need super tight integration between apps, shared file management, etc. They're stable, etc...
For vector graphics, Corel Draw is awesome. I do a lot of stuff with GMT, which outputs to postscript, and Corel Draw is a very simple tool to manipulate graphics.
For image editing, I remember the pains of using Photoshop (this was back with PS 4 and 6). To be honest, I found Photopaint to be worse. Back in the day, I used Paint Shop Pro, which was decently easy to use. Personally, I now use GIMP exclusively. I don't see why people have such a problem with it. It is easy to use and runs fast. With Photoshop, I remember fumbling around the menus to find simple things like rotating and resizing images. Everything is pretty clear in GIMP.
For Paint, I use KolourPaint. It is like a jacked up version of MS Paint. Now you too can participate in drawing bad pictures.
At least for mac users, there are quite a few very well designed and maintained products that are shareware and rival Adobe's offerings in both features and pizazz.
RapidWeaver is an industrial-strength alternative to Dreamweaver which includes an SDK, full drag-n-drop designing interface, coding panel, Flash integration, and site maintenance. Currently it's $49.
Coda is the newcomer on the block, built by one of the best Mac shareware coding companies. As with the others, it allows for drag-n-drop designing and fully supports XHTML. Panic Software's tagline "shockingly good Mac software" is evident here cause they integrate the features of Transmit (their excellent FTP utility) including site/filepath synchronization, drag-n-drop uploading from the Dock... Coda also includes a console that's integrated into the app window that allows for split terminal shells for SSH and other functions. Coda includes a GUI CSS editor and comprehensive HTML programmer's guide in the application itself. $79.
TextMate is the Mac's premiere enterprise-level, yet shareware price text editor that does... pretty much anything. It can handle just about as many language bundles as jEdit but is purely Mac. It integrates well with Transmit, the shell, Subversion, and has a fully customizable code snippet library for full programmer control. I can't even begin to summarize all the features that sets this editor apart from the others, but it easily shames Dreamweaver's code window. Just watch the screencasts on the website. It costs 39.
CSSEdit by MacRabbit is a GUI-powered CSS editor which has a snooping mode called X-Ray that can analyze a website's design similar to Firefox's 3rd party Web Developer addon, except with style, polish, and features that you've come to expect from Mac applications. It includes a CSS "builder" workflow that allows you to use some natural language and object-oriented programming (in the most basic sense) to build CSS effects. $29.95
There are many others including Apple's own iWeb (which is included with every new Macintosh, is VERY easy to use, and puts out bloated-yet XHTML compliant code) and BBEdit by Bare Bones Software which is very comparable to TextMate in many ways.
Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.
On the OS X side of things, when OS X was updated with core image a lot of people were talking about how someone would be able to swoop in and offer a front-end to all the built in image filters that were part of core image. (you can see a list of all the filters that are part of it here. You could open up Core Image Fun House (on the OS X install disc) and play around will all the filters, and easily imagine a company making an interface for that power, offering 60% of the power of photoshop for a fraction of the cost.
Cut a long story short, someone seems to be almost ready to finally do this, Pixelmator. Cheap, neat and looks like it's easy to use. Not a real photoshop competitor, but then again most people pirate photoshop for light photo retouching and occasional messing around. This looks like it could handle what a lot of casual photoshop users want without the insane price tag.
[nvu] is an awesome WYSIWYG editor for HTML. [vim] for coding, and if you can't get the hang of the command system in it. try cream which is a simplified script for vim makes things alot easier for those running windows or just converting away from wordpad and notepad. [gimp] works great for web development, if you need some 3d just run blender to design your 3d effects. I have nothing to recommend for CMYK, I am a web developer so i stay in RGB for compliance reasons. Use Dreamweaver over Frontpage, frontpage likes to tag everything as if it was the one that built the page. and it relies to heavily on server extensions where as dreamweaver has several dynamic language controls. and it is hands down the best at on screen CSS rendering.
CMYK is not a device-independent color space.
Surely that's why you embed your color profile in the TIFF when you generate it?
Anyway, it doesn't really matter how you try to do it. If you ship an RGB file to the printer they can assume it's sRGB and do the conversion, but there is no way for them to calibrate it against your monitor so the colors may not match what you expected. If you do the conversion, using the correct color profile for the printer that will be used, you at least stand a slightly better chance of getting the colors right. Having said all of that, this is all why Pantone was invented...
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.
I'm a keen photographer, and any processing of digital photographs that I do is done using PaintShop Pro (actually quite an elderly version now...something like 7.2).
I'm a member of a local camera and photography club, and just about everyone there who uses digital phot editing software uses some version or another of Adobe Photoshop. It's very good, very capable and is the de facto standard.
I've sat with people and watched them do manipulations using Photoshop and I have to say that so far I have seen little if anything done in Photoshop that I couldn't replicate in PaintShopPro (for general editing - Photoshop can do some pretty way out things with filters, but that's not really my thing)
8.) Profit!
Karma police, arrest this man. He talks in math. He buzzes like a fridge. He's like a detuned radio.
If you're serious that CMYK printing is one of the goals you want to accomplish, you've really no choice but to pony up for professional applications. Printing is not cheap, you'll spend hundreds of dollars per job at the printer, any money you "save" on software is guaranteed to be paid many times over to the printer for fixing your files and getting them ready for press. Making software that works for prepress requires spending lots of money on paper and ink experiments, money that GIMP and Scribus simply cannot spend unless a sponsor steps up.
If all you're trying to do is educate the users about CMYK, then of course you can use pretty much any software that works nicely with a desktop inkjet printer that can do CMYK proofing (in a pinch Photoshop can be used as a RIP for this purpose assuming you have one copy of it). Of course no proof is ever the same as a real print, so eventually people will hit a wall in their real knowledge until big $$$ is spent on real jobs that you get back from the printer and realize were not quite as good as they thought they'd be.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
The CorelDRAW Suite does CMYK. That's only a couple hundred USD, I think. Add on NVU for Web design. That's free. The only thing you're missing at that point is a page layout program. You could try Scribus, but it's not getting great reviews here in the comments. Oh well, that's the deal with going cheap: you have to make sacrifices. However, as long as you install CutePDF or some other PDF printer program, you can make almost anything a page layout program. Open Office would probably be viable and free. Nothing will match InDesign and Quark, but since you're just setting up your friends with basic apps, maybe it will be good enough.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
I mean, "there should be competitive products" -- you're talking of a high-end graphics application that is way ahead of most of the "competition". Sure, Paint Shop Pro is *much* cheaper, and GIMP is even free, but neither are as powerful as Photoshop.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Apparently some people swear by mspaint.
Gimp is my best alternative for adobe's suite... nice post
Best Regards, Eliena Andrews
I use Indesign (CS1) and I Import .doc files all the time. They are imported along with all associated formatting and character / paragraph styles.
Or it's done by you, after taking a little time to calibrate all of your input/output devices and monitors and get your color profiles straightened out. Proper calibration takes only a relatively small investment of time and money, and saves you time and worry. Additionally, as you always get matchprints of your work before signing off, there really is no advantage to having your printer do things for you, as you will still have to sign off on that matchprint.
The real secret of color in the printing world is that it's an inexact science. When you get right down to it, the right color is whatever the client says it is. If the client signs off on a piece, no matter how obviously wrong it is to trained eyes, then that's what the client gets. I have had clients tell me to take yellow out of images despite the fact that there's almost no yellow to take out. Make a little tweak, show them a new matchprint and all of a sudden they like it. Viola, all it needed was a little yellow taken out. . .
As to the thread, unfortunately there really is no replacement for Illustrator and Photoshop, despite their increasingly bloated size. If you don't like InDesign (which I'm lukewarm on) use Quark, but that is the only real alternative. There is nothing out there at all which can hold a candle to Photoshop for high-end retouching. The Channel Mixer and adjustment layers alone make it worth the (rapidly escalating) cost of admission.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
What about OpenOffice Draw? It works fairly well for light DTP needs and it has a nifty built in PDF export feature.
n shot.png
If you don't believe me have a look: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:OOo_Draw_Scree
Whatever you decide, stay far away from GIMP. It's a POS. If you have access to KDE try Krita: http://www.koffice.org/krita/
I have used Linux as my primary work OS for 8 years now. I ditched Windows 6 years ago. I find that Emacs+Latex beats Word, GIMP satisfies my raster needs, but despite it's rapid development, Inkscape is not yet there, nevermind Scribus or etc.
I bought Adobe CS3 last week. (Yes, I also have a Macbook.)
Note to self:
1) Stop reading slashdot. It's for kids.
2) There nothing but kiddie rants here.
3) The moderators are kids. Kid mod kiddie rants higher. (Example, parent post's self-agrandizing style of objectivity has been done to death, yet kids like it for its holier-than-thou feel.)
4) Nobody without a PhD understands what you talk about anyway.
5) Well, if you MUST read slashdot, read only the science news and the funny posts.
Microsoft is going to be bringing out their own equivalent fairly soon. This will be up to date and use all the features of a modern Vista system rather than be a passable port of an Apple application.
As much as I like gimp for small web usage (face it, nobody out there gives a rat ass about color calibration of his/her monitor), to do proper photo work, the lack of profile import/conversion is a showstoper. So I recently took the time to hand pick various softwares and integrate them into a workflow. First, ufraw to get a decent 16 bits tiff out of my *ist, with custom icc profile converted to proper sRGB colorspace ; then krita (can work on those tiffs and keep colorimetry info), inkscape, scribus and quanta+. Most of KDE apps are cms aware and can output cmyk. No excuse to shell out an ungodly amount of money for a casual usage, and no need to pirate anymore.
I'd like to teach some graphic design and web production skills to my coworkers
The baseline knowledge of the pupils has been established as practically zero. It's important to note that this situation sounds completely different than the mercenary graphic designer going from shop to shop.
The purpose for teaching them isn't perfectly clear. I get the feeling that their work will flow through the designer anyway, so the lesser skilled workers production probably won't go untouched anyway. In this case, GIMP and Scribus certainly will do the job. Quanta Plus is acceptable for coding some html and php too.
The new users won't be married to a specific gui, won't be terribly productive with the software to begin with anyway so they'll get productive on GIMP/Scribus/etc. There are plenty of formats supported by GNU applications that printers and Adobe products can open, so there is a good chance it would work just fine.
Politically though, unless you have very pragmatic management who are smart enough to focus on sticking with tools that do the job, they will want to buy Adobe.
Got Trader Joe's? friendwich.com RSS feeds work now!
NVU is worth a look. It's what Netscape Composer "became" in the way Navigator "became" Firefox.
Best web design advice ever: Start > Settings > Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs > Microsoft FrontPage > Remove > Yes
I have the Adobe Creative Suite but for most Vector work I return to Xara Xtreme as it is the best Windows equivalent of Risc Os's Artworks, the last is not dead either. In modern printing and photography you have to have ICC color management though and Xara doesn't have that. The same for Ovation Pro as a desktop publishing program. For web use I like NVU.
I do not understand why there isn't a wider use of color management in programs like mentioned, LittleCMS and ArgyllCMS could provide the sources for that.
I think the iPhone has that functionality, too.
I'd like to teach some graphic design and web production skills to my coworkers in the marketing department, and realize that most of them can't afford $2500 to buy Adobe's premium suite and, frankly, shouldn't need to because there should be competitive products on the market.
There used to be nice alternative to Adobe's suite, but the graphic arts community decided to hand Adobe a monopoly, not because those tools were particularly good, but simply out of laziness and ignorance. Now, they have to pay the price: $2500. That's what happens when you buy and standardize on proprietary software without thinking of the long term (keep in mind that Photoshop started out as a cheap toy program).
There are no simple quick fixes. If people want a cheap alternative in the long term, they have to switch to something else now, no matter how painful it may seem to them. Start using the Gimp, Inkscape, and/or any of the other open source programs, and start contributing to them through bug reports, feature suggestions, documentation, scripts, and (if you're capable of that) code.
If you wait for someone to hand you a free alternative on a silver platter, you'll be waiting forever. Either roll up your sleeves and contribute, or keep paying Adobe.
Here's how you appeal to Mr. Notoriously Frugal:
1) Figure out how many licenses you actually need to figure out how much you'll be spending.
2) Figure out how much time will be wasted by you and your team trying to get by with 2nd-tier products (i.e. trying to make The GIMP be Photoshop).
3) Calculate how much of your salary covers time determined in #2, then multiply by number of licenses in #1.
I can almost guarantee you that the result in step #3 is going to be larger than #1.
" And I'm not familiar with any products that are better than FrontPage yet still easy to use for Web design."
Does this not tell the tale?I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
Most press houses will source the CMYK profiles for their specific press to the clients, so clients can convert their graphics before making a PDF of the final document. That's preferable to all the conversion happening on the print-house's end.
As a republican I feel it my responsibity to manufacture criminals. People need punished!
I've been using Photoshop since 1995 and Linux since 1994 and I've tried really really hard to like GIMP during the years - and failed every single time. It's just one of those programs I wish I had on floppy so I could break the disk in two.
.NET installed, but that's easier than telling users to install the Windows port of GTK.
Anyway, this is more of a Photoshop Elements alternative than CS but if you're on a Windows box I'd recommend the free software Paint.NET ( http://www.getpaint.net/ ), it's completely free and way more intuitive than GIMP, obviously influenced by Photoshop instead of trying to go its own way. It's spartan - no CMYK that I know of - but enough for all basic photo/image editing tasks (unless your profession mostly involve pixels Photoshop is probably overkill anyway).
As the name implies you need
www.freshpilot.com
the best response I've seen here so far is to buy an older copy of the product (ebay what ever - Amazon have CS2 listed as NOS for a piffiling fraction of the cost of CS3).
I'm "still" using CS2 for my private work and no burning desire to upgrade to CS3 just yet, my place of (9-5) work's design and photography unit kept using CS1 on most 6 of their G4/G5 macs right up till almost the middle of 2006 before moving to CS2.
For occasional use even BEC (version 4) or SC (version 5) are still viable solutions to 99% of what most people "need"... I'd still be using 5 if not for OSX incompatibility with my G5 tower (no boot to classic no classic emulation). I recall XP "broke" photoshop CS1 and below but I'd be extremely surprised if this was not fixed with a patch (or third party work around) by now.
as for cost... you're using this to make extra money for the business right? If spending the dosh for the appropriate version sets off to may alarm bells for the bean counters then maybe they are right and it's not going to be recoupable in extra productivity (or preventing lost productivity) or maybe you need to present it as a better "business plan" to get them to see their erroneous ways.
for my personal business use - one photo shoot (a wedding) - more than paid for the upgrade to CS2, one commissioned shoot of 5 images I sold could have bought me CS 3 with almost as much money left over to spare (just I'm holding out for it to mature a bit).
Come on, what's the point with shareware? The developer gets only pennies, users get bad software because of the single developer and no possibility community code contributions. And when the company goes down (they will), users are left in the dust. Not so with free software.
I'd consider shareware to be a risk far too great to take. The same goes for the small commercial software.
it's open source (i run it under X11 on os x), and is a vector based program -- this means it will replace illustrator, but not photoshop. i've used it for a few projects, and it has worked quite good. it kinda broke down when i had to send a job to the printer (they used corel draw, i think), but we were able to make it work.
on os x, the graphic converter program does fairly well, but i don't know if there are non-os x versions of it.
i guess it depends on what you're trying to teach your coworkers. if it's basics, you could probably use online tools, even. if you're trying to teach them photoshop, well, get photoshop.
mr c
"Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it." - R. Feynman
And I'm not familiar with any products that are better than FrontPage yet still easy to use for Web design.
LOL.
That is all I have to say.
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
Looking down the comments I suppose that this is horses for courses, but they've done what I need them for so far (web graphics, business cards, t-shirts). Sorry if this is a repeat, I'm sure it is by now:
Gimpshop - The Gimp with a more Photoshop-user friendly UI. www.gimpshop.com
Inkscape - Vector graphics in an Illustrator stylee. I haven't done much with it but it generally does the job. - www.inkscape.org
Scribus - very versatile DTP system. It does CMYK separations and can present finished artwork pretty much any way a print house wants it - www.scribus.net
Kompozer - Windows based code fix for Nvu - Very good for rapid web prototyping, and creates far better HTML than FrontPage although as soon as I start getting clever with css the text editor comes out - www.kompozer.net
The other cool thing about this is that it's all open source and it's all available for Windows, OS X (X11 mostly, but hey) and Linux. Free's still good, isn't it?
I found that I could do most of what I wanted with Canvas (Deneba). I think the new version runs about $380 and is version 10. I've used versions 3, 4, 5, & 7 over the years. Been thinking about upgrading.
It's available for both Mac and PC and has GIS and scientific options.
Note: I am in no way affiliated with this company or s/w other than using it.
Pixel is an excellent paint program.
For creating web pages, you may want to try Quanta Plus.
They've got the lock on everything except the Homer Formby types in the pixel-pushing world.
And how many people build their own cabinets and other woodwork when it comes to layer-based editing, alpha channels and blending modes?
Wanna take a workshop on how to push pixels? Gotta know Photoshop. Wanna manage your digital photos? Better get to know Lightroom if you want tips from the experts.
Wanna be a technical writer...or a pixel pusher...or a layout artist...or an illustrator? Get rid of your Sun box. Then, ditch your aspirations for Linux. Next, toss your Mac. Then, get rid of the tools that have been working for you all along - Adobe has a new, Windows-based tool for you to learn!
Adobe has yet to learn that Microsoft will come calling at some point. They seem to have staved off the Redmond rollover, but trust me - it's a matter of time. Microsoft or a subsidiary will buy or crush Adobe at some point. Perhaps I'm wrong and Adobe has a stranglehold on creative apps - but whatever happened to WordPerfect and 1-2-3?
It's not enough that Adobe is pissing drivers on S.R. 87 off with those those stupid, moronic rotating beacons in the flight path of SJC. Oh, no. They've got piss in the face of the market that helped them ascend to where they are - and those same customers can't do a damned thing because there's no viable alternative anymore - Adobe already bought all the comanies that competed against them.
The trend for printing is color managed RGB content in PDF/X format. Design students should anticipate on that. The output is the web, broadcast, mobile gadgets, digital printing. Most likely in that order. You archive your designs in RGB preferable with the widest gamut profiles the images had + 16 bit. Then the color managed translations are made for the output formats needed. Print shops that stick to CMYK for everything and can not import PDF's properly but ask for Quark files are doomed anyway. Check what is going on with PDF/X and JDF to get an idea how the printing industry adapts.
Zen tips: Pay attention. Don't take it personally. Believe nothing.
Fucking newbie. Crawl back under your rock.
CMYK is THE standard for shipping stuff for printing.
Oh yeah. I didn't see you suggesting a better alternative. Piss off, troll.
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Inkscape or Sodipodi as an alternative for Illustrator. Scribus (now also for Windows) as an alternative for Indesign/Quark Express. The Gimp or Paint.Net for Photoshop... All (also) have the disadvantage of not being able to use the PMS (Pantone Matching System) since this is not a free 'format'. In my experience, designing using the tools above is ok (Scribus still has some stability issues though) but I've always needed someone (with the 'expensive' (Adobe) tools) to do the color separation and other preprocessing for printing.
I find it interesting that Flash was omitted from this list. It isn't a coincidence that the most recent version of Flash is called Flash CS3.
Is Flash really ubiquitous enough that people no longer seek an open source replacement for it?
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Did the original poster mean to say FrontPage? FrontPage is not an Adobe product, which is what I thought this article was about. Maybe he meant Dreamweaver.
I think a lot of people may just -replicate- a 2005 M series, instead of buying a brand new one at the dealership.
A multiplatform clone of Photoshop for $38??? Is this some kind of joke, or the best deal in picture editing ever?
How come these kinds of things never get found
Maybe his marketing is terrible...
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
I downloaeded and installed the Indesign demo for the very purpose of seeing if it could handle docs, and it oouldn't.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
Try paint.net.
Myself, I use the Corel Draw suite. It comes with Photopaint (A photoshop equivalent) and Draw (Illustrator equivalent)
I only tend to use the bitmap/photoediting stuff. I've used Photopaint, Photoshop and GIMP, and I think they're all about equally powerful, but I hate Photoshop's and Gimp's user interface. I think it's poorly designed, and completely unintuitive for novice users.
Also, it's a fraction of the price to boot. I bought my software with an educational discount, but for regular users, according to amazon, Adobe Photoshop+Illustrator = $1,234.98, CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X3 = $312.99.
For my PDF solution, I use JAWS PDF Creator, $64. My experience with it was better than with the Acrobat Pro which we used to have a site license for - some of my documents had some weird formatting which confused Acrobat, but handled fine with JAWS.
--
#include <malloc.h>
free(your.mind);
A multiplatform clone of Photoshop for $38??? Is this some kind of joke, or the best deal in picture editing ever? How come these kinds of things never get found ... I looked through a dozen shareware apps and never heard any mention of this.
It used to be named Pixel32, if that jogs the brain a bit... I used to use it on BeOS, when I was one of those whackos... ;)
Downmix -- Artscene News
I love the idea of giving the marketing department more insight in design and web production, and I can see how starting with tools that are considered as less than the best could make teaching more difficult. My perspective is that I'm not a professional designer nor web developer but an enthusiastic amateur. I try to achieve good results and I have an intrinsic motivation to learn my hobby, and so far tools like the GIMP and Inkscape have still more power than I can utilize. I can only hope to achieve a level where I find myself in need of the best programs and turning out results that deserve to be printed by a professional printer.
"I'm not much interested in interoperability. I want substitutability. I want to be able to throw your software out."
The Corel Draw Suite is what you're looking for (X3 is the current). It does everything Adobe does (aside from Flash) but costs about a tenth. I've used it professionally for Web and Print and it's the best price/performance ratio available. It has everything from Pixelgrafics(PhotoPaint) over Vectorgrafics, Fontdesign right up to professional layouting. All in one package.
In many ways I actually prefer it to the adobe suite, which is a bizar performance hog where it needn't be and is more difficult to use in multi-document workflows. It also has a few features Adobe doesn't offer (neat vectorizing for instance). I personally use the full official Corel Draw 9 Suite for Linux (not available anymore) but X3 for the Windows Family looks just as neat. And the education version for X3 only costs 99$ in some places. CD is actually one of the few apps I'd switch back to Windows 2000 for.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Doh! I forgot the CorelDraw Suite! I've been using Draw for years, it doubles as illustration (as powerful as Illustrator) and page layout. PhotoPaint is, arguably, an equal to Photoshop. I think the whole suite is around $500 Canadian.
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
You can't leave the conversion from sRGB to the printer's CMKY profile to the printer. Your sRGB image might contain colours that are impossible to print on CMKY. If you don't know the limitations of the printer you might have nasty surprise when you see the final result. You need to know at least the RGB profile of the printer and leave the conversion from that to CMKY to the printer, but you can't just submit sRGB and expect good results.
The page you linked even says in big letter limited. If it can't do UCR GCR and UCA then its a mute point. If it doesn't support Pantone, and other proprietary inks, its a mute point. VERY GOOD tablet support not just it works or its a mute point.
GIMPS UI is dog slow. I try and I try to like it because I HATE ADOBE and I Use my Old Live Picture and a Program Called Eclipse as much as I can. Gimp is just not a professional tool. AND I WILL take anyones challenge on that.
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
And I notice that some people say that GIMP is nicer for programmers and people with that mentality. Which is fine, but Photoshop wasn't created with primarily that market in mind. I took the latest PhotoShop Beta for a spin recently. I couldn't figure out how to do the most basic things like use a line drawing tool. What were you expecting to get out of it? You do realise that Photoshop isn't- by reputation- a pick-up-and-go package, and isn't meant to be?
Adobe released Photoshop Elements for that market. You may think I'm demeaning you by suggesting the lite "consumer" or "beginner" version- but you were the one you expected it to be easy, and criticised it for failing in that respect. The full Photoshop is designed to be powerful, not easy. Elements is still quite powerful for something easy to use.
Actually, I'd suggest that Photo Deluxe (Elements' predecessor) was even easier to use- but that was very cut down and wizard-based, and has been discontinued. I'm sure with professional training I'd be doing all kinds of amazing things, but seriously, for the hefty price tag I'd expect a UI that made things easy enough to figure out on my own. No, the reason Photoshop is expensive is that it's a serious tool with a large number of features, priced for the professional market it's aimed at. You're paying for the power, not the ease of use.
You can only go so far in making something easy to use without losing flexibility.
I don't know Photoshop well enough to claim that everything "hard" in the interface can be explained as an intentional move by its developers to choose power and flexibility over immediate ease-of-use and intuitiveness (as opposed to bad interface design). But I do know that it's generally accepted that Photoshop is *not* aimed at the casual user.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Can someone suggest a free editor that was designed to work with .ICO files, and is able to deal with things such as multiple-sized and various colour-depth icons embedded into the same file?
n agement/aaICO-Freeware-Icon-Editor.html ), but it is not as flexible as commercial tools such as ArtIcons or Microangelo.
The best thing I found so far is aaICO ( http://www.softplatz.com/Soft/Business/Project-Ma
The saddest poem
If you indeed, "own" any previous release... then you know the price isn't $2500, it's just the upgrade. Also asking for CMYK support on a Linux fanboard is like telling everyone Windows Server 2003 beats Linux. This story is just a troll, I think.
It does many things photoshop does and does 32bit per R,G,B
r tizen/Comparisons.htm
Its dirt cheap too, how can you say no to something less than $60 CDN.
http://www.supportingcomputers.net/Applications/A
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Meta analysis of the above material indicates the best alternative to Photoshop is an old version. They also have a 30 or 15 day trial. You also asked about web design.
I've been working with Qatari kids with learning disabilities, teaching IT esp. web design. If you can imagine dyslexic, ADD, multi-millionaire teenagers who have had maid feed them until they were 12 or 13 you can imagine that this is about as easy as attacking a lunatic asylum with a banana.
I have had them using a program called web dwarf, which is a free version of SiteSpinner. It pretty much kicks ass as far as getting a web page done. It is the most WYSIWYG web design I have ever seen. It is fun simple and free.
You can easily make a working website in linked PDF, its small compressed and has any layout you like, though not dynamic unless
your CS can dynamically make pdf from any source. If you have a targeted audience of specific content, then use pdf. Html shouldnt
be enhanced beyond design to achieve something else. Hell even dynamically generated layout on the server side and pumped out as JPEG would work
with Mapped links. Prevents text/cut/paste too, but thats an extreme custom solution.
For basic html, just use basic design, and a designer with html knowledge understanding at least on a 1998 scale.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
CMYK persists because at the end of the day the printers are still printing with cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink. So at some point the image has to be converted to CMYK. (Of course in theory you could use different colours too, but it would still be fundamentally different from RGB).
And since all printers, papers and inks are different, you can't just use device independent formats. Like I said in my previous post, you can't leave the conversion solely to the printer if you want predictable results.
Yep, lack of CMYK is a significant limitation in the GIMP, and it has some issues. I wouldn't characterize it as a "toy" by any stretch, however, and I've found it quite capable for much of the work I do. The biggest day-to-day complaint I run into is its' inferior performance and previews as compared to Photoshop.
I don't consider lack of 16 bit RGB support a crippling problem for all workflows. Certainly, along with limited RAW support and lack of any sort of ICC colour management it's a problem for high-end photography work, but it's not really a killer for many uses. In fact, the newspaper I work with uses 8-bit colour all the way through its workflow at the moment - and while we'd probably benefit from moving to 16-bit colour for image archival and manipulation, it really doesn't make that much difference for many uses.
I have a much bigger problem with the lack of ICC colour support and CMYK support. You need at least one or the other for a print-targeted workflow, with both strongly preferable. If you only have ICC colour support, you'll need DTP apps that can do the right thing with tagged images, and you won't want to be working on really difficult images that need fine-tuning after colour space conversion. And if you only have CMYK support you'd better have a decent external tool with ICC colour support to the RGB->CMYK conversion, or the result will be muck.
It's exciting to see all the work going in to GEGL (the core for the new GIMP revision with much-improved support of ICC colour, multiple colour spaces, higher bit depths, non-destructive workflow, etc) and I can't wait until some of that starts appearing in a reasonably usable form. Their approach to non-destructive editing & history is the first thing I've seen in GIMP that makes me sit up and take notice when working on Photoshop.
... is a reasonable OSS replacement for Dreamweaver.
Right So the CMYK press should print in what colors? Oh RGB but RGB doesn't fit the same color Gamut as CMYK. SO Uh WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT. but what would I know I just have a masters in Digital pre-press from RIT.
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
You actually asked Slashdot a question about graphic design?
That's hilarious!
Here, lemme join in: "You should use the GIMP! It almost supports CMYK now, so it's perfect for print work!"
Write up a purchase order and get the software you need. Typically it is also cheaper than going outright and buying the software.
I've been using Gimp for a long time and what I miss more is the lack of the 16bit/channel support. Basic shapes cannot be trivially drawn, too, it's a pity, though there are plugins and some tricks with the selection tools. In general, you would not find Gimp an all-purpose tool though quite advanced. Gimp is the only tool that I've used in both Linux and Win, otherwise all under Linux.
Cinepaint is great with pictures, quite more oriented for that field, has 16bit/channel and tools like those to change the "exposure" are quite good. It is a bit unstable, this is not so good, and some tools do not work as you'd expect (for instance you may get stuck with a copy-and-paste if not working under the right colour depth). Also, the interface is really outdated, everybody's hope is that the new development cycle will make it better.
Krita is potentially very interesting for a number of reasons, first of all its flexibility with plugins. I have high expectations regarding it. Alas, it is yet a bit incomplete according to me but what stopped me from using it is that it crashes each time I try to load a very large TIFF in it (~4500x3000 16 bit/channel sRGB). Maybe it's that specific TIFF format, I did not check.
But most of all, I think that your problem shall be seen from a different perspective: even Photoshop may be not the best choice for doing some things (often an overkill, hardly it will not let you do it). Many things depend on the workflow and maybe you will find out that what you usually do can be perfectly worked out with some open source or cheap tools.
Those things that you do not need to do often and that you cannot complete with one tool, may require a couple of them, but as long as they are uncommon that would not choke your work. Find out what you really do most often!
As for colour management, it may be a have been a pain in Linux buit things are improving fast. Stay tuned...
Try Lineform from Freeverse for illustration...
http://www.freeverse.com/lineform/
"... but I rather suspect that CMYK has persisted because it makes people think that they look clever and to get people to hand over cash for something that now shouldn't exist."
Go look up additive and subtractive color systems and the circumstances under which each is used. Then come back when you have something not unimaginably dumb to contribute to the conversation.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
http://www.serif.com/ I picked up PagePlus in the early '90s, and now have most of their software. Although it's not FOSS, and it's not quite up to Adobe's quality, Serif beats Adobe with a big stick on price, and has done everything I've needed it to. I've never quite understood why they're so poorly known here.
I'm curious why you put a comma before your subordinate conjunction "and". Just because you pause when you talk, that doesn't mean you pause in your writing. It's completely unnecessary, unsightly and [sic] should not be used.
RGB should be good enough for anyone, right?
Basically, if you need good CMYK support, you might as well just give it up. There is no alternative to the big commercial products, specifically Adobe's big commercial products. Working in the printing industry, we only have 2 kinds of software...Adobe, and zillion dollar special purpose stuff written by companies that do nothing but write image/printing software for big image/printing companies. To make it even more ridiculous, Adobe writes their stuff to be compatible with these big apps, and vice versa.
It's one of those niche markets that OSS is really bad at filling...Not enough people need a cheap alternative to that level of a printing app...I mean, you don't need that level of a printing app unless you've got a couple million dollars worth of printing equipment, so after you've got that, a couple copies of Photoshop isn't going to seem like much.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Don't forget that, if your students are involved with an accredited university, they would have at their disposal academic pricing, which is often 50-80% cheaper. It's still expensive when considering Adobe's individual-prohibitive pricing, but it might be tenable for some. I also wouldn't rule out writing to Adobe directly, explaining your plight, and seeing if you can't get some kind of donated copies for your students (after all, if they learn and grow familiar with their software, they are likely to influence corporate purchasing in the future).
I have been in the print industry for 23 years. 10 years ago there was a variety of programs - Freehand, Multi-ad, CorelDraw, Quark etc. etc. In the past 3 years we have all seen a disturbing trend as all of these programs have been taken over by Adobe. Basically if you are not using Adobe products - you are not in the print industry. All of the major workflow systems are PDF based using Adobe engines and Enfocus's Pitstop (which Adobe Acrobat professional 7.0 almost duplicates, indeed Enfocus will be out of business in less than 5 years as Adobe is placing "Pitstop" capabilities as a part of Adobe Acrobat - so yet another part of the industry is going Adobe). If you are not using Adobe CS to teach them about graphic design - you will be doing them a grave disservice.
Parent post modded off-topic, sure, but pirating Adobe software is advice that, given this situation, doesn't necessarily hurt Adobe. Look at it from the perspective of this "business-model". Your co-workers don't know how to use any of Adobe's products, and can't afford to buy them. They can, with limited technical knowledge (or knowing someone with that knowledge), pirate the full versions and pay nothing. They play around with the software and get comfortable with it.
Now your company CAN afford to buy the Adobe Creative Suite (after all, it's ideally an investment that will make money). After the individuals pirate the software for home use, another marketing department has people with experience in Adobe software, and Adobe gains a paying customer (without losing any, as your co-workers aren't going to buy it anyway).
Or so the "model" goes.
Oh man, you need to go read up on color spaces. Everything I know I learnt from Wikipedia and the LittleCMS webpage, but even that's enough for me to know you're talking crap. You don't even know what sRGB is and why it's useless for color matching, do you? I'm not even sure you understand what color matching is, let alone additive and subtractive colors, and I'm damn sure you have no idea what is involved in color space conversions or what the term "color space" actually means. The difference is, I know how clueless I am!
You can get the full version of Corel Draw Suite for under $400 at newegg I believe. It's got a lot of nice tools. Unfortunately I can't easily check what all formats it can output to - except I know it does a lot, including Photoshop's format.
And of course, you've heard the plethora of gimp protagonists here, so I won't run that into the ground. I use Gimp on my BSD machine, and Draw Suite on my Windows machine.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
Forget GIMP. Really. Development 'team' is terribly political and dense.
Forgetting the whole 'I hate you for making gimpshop and getting credit, instead of joining my minions and procrastinating about how we know better than our users, and giving usability excuses for technical limitations of the software' aspect of GIMP:
Krita is a clean, usable, excellent, full-featured app that is a must for linux. I love it. I want to develop for it (ok, I'll look for a C-- / Java bridge or framework for extending Krita!)
Take a look at the quick mask, brushes and general usefulness of Krita. Being the kind of programmer design who balks when ctrl+alt+0 no longer worked in CS2, I found Krita enormously great to use, sadly, I am hogtied to a winblows system right now (we can use linux, our customers don't, ergo, we don't). I use CS2 at work, Krita at my real real work, at home.
I wholeheartedly recommend Krita to one and all, and say, don't use GIMP, besides being a nightmare of usability and will add GIMP wrist to your emacs finger (and nobody wants the dubiously sounding GIMP wrist...)
Google around for the whole nasty business of why the GIMP sucks, and will always sucks. It occupies a most important place in today's linux distribution - the de facto graphics package, yet it rings of yesterdays linux apps, badly developed, and headstrong tendencies that go against a meritocratic open source development team.
Because GIMP is seen as the de facto app for graphics, it makes the 'linux' system (I disagree calling it GNU/Linux, because there is a whole lot of things that aren't GNU in there, and since we are chucking GIMP out, one less) look bad.
Krita. yes.
Don't get me started on Gaim, where the minor technical obstacle of making the font used fit in with the system, **AND** letting users easily edit the font is rewritten as 'allowing the user to easily change the font, in an application design for reading and writing, would confused them, because they are stupid'.
Krita FTW!
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
IMHO (I've only designed about 20 commercial sites however) web design is both coding and visual design - they are so entwined as to be inseparable. Sure you can create any image as a web page but it won't necessarily work, be standards compliant, light to download (some people still use dialup) and accessible nor integrate the latest bells and whistles that users want.
Unless Elements has changed vastly recently then I'd not give it as an alternative. The UI sucks and there's far less functionality than a combination of inkscape (or XaraLX or possibly sK1 [soon]) with Gimp (or Krita which uses lcms to do colour profiles).
As for web stuff - it depends what you're after. I hate dreamweaver (but haven't tried the very latest incarnation) even after you've tamed it to stop attacking your code - it does have some useful stuff. The greatest for me was the checkout and uploading system - Quanta is now close (if not better) on the easy uploading but I've not found any OSS that does web coding with a preview (not-quite-WYSIWYG is fine) and handles multiple users. Nvu was quite servicable for a clicky-click editor (the table creation is really rather good) last I looked but development seems to be slow.
My 2p.
Personally I've been using Paintshop-Pro (PSP) for years now instead of Photoshop. I personally find Photoshop's UI extremely clumsy and bloated in comparison - when I switched to PSP my productivity sky rocketed. I'm primarily a texturer/3D modeller so never really play too much with colour print profiles, but afaik PSP does have a lot of options enabling you to play with the various CMYK profiles (no idea if they are up to the described task though).. PSP also is compatible with most photoshop plug-ins, which is a bonus. PSP is not free, but it is a hell of a lot cheaper than Photoshop, and in my eyes just as capable.
I try GIMP every so often, but to me it feels like it was designed by people who don't actually have to use the software, lots of features but very clumsy to use.
While I have no idea about real alternatives to Adobe programs. I use photoshop when I have to do photo editing and still write HTML by hand in notepad/wordpad. The one I truly know about is PDF editing. I use PDFill ( www.pdfill.com ) for most of my PDF needs. While not open source, at 20 dollars US, its a steal. I mainly use it to fill in documents where the idiots who created them (local government mostly) made them so its locked down with only the ability to fill in lines, but no lines put in to fill in. Apparently, it makes the pdf a background image so its easy to fill in. I don't know if that helps, since it most pdf creation has nothing to do with that. -DeAxes PS, I'm just a happy customer who has to deal with stupid local government because of grants and such
Exactly. And I've seen clients who signed off on Fierys they printed out at Kinko's, asking for colors which can never be reproduced on an offset press. I've seen clients look at the exact same color under two different light sources and ask why the color has changed. I've seen different creatives on the same project look at the same exact colors and each ask for different changes. Now, obviously, the better informed the client the more likely they are to have a clue, but there are a lot of people out there with big budgets and not much of an idea of what they want other than, "make it this way", no matter if "that way" can be reproduced or not.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
If you need to create minimal flash effects plus some actionscripts then koolmoves is for you.
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
It really depends on what you are doing and what your requirements are. Everybody will say that for serious prepress there are no alternatives. If you are really serious about prepress I want to see your hardware calibrated monitors otherwise you are just pissing in the wind.
There is no doubt that Adobes tools are good and that there is little in the way of serious competition. The reason for this either you earn enough money that the asking price doesn't really factor into things or you pirate it. Lets face it - piracy of this sort of thing is rampant. The effect of this is well little in the way of serious competition.
Adobe's aquisition of Macromedia also hurt competition quite a bit. Macromedia was leading Adobe in the web based field and was the most viable compeditor in a few other markets.
Anyways there are alternatives. First stop is to check out the Corel Suite - I personally don't recommend it, But I know plenty of businesses who use it to make real money and employ real people.
On the OSS side there is Scribus for DTP/PDF Creation. Its fairly fast moving - I recommend version 1.3.4 which was just released. It is capable of professional work and has been used to that end. It may or may not have everything you require for prepress - for me bleed setting is the one thing I need which hasn't been implemented yet. One thing to note is that scribus lets you create scripted pdf documents.
Inkscape is another very worthy tool - While it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Illustrator.. I find it has all the functionality that I would use on a regular basis. Again this project is fast moving at the moment
so try and get the latest version.
For photo editing there is Krita & the Gimp - you won't have access to krita yet unless you are running on free OS (I think) but it supports a lot of the things that the gimp does not including HDR and CMYK colour spaces. the main area it falls down is performance. The gimp is not so bad or good as people make out. It has a its own logic on how to do things (unfortunately this logic is typically alien to somebody who has spent years using photoshop)... When you are used to it can be quite smooth (I had this pointed out to me by somebody watching me work) - but this is all a moot point if the Gimp does not provide all the features you need. It may not.
The webdev I am sure has been covered elsewhere - In the OSS world there are good programmers editors and good basic WYSIWYG environments. Nothing that gives you the mix of power and convienience that Dreamweaver does. Still there are alternatives depending on your requirements.
And I'm not familiar with any products that are better than FrontPage yet still easy to use for Web design.
Wow. Um, better than FrontPage? I seriously hope that was a slip, and that you meant "DreamWeaver" and aren't trying to teach people web design with FrontPage - anyone who uses FrontPage and claims to be a "professional" anything to do with web design needs to be taken out into the streets and heckled to death.
As for DreamWeaver, while it does provide some nice tools for visualizing what you're doing while you do it, you really don't learn it any faster than if you were typing your data in with a text editor and saving/browser reloading frequently. There are a few good text editors out there that do syntax highlighting, for example Notepad++, and Crimson Editor. Both of which are useful for not only HTML editing, but for many other programming languages, as they change syntax highlighting based on the file extension (for HTML, PHP, Java, C, and so on...)
Obviously this isn't an ideal end-solution, but for your situation it seems to me that the trial version of the software should suffice just fine. Entering into your first foray at design - especially in a corporate environment - doesn't warrant the expense. Even if your colleagues loved the software and the chance to design, the truth of the matter is that they just won't be good enough at it to offer any significant value to your company until they've had some time to understand the tools.
1) If you are working in sRGB you have constrained yourself to a very small gamut. Yes, it looks better on the screen, but it will look clipped and posterized in print. 2) TIFF is not a good archival format. But if you work in JPEG, you end up getting a degraded image. Every time you close and reopen the image you are recompressing the file. With a TIFF, this is not a problem since the compression is lossless. Since JPEG is lossy, opening and resaving the file degrades the image. 3) You are correct in saying that CMYK is not device independent. However, most folks know the kind of press they are using. That being said, working in RGB is a much better call--you can always convert to CMYK at the end of the process.
--Sam
The downside of this model is that it eliminates much of the competition. Which is a good thing for the MSes/Adobes of the world I guess.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
Since you're a Microsoft shop anyway, check out Paint.NET. It requires the .NET Framework 2.0 but it's (IMO) 100x better than The GIMP. It's actually turning out to be a pretty good competitor to packages like Paint Shop Pro and has the interface down, to boot. Also, it's free. Did I mention it was Open Source (MIT License, whatever that is) and Microsoft is helping with it? Yes, Microsoft is helping with an open source project (another one, rather). For simplistic tasks, it works great.
Schnapple
Someone below I think summed this up best, you don't need the whole creative suite for everyone. Just get the parts you need. As for alternatives, you can't use The GIMP for a lot of professional work. Its text layers (and complete lack of layer options), CMYK support, Color Management, etc. are just not there or good enough. Now I get on The GIMP's case a lot. But we have to keep in mind that its version 2 of the software and being done for free vs. Photoshop which is at version 10 and has paid R&D. Given that, The GIMP is pretty good, but its got its limits. As for using FrontPage, do your web site readers a favor, and have your staff learn HTML and use a text editor. No "WYSIWYG" editor, be it Dreamweaver, GoLive, or FrontPage produces HTML that is solid. All of them produce excessive markup. They don't separate the content from the markup (presentational markup vs. semantic markup). For example, if your site uses semantic markup, then people with disabilities can easily scale the fonts or use readers, pages are much lighter weight, work with a wider range of browsers, makes it easier for a site like google to index the pages etc. There is a very good book, called "Bulletproof Web Design" that goes over all of these issues. And the visual page designers are all bad. FrontPage is by far the worse offender. There is an HTML tag called that Microsoft's IE ignores. FrontPage fills a document with these tags since compliant browsers pay attention to them. The result is the page only views correctly in IE and is rendered pretty much completely unusable in other browsers. If you have to use a WYSIWYG editor, go with either Dreamweaver or GoLive, but bring an end to the intentional evilness that is FrontPage.
Rob Miracle http://www.robmiracle.com
I stopped counting the times when I ran out of fingers. *runs away*
Woah woah woah back up a second. CMYK and RGB color spaces are both device-dependent. You confirmed this yourself through the use of "sRGB," which is the so-called "standard," of RGB profiles. However, the sRGB color space has a much smaller color gamut than many other RGB profiles, specifically Adobe 1998 RGB. These profiles can still be converted properly to CMYK using the right rendering intent (usually "Perceptual," if you're converting from RGB to CMYK) and still have a fairly accurate result.
CIELAB and CIEXYZ are true device-independent spaces. They're what's used to actually convert from RGB to CMYK or RGB to RGB or anything to anything, basically (at least in an ICC-based workflow). They're renderings of how the human visual system perceives color.
Obviously if GIMP doesn't support ICC-based color management, well then good luck with any of this. Adobe's got the most complete system using ICC color profiles. However, they still have problems because different programming teams develop the different applications, and each application handles color management in slightly different ways (at least in CS2, it's probably still a problem in CS3). Still, it's the best solution out there, especially if you know how to handle it.
I have found there to be the best software out there for getting the same
picture handling that you get in photoshop. It is called eMule, and although many will tell
you not to, I dare you to try and install it, then run a search for whatever software you want to duplicate( int this case photoshop) , they will give you a list of possible replacements.
Then once you have selected the replacement, you will not have paid anything, and allowed to
complete your work as per your bosses schedule. The only down side is the possibility however remote you get a visit from someone at Photoshop not happy that your printed work was
accomplished with one of these OTHER softwares. Then you can refer them to that scrooge that you call a boss and let him handle the legalities, maybe next time he wont be so cheap!
TIFF is a way to waste disk space. It's used by people who think "300 dpi" (used in place of pixel dimensions) is meaningful for a digital image, and by people who think that abusing CMYK makes you a Real Professional.
Yea! Idiots. Everyting today uses RGB! Why use CMYK, when you can use what everyone uses. You have CMYK printer? Get a RGB printer!
Be modern and smart, CMYK was very popular around Januari-Februari 1994, but then peopel realized this is very old, and no longer used it.
And I hav to completely agre about "300 dpi": what has "300 dpi" to do with dots per inch and print density?! LOL. Peopel who think "dpi" has anyting to do with dots per inch are morons!
For example this print shop I used few monts ago: I go there and tell them, please print this at 1024x768. They say "wat is this: A4, A5, A6?". I tell them: "Are you morons, I want you to print it 1024x768". I mean how much more cleer could I possibly tell them that?! They look at me as if Ive fallen from the sky or someting. They now absolutly about modenr printing!
It's not his marketing, but the program itself. It looks good but performs terribly.
It's bug ridden to the core and to top it off, the developer is an asshole. He's always promising releases and never delivering(Read the News post and comments). Pixel is a waste of money, buyer beware.
the BEST solution would be a cheap, older version of Adobe products. You can usually get Adobe Photoshop LE bundled with copiers, scanners, and lots of other stuff... I have about 5 copies of the Photoshop LE cd that I've gotten from various product purchases over the years. You can get these same things on ebay pretty darn cheap.
CorelDRAW Graphics Suite is about 1/4 the cost and covers all the angles of graphics, including about a dozen color models and custom coloring. For the website side of it, Notepad works great!
Software and Games for Wii's Opera Browser
Most people who use it professionally actually purchase a license. It's not that expensive at all, given the cost of the profession.
It's only $650, and if you already have a previous version of Photoshop, the cost is a mere $199. Given all that it can do, that's practically free.
For those who are not pro, by all means don't buy Photoshop. Buy Photoshop Elements. The OEM version is $30. Are you going to load some virus-infested cracked version of CS3 to get out of spending $30?
No, I don't work for Adobe.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Like I said, it does what I want it to do. It doesn't exploit Chinese children or dump chemicals in the sea. It lets me tinker with images, and is long overdue a revision, but I've been using it for long enough to get around its foibles. I use the X11 Mac version by the way - it still does MWI. I haven't used the Windows version for a while, so YMMV.
Education may just be where pirated software is most appropriate. If most corporations are paying full freight for applications, and an employee skilled on an application is the best salesman for that product, software vendors shoot themselves in the foot for NOT providing their products free to students. Maybe a hidden watermark that says "academic" would prevent them from using it once they land that good job.
It's a shame to see people like the parent being so blindly conditioned to the current backward model of intellectual property. How long will we have to use buggywhips to fly jet planes?
You are welcome on my lawn.
The site Open Source alternative may be of some help here. It lists open source alternatives to many commercial pieces of software. In this case:
Photoshop > Paint.NET
Illustrator > Inkscape
Acrobat > PDF Creator
Flash > Open Laszlo
Dreamweaver > Nvu...or a good text editor
and so on. I urge everybody to check it out though if you're looking for some more bits of software to play with.
Ah...ahhhh....ahhh....BITTORRENT-choo!
Ah...ahhhh....ahhh...PIRATEBAY-choo!
Instead, inform the marketing department about the printing process and how to choose a designer. Then hire the professional designer that suits your marketing department. The company will save time, the marketing department will do what they are best at and so will you, and the designer will be accountable for the finished product. Why waste the company's time training folks to use software and to perform graphic design when the process can be managed more effeciently by using a projessional who has ties to print houses and knows what is happening?
You're 100% wrong on this count. I just tried it to be sure. You go to File: Place, then select the file you want to import. It handles both Word(.doc not .dot) and Excel files. You can find this out by clicking on the help menu and typing in "Microsoft Word." I don't think you were very thorough in your evaluation.
I have to agree with most of your experience with GIMP. It repeatedly crashed on my machine. The GIMP interface is also not very usable. I know how to use it, but the separately floating tool windows, the cryptic menu layout, and the inconsistent design mean that you'll spend twice the time trying to accomplish a goal you could complete more quickly in Paint.Net. Paint.Net was a godsend to me. The interface is professional, well-designed, and responsive. The application also has most of the features I need in an imaging program. The fact that it is free and receives regular updates is just icing on the cake. Paint.net feels like a sold application from top to bottom. http://www.getpaint.net/
- Yes, I am posting at a -1, and no I will not use a proxy to bypass my circumstances.
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/
If their too cheap to buy software that will produce what they want to produce then let them go with trashy results, after all garbage in - garbage out
How is an academic version of software the same as a pirated version? That doesn't make any sense at all.
I'm all for academic licenses for the reasons you mention--such as being able to learn the software before one has a corporate affiliation. But if the company is sending it out free to students, this is far from pirated. Pirated means downloaded illegally, cracked, stolen, etc. It wouldn't be appropriate for a school's tech person, for example, to install 35 copies of CS3 in the high school computer lab just so the kids can learn.
Remember you're teaching fundamental skills, not products. Sure the Gimp sucks compared to Photoshop, but what do you want to teach them to do, crop images, Alpha channel and transparency?
You need to detach yourself from the product, go ahead use the free apps listed elsewhere, but make sure you're teaching concepts of graphic/web design, not Photoshop/Deamweaver. Then when they get access to some high end tools, they at least know what they want them to do.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
I would not want a graphic designer who does not know code designing in Dreamweaver. There are just too many "gotchas" that they will have to work around--usually producing horrible code.
If they don't know HTML and CSS well, graphic designers should design Web sites in Photoshop or other visual design software. Then you have someone else who knows what they're doing in HTML and CSS slice it up and code it. Ideally the two collaborate so that the design is both visually appealling AND easy to implement well.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
ahh, the good old days. I remember CuteHTML being one of my favorites (SciTE supposedly not bad either). Haven't done any significant web design in about 7-9 years though. (CSS? what's that? :) ) Anyway, while you obviously CAN do it all it directly in text, with all the wackiness on the web these days, is it still straightforward and productive to do so?
...while GIMP was quite useful for resizing and retouching photos for the web site, we ran into serious limitations as soon as we tried to produce material for printing (biz cards, trade show banners, etc.).
GIMP does not support Pantone(tm) colors, so we cannot use it for accurate color matching. This means that, even when we get the color exactly the way we want it on our screen and printer, it is likely to come out way different on a professional printer, i.e., the one your printer will likely use to print biz cards, letterhead, trade show banners, etc. For example, some of the professional HP printers are notorious for rendering what you think as blue into a purple-ish color. We end up squandering everyone's time in a guess-the-actual-color game to get even close to the color we intended.
With Pantone support, the problem is solved because we'll select the EXACT colors we want using the standard color swatches from their kit, and our printer will be able to reliably print these EXACT colors.
Since the info I've found indicates that GIMP does not even plan to support Pantone, we must switch, probably to Photoshop, if for no other reason that it is the industry standard, and we'll have a greater level of exchange and collaboration with our printers.
So, I'm sorry to say that my open-source bias has again bitten me in the arse. I knew better than to have skipped past my product research, but I just went for the OS solution. Now, I've squandered valuable time in a startup biz learning the quirks of software that will now be replaced. There, I've said it, so mod me down.
OK:
- Perhaps you shouldn't be using Photoshop if you don't know how. There are many simpler programs for doing buttons and icons, and they are probably more appropriate for your uses.
- Twenty levels of undo are more than enough for most purposes, but as others have already told you, that number is configurable.
- Simple things may take longer to complete, but when you are done, you have something much better than what you could have done in "Paint". Your icon, with all its layers, can be tweaked readily when the customer comes back with small requests because you still have all of your layers (remember those?). Move the scarecrow behind the pumpkin patch. Make the flag bigger. Change the time on the clock. That type of thing. What good are your 1000 levels of undo then? Anyway, you've already saved the file, so you have no levels of undo.
Think of it like Object Oriented programming vs. one big, long, honkin' nested if/then/else. Sure, there is some upfront effort to do an OO architecture, but the dividends come during new feature development, enhancements, change requests, and bugfixes.But really, ask yourself, when do you ever wipe out 50 or more of your last changes? Sure, you often want to alter something 50 or 100 levels up the undo stack, but usually you want to leave everything below it intact. This is why we have Layers.
If you need more than 20 levels of undo, and I'm not denying that you do, but if you find yourself in that position, it is a red flag that you may be misusing the software. You should be asking yourself, "Why do I need so many levels of undo? What am I doing wrong?"
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
It's a shame to see people like the parent being so blindly conditioned to the current backward model of intellectual property. How long will we have to use buggywhips to fly jet planes?
It's an even bigger shame to see people use software from companies that created and perpetuate that "intellectual property" model. Every person trained to use their tools is a vote for their software and model. Scribus, inkscape, GIMP, bluefish and many other tools make good replacements for non free software.
Getting all of it to work on XP is another matter. It there is really something XP has that he needs, dual booting or Parallels should be used. Like all software, free tools are much easier to install and maintain on free software.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You might find this interesting:m l
http://www.download.com/8301-2007_4-9714054-12.ht
One of the many important features of Photoshop is color-management. Your print shop sends you the color profile of the specific hardware that he is using, you load that profile into Photoshop, and let Photoshop handle the translation from "what appears on the calibrated monitor" to "what gets sent to the printer".
Why are you so concerned with device independence? Let Photoshop do its job and color-manage the image. Any other way, and you are delegating color-management to your print shop, who has no earthly clue what colors your client really wanted. Bad idea.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
I'd recommend Corel Draw!
Predominantly, you guys aren't designers. You are engineers.
Designers don't give a damn about open source, free software, EULAs, software patents, etc.
Designers care about getting a tool that allows them to complete their workflow in the highest quality, in the shortest amount of time. If the tool they are given has some fucked up interface where they can't find anything, that prevents them from getting their work done, and they get pissed off. They see no benefit to using GIMP over Photoshop, because they have been using Photoshop for years, and know exactly where everything is.
I managed to ramrod through a transition from QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign at the company I work for three years ago, and the only way I could make that transition was to set InDesign to use Quark keyboard shortcuts and menus - something Adobe added because they knew it was necessary to match functionality and ease transition, because no one in their target demographic is going to take a couple weeks out of their advertising schedule in order to learn new layout software.
In the real world, billboards and newspaper ads need to be produced, and fucking around with the flavor-of-the-month OSS version of layout or editing software impedes that for most people. Paying Adobe's price usually ends up saving a lot of time and money in the end.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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.
You guys missed...
http://www.ambientdesign.com/artrage.htmlArtRage: The easy to use, stylish painting package that lets you get painting from the moment you open it up. You can paint with oils, sketch with pencils, sprinkle glitter, and more. You can paint with gold leaf, silver foil, and other metallic colors. You can even load in your photos as Tracing Images to help you recreate them as paintings.
From Wikipedia:
That said, I agree - for 90% of the users out there, these apps have more than enough functionality, and do a fantastic job.
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.
That's why you want to use a tool like Inkscape for 2D design work instead of the GNU Image Manipulation Program, which is better suited to ... Image Manipulation. Numerical inputs are a good way to make sure things are correctly proportioned, and any real designer would know that proportion is a necessary evil in any serious work.
I have both OpenOffice and GIMP installed here, next to MS Office and Photoshop.
Real design people use Mac, even at Microsoft, where dog food rules over reason and getting things done. Some may move to free software but none is going to trade a Mac for M$, ever.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
There are people who actually pay for Photoshop? /people learn using pirated PS //go to work for companies that purchase it because people have the skills
--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.--
When Corel purchased Ventura Publisher from Xerox it had great 4-color separation output. I've heard and by Ventura's nature it would seem natural (though I cannot confirm) that it can import other Corel products. It would make some sense to look into Corel Ventura as an option.
~psybre
Authority questions you. Return the favor. -- d474
I have used PaintShopPro 3-9 and have never had it crash. The layout is so much more intuitive. Since they added macro support there hasn't been anything that I wanted from PhotoShop that PaintShopPro couldn't do as good or better.
Nevermore.
GIMPShop may be fine and well for all those who can quickly relearn the placement of buttons and new key commands, but for the rest (majority?) of us designers, the GIMP and GIMPShop just won't cut it. We are really creatures of habit, and call us suckers, but Adobe has really made us comfortable with their UI. Having to adhere to the X interface is reason enough for me to pass on GIMPShop.
I use it at home quite a bit (though I'm about to plunk the cash down on CS3), and have tried like hell to get permission to use it at work ($38 being better than $2500, in my mind), but they don't accept purchase orders and I got a thumbs down on that point alone...
So, still wanting to save the company a little scratch and keep my overhead as low as possible, I use a wily combination of Inkscape and Gimp to do the majority of my designs at work, but then go home as use pay-for software to do my own stuff.
How backwards is that?
I digress...Pixel is a neat little piece of software that deserves some time (and money) to really grow its legs and run...getting the word out on it, however, has been a real problem. When you say to your friend they should try out Pixel, they're going to try and hit up something that makes sense, like pixel.com, or pixel.net, etc...well, this program won't be found there. I think a rename is in order, if for no other reason than to get it's own domain name.
"How like you to drag your keyboard to a gun fight." - Aaron Bedard (BANE)
Real men edit photos with ImageMagick on the console.
You don't get what you don't pay for.
You can pay through the nose and get a pile of shite (ClearCase, for example). So in many cases, you don't get what you paid for: you paid to get what you got given.
However, if you don't pay for pre-press and patented ink technologies, you don't get pre-press and patented ink technologies.
See how much better it works?
Umm...Notepad, anyone? That one won't cost you a dime, and it won't produce fscked-up HTML like FrontPage does.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Sometimes you've just gotta pony up the bucks and pay the piper. In my experience, workarounds tend to be a PITA, so if your company is serious about the work, then they should pay what is necessary to buy licenses for Adobe's Suite. Having "normal" users use a patch work of tools will just result in frustration for them and all involved. I've learned the hard way, that it's better to pay the money now, than pay in time and frustration later. If the company is too frugal to buy the tools they need, then why are they in business? Most of the time, if you tell the bean counters that you can't do X without Y, then they'll make a way, or just forget about doing X.
The other big advantage of sticking with Adobe's tools, is all of the support that's already available for those tools. I've spent way too much time in the past adapting a book or tutorial's lessons to other tools I've happened to be using at the time. It just isn't cost effective in the long run.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Well, you better hurl, fanboy. I own and use both. Linux/KDE is superior to OSX for my use. My criteria on any OS is to be able to make the computer do what I want, consistently. Any proprietary OS is designed with the criteria of locking you in. OSX is superior to XP/Vista, but not to Linux. But then I am a computer professional and know how a computer works, what I want it to do, and how to make it do it. So puke, punk. Make my day.
Namo is the best value for its price, IMHO. It produces bloated HTML, but it can do a lot of things the free programs can't--and for a fraction of the price of more high end editors. I've tried out Nvu and other free editors, and just like most of their OSS counterparts (like GIMP, et. al.), they're fine for a simple user, but worthless for someone used to the high-end features of a commercial program. Even a cursory look at Nvu, for example, shows that it can't even do simple rollover effects for graphics, has a strange and annoying way of resizing tables with a mouse, and sometimes requires command-line style coding to do what should be basic tasks (a la Linux).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
the best overall image editing and creation tool by far even exceeding photoshop is ulead's photoimpact at $129 it is very impressive but not free. might look into scribus it is free open source and will run in windows. it is more like quark it separates images and text it is no comparison to quark just quark like in operation.
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.
Gimp is like Photoshop Inkscape is a Vector Graphics Editor, similar to Adobe Illustrator Scibus is a page layout tool, like Pagemaker. All work well in XP as well as Linux.
I am sure these comments will go around ad infinitum about the +/-'s of GIMP, but what I find myself needing today is a free vector editor that I can use to modify eps files. Does anyone know of any good alternatives in that arena?
Nevermore.
That'd work, barely, in a hacky way.
You're embedding a color profile. You're thus expecting the press house to do a color space conversion. Why do two lossy conversions (with rounding errors, etc.) when you could have done just one if you'd sent the RGB instead?
Second of all, the point about monitor calibration applies in either case.
I mainly use Corel Paint Shop Pro and Xara Xtreme Pro.
Corel Paint Shop Pro - Only a step behind Photoshop and a quarter of the price.
Xara Xtreme Pro - Does everything Illustrator and Pagemaker does, only a lot easier to use.
For basic page layout Word is actually a decent program. It does a lot more the Publisher (IMHO) and comes really cheap for most students. For generating PDF's I use PrimoPDF. It works great and is free. I do keep an old version of Illustrator around simply because there are weird formatting issues from one version Illustrator to another, and Adobe format seem to render well between versions.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
I would reccomend, Corel x3
:)
Key points:
Industry accepted product (albeit not widely used)
Outputs RGB/CMYK
Can copy and paste form most apps very well, and import PSD's
Significantly cheaper.
Mostly a Vector app, but can handle raster quite well.
Corel is very similar to CS2, it even has a CS2 interface option so the transition is minimal. The biggest difference in practical application is that corel can do most of what CS2 can do, but it's faster.
What can be done in CS2, can be done better in CS2, but for the same results on many uses, Corel X3 is faster and simpler.
My wife works in a graphic design shop (*so this is secondhand info from many a tirade about how one is better or worse, i prefer CS2) that almost exlusively uses Corel over Photoshop/Illustrator, because it was cheaper. Now that they can afford all the apps, the designers chose Corel because it does the same in 1/4 the time.
Mostly they do, Business cards, Trifolds, Ad's, Corporate identities (including logo development) and various layouts of other media and print.
Not actual experience, but close enough to form an opinion
Say, what if you use a 6-ink process? CMYK for that too?
Being THE standard doesn't mean it isn't moronic.
Nearly everything is fine as sRGB, especially since you may want identical colors on your web site. For the rest, there's Adobe Wide Gamut RGB.
While the interface is not as polished as Photoshop I have found Photoline to be a good choice. http://www.pl32.com/ it supports CMYK.
Mac and Windows versions are offered at 59 Euros
Or download the full versions for 30 day trial? 10 hours a day, for 30 days will get you up to speed on these apps.
I drank what? -- Socrates
If you really need a large gamut (and are OK with the result not being reproducable on your web page) then you can use Adobe Wide Gamut.
If you wish to avoid posterization, you work in a 15-bit or 16-bit color depth. You can still use the sRGB primaries.
JPEG was not a suggested alternative! PNG is OK. (it does support color space info and 16-bit depth) You can also use OpenEXR or your app's native format.
One might change to a different press for increased volume, for lower costs, because the press house went out of business, for a small run of a few extra copies, etc.
I used "sRGB" specifically because it is defined in terms of CIE-XYZ. Your random CMYK is not.
There is no sCYMK. There are numerous device-independent RGB spaces, one of which will even reproduce correctly on your web site. (sticking to the gamut of your web site, sRGB, will ensure that the colors match there too) Go ahead and use Adobe Wide Gamut RGB if you like pain though; at least it is a perfectly functional device-independant color space.
GIMP does have ICC-based color management now, but it has other problems that make this point moot. GIMP fucks up the gamma and uses 8-bit channels.
It's a little classic Mac-like looking but it has a TON of features, including both vector and raster elements, it DOES do CYMK (can't vouch for accuracy), page-orientated so you can have text flow between boxes etc, PDF and even some web output (I wouldn't trust the web output though, maybe v9 or 10 are better).
I've used at least version 7 & 8. I picked them up on magazine CD's. (What's with all the Mac comments? Did people forget you're using XP?)
Well, you could buy one license and setup a machine with it. Then, anyone who needs to do graphic work would use that one machine. You may have to setup some system to decide who gets it when.
If you need to setup a bunch of machines to teach a class (and the class is less than 30 days) you might be able to use demo versions. (Not sure about the license on that though).
Does everyone need the CMYK? Could some get by with just a copy of Photoshop Elements?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Heh. No, really, 300dpi (as used) is moronic.
People say "give me a 300dpi image" when asking for a JPEG. WTF? You can print any JPEG at 300dpi. You could print a 32x32 icon at 300dpi. You could print a 30000x30000 monster image at 300dpi. The physical dimensions are not specified, so there is no way to determine the needed pixel size. WTF?
Google's Picasa is a very nice photoshopping program--easy, user-friendly, and has a lot of functionality.
Enabling your marketing department to produce their own graphics is a double edged sword. Sure you get them off your back if you are overworked, but the danger lies in they soon begin to think they are designers, and will tell you that they know better design than you. Or, you have to un-fu@# their mess ups which may take more time than you had saved by giving them tools. When they go to their next job, they will annoy the web developer or graphic designer with "I know HTML you better not tell me such and such can't be done." They will become reviled and make other people's life difficult because they think they "know something" when in reality they do not.
ok that was a bit cynical but it has happened.
Lane Myer: I have great fear of tools. I once made a birdhouse in woodshop and the fair housing committee condemned it.
Xara Xtreme doesn't have CMYK; Xara Xtreme Pro does. And I'll add my voice to those suggesting Xara as a fantastic alternative to Illustrator or Draw.
I'd say that color profiles is important. Not just people who print at home, but because input and output devices (this includes monitors) are inconsistent. Mac and PC people already have faced the different gamma. The web is a little easier because of it's limitations. Not the limitations of the computer. If one was sharing multimedia across platforms then some kind of correction would be needed to get WYSIWYG.
So you're looking for something that'll replace Adobe's CS.
Well, for image/photo editing, everyone here is mentioning Gimp, so I'm not going to repeat that.
Now, for InDesign replacement: I'm not sure if it supports CMYK, but look up Scribus. I found that it had most of the basic functions of Indesign, and it's opensource. I have no idea about windows support, and even less about how a real designer uses the tool, I took a few GD classes in school, but that was it.
Now, instead of dreamweaver, which is a WYSIWYG editor, FrontPage, as much as it sucks, is one. I don't usually do web pages, so I can't really name any particular product, but my sister's doing alright by using Screem and typing in the HTML herself. Probably not all that great if you're looking for something easy, but it works, and well.
Instead of Illustrator, take a look at Inkscape. That little program is super sweet, and works really really well. I tried it a year ago, and still use it every time I need some sort of clipart. Granted, it doesn't do the fake 3D stuff that Illustrator does. BUT, if you want 3D, then use something else (Blender, ideally, but the learning curve is steep, probably some of the other built in things like kpovmodeler, and render in povray).
As far as color management... well, I dunno, if they can't spring the $2500 for Adobe CS, what makes you think they can afford to buy a printer that understand CMYK? Think about it, they're probably not going to need that kind of precision for a while.
Hope this helps.
---- I am certain of only one thing : I know nothing else.
...around 1994 or so, when you could walk into any college book store & score industrial-strength software w/all the bells & whistles at the student discount price! The $499 package for $99--no questions asked--& not even need a college ID!!!...yup--those were the days...
Besides, Paint meets all my needs.
If you are looking for an IDE replacement to Dreamweaver, check out http://www.evrsoft.com/, and pick up 1st page. I have used them off and on for a lot of years. I mainly use Dreamweaver, but I find it very easy to switch between them.
Nvu is a viable Dreamweaver alternative.
http://www.nvu.com/index.php
I definitely agree about the native format. Most imaging and prepress people I know work in the Photoshop format. Archival formats are still an issue. PDF is nice, but big and not compatible with every design application. The problem with formats is that you want to save all of the layers, channels, and paths. That gets tricky; I don't know if PNG can save all of that information. Realistically, I don't know of any prepress professional who works in the PNG format. What would be the point? TIFF and Photoshop both work fine. In Photoshop, many filters do not work in 15- or 16- bits per pixel. For printed material, why would you want to do manipulation in sRGB rather than Adobe RGB? The problem with sRGB is that it is a subset of most CMYK spaces; the Adobe RGB and CMYK spaces are not subsets of one another. Personally, I feel that working in CMYK is a terrible idea. I would rather any file that is going to press start with an Adobe RGB or other wide gamut profile and get converted to CMYK prior to press or on the RIP. If it is going to the web, convert the file to sRGB as it is resized for the web page.
--Sam
Photoshop Elements. OEM version is $30. It does 95% of everything a non-pro user would ever want to do with Photoshop.
:)
The advantage is that what you learn about Elements translates directly into Photoshop. This way, if you ever truly need Photoshop, you're a long way up the learning curve.
Look, I prefer free software. I use Linux. I use OOo. I use more free packages than I could ever name. The GIMP is just not an option for me.
You are, however, correct that I have not tried the GIMP for several years now. Looking at the current screenshots page, it doesn't look as awful to me as I remember it. I still hate the millions of orphaned windows paradigm, but maybe that's just my own personality defect. For all I know it's configurable. Not that it matters for me anymore.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
I understand that you meant it as a joke but, as I'm sure you are aware, Photoshop is one of the most pirated packages ever. I just wanted to provide folks with a decent alternative that won't break the bank.
I'm glad you are happy with Paint. But someday, your needs might change. You never know.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
http://www.xara.com/products/xtreme/default.asp?t= &v=
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
My company's WinImages offers most of what Photoshop does, plus a considerable number of features that Photoshop does not, particularly in the area of layered image editing. WinImages is about $50, starts and runs faster, has a smaller footprint, and offers UI methods that can save a step for every application of a filter or effect, particularly helpful when you're doing extensive image repairs or editing, for instance. The $50 price is a discount that applies if you have any Adobe, Corel or JASC product, so for instance, if you have Adobe's free PDF reader, you're eligible, meaning, anyone is eligible if they want to be.
WinImages is Windows-only, though it runs perfectly under Parallels on OSX. Not aware of how it might behave under Wine, though I would think it should do ok; we're not "deep-dippers" when it comes to OS features, preferring to create our own in-program solutions.
Slashdot inhabitants should also know if they put "slash" anywhere in the second line of the address, we'll apply a 25% discount to the overall order.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If you really need Pantone colours, why switch to a closed-source and expensive product and not have the feature implemented in the next version of GIMP? If you know how to program, you could implement it yourself, or suggest the feature in the GIMP mailing lists. If nobody wants to implement your favourite feature for free, you can always pay someone to do it.
Now exactly the same as Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, but much cheaper. And they've been around a long time.
Okay, enough of the photoshop vs. gimp talk. How about an area of real comparison? How does gimp compare to photoshop with use of a tablet, like a wacom? What about Paint.NET? Or the Corel products? Do they take advantage of the pressure sensitivity? Last I checked, gimp did not, photoshop did. Don't know about the others. Or maybe gimp on linux can, but not gimp on windows.
Let's stop talking about theoretical uses, and try and answer a REAL question.
This is at best sloppy (and incompetent) mixing of quotes and/or replying to different audiences, and at worst a deliberate strawman.
Or was it just a kneejerk reaction that simply because I said something not 100% in GIMP's favour (i.e. that Photoshop was more powerful) you could lump me in with anyone who had ever criticised GIMP and assume that their views were mine? So which is it? Is GIMP a powerful tool or just a complicated tool? I'm not a graphics pro, but GIMP has done everything I need for graphics quite well That's great, and I'm pleased that you're happy with it. GIMP is pretty powerful; probably more than powerful enough for people who (like yourself) aren't graphics professionals, or at least very serious amateurs. and is well worth its price. WTF? GIMP is free, so this part is either meaningless or an underhanded insult to GIMP. I assume that you didn't mean it as an insult.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
this is exactly how the education version of Quark XPress used to work when my buddy was in college. by then, i had graduated and was using a copy provided by my employer to train others in its use.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Alternatives? ALTERNATIVES??? LOL.
There are none.
hth.
Seriously, people suggesting The GIMP with a rudimentary CMYK addon...no. Just no.
Inkscape is seriously cool but no.
Scribus offers some nice features but no.
Don't get me started on affordable PDF support outside Acrobat.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
The suite can handle the tasks of Photoshop, Illustrator, and some of the Indesign. Draw creates PDF natively and can read and write almost any format. PhotoPaint (part of the suite) is adept at handling CYMK processing. It is substantially less than the Adobe CS3 suite(s). It has a robust community of users and annual conventions (CorelWorld) www.corelworld.com and is in many respects Adobe's superior. Much of the CS3 interface looks suspiciously like CorelDraw of several versions ago.
Rikk
The users I'll be training are barely aware that there's a difference between CMYK on the color laser and RGB in the digital camera. They're NOT graphics professionals. That said, there's no reason why they cannot learn a few basic editing skills to put together a 2 color newsletter (b/w photos, non-black clip art) that they could distribute to all the residents of our nursing home facility. Heck, we could do that in MS Word if we were so inclined, but I prefer to use more appropriate tools so that we can also teach skills that are applicable to designing simple web pages. No, we're not planning on needing Pantone matching, but it would be nice to get our corporate colors correct.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
wow, lots of suggestions and just a minute free to reply right now. I'll be brief
Photoshop - I agree, there really is nothing to compare to Photoshop, but our users do not need much more beyond redeye reduction, contrast control, cropping, resizing, and the ability to save JPG for web photos and TIF for printed photos.
Illustrator - I'll have to try Inkscape. Not sure how much line art we'll be handling, but as long as it has a file format that can be imported to other programs, much like how Xpress, Indesign, and Pagemaker can import EPS files and PDFs.
InDesign - Scribus looks good so far because it handles multipage full color layouts, CMYK separation, PDF generation, etc. It's a huge step up from Word.
Acrobat Pro - My understanding is that nothing can touch Acrobat for PDF creation and working with electronic forms.
Dreamweaver - We're already using Accrisoft for content management; I was considering PHP NUKE before I learned we had Accrisoft. Now I just need to devote some time to learning Accrisoft myself. However, building static web pages is still a task we'll need in the near term.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Canvas is 100x better suited to the poster's needs than GIMP. It's a shame that it is being neglected under it's current corporate management (few updates, no publicity). The web site hardly indicates what a general-purpose piece of graphics software it is. I can't think of something that would be better suited for the poster's needs.
n dex.php
Here is a review:
http://www.macworld.com/2005/06/reviews/canvasx/i
Pantone owns the colours so there will never be a (legal) Pantone plugin for the GIMP even when its non-RGB colour support is improved. To actually use Pantone (which so far as I can tell, virtually no-one in the modern design industry does) you need their physical swatches, which are not cheap and you need to ensure that your equipment has been calibrated and your software set to warn you about colours that are outside the gamut, which will often be most of them.
/bought/ a display that's got calibration features, they're probably sitting at the wrong angle, under the wrong type of lighting, or have the backlight turned down to save power. So no-one will ever see your beautiful golden brown as intended. Use simple primary colours and lots of white, or accept that it's a lottery.
On the web, Pantone is useless, no-one outside your design house has a calibrated display. Even if they
Why did I say earlier that so far as I can tell "no-one does" ? Because I'm currently working for a much smaller company than before, so I actually meet the design teams, see the pitches and the proposals and all the supposedly colour-matched design output. I have a mug, a business card, a web page, a brochure and a magazine article all of which are supposedly using the same colour for our logotype. They don't match, whether under artificial light or sunlight they're nowhere close to identical. Indeed every batch of business cards, and brochures is a slightly different shade than the last.
The truth is, it doesn't matter at all. The people who'd paid for the expensive consultants to choose a specific colour were angry for about five minutes when they first noticed and haven't said a thing about it since. Most customers and indeed even some staff don't notice.
The GIMP's colour support isn't adequate, and there has been too much astronautics and bike shed painting and not enough hacking because everyone thinks the cavalary is coming even though it's a Free Software project and if you're not in the cavalry then there's a good chance it'll never arrive. However it's a big step from GIMP needing better colour handling to the lack of Pantone specifically being a real problem.
http://menino.com/question-is-moot.mov
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
you missed the point of dreamweaver for the casual user/print designer. sure, rollovers are just a couple of lines of code, but you could use dreamweaver to build a site and never see any code at all! clicking on buttons and entering text in fields makes using dreamweaver child's play.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
I just switched to Paint.net from Photoshop. (I was running a very old version of Photoshop.) So far I am ecstatic - the only feature that I've found missing is the ability to export slices.
Paint.net lets me work in layers and do most of the things I'd do with Photoshop. Many of the keyboard shortcuts are the same - ctl+/- to zoom, etc.
I had tried GIMP before and hated it, and figured there wasn't a good free image editor out there. Paint.net changed my mind. I like it so much that I'll probably chip in a few bucks to support it. I highly recommend it.
I would love to see someone add a parallel to Illustrator and create a parallel that is to the Adobe suite what OpenOffice is to the Microsoft Office Suite.
I might suggest that for this, and all similar problems, you check out: http://www.osalt.com/ It's a website with Open Source alternatives to common software. Great stuff.
There are two reasons I don't implement the Pantone feature myself:
1) I am no longer in the software business, I am in a business which designs and manufactures carbon composite products. Software only supports the business. I barely had the time to learn a new app, much less get up to speed on the APIs, and learn techniques of coding color display systems (my software experience was primarily in higher level programming for business apps). Beyond the projects on my desk, I've got days++ of work just getting the content prepped to make our web site not suck, and I have not even a minute for the hobbies I really love. So, I'm not likely to carve out more time to implement a feature just to get a print job done right.
Paying somebody to implement it is an interesting idea, although I haven't even got the spare time to manage it, or the funds even to outsource it to India or somewhere.
2) More importantly, even if I had the time or money and did get the code written, it would do no good. My understanding is that the GIMP managers have already decided to NOT support Pantone, because Pantone requires a licensing fee (I even read one post indicating that the support was already mostly written).
So, sadly, it isn't an option. If they decide differently, I'll certainly look again.
I think a LOT of other people would also reconsider GIMP if it got Pantone support. It is a critical feature that keeps it off the list of professional-grade applications. But I still found it quite good for web site work.
Adobe's $2600 Creative Suite 3= 1153138
http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/default.aspx?EDC
Acrobat Pro $426
Illustrator $615
Indesign $720
Photoshop $660
Dreamweaver $412
Total if purchased individually $2833
**
I'm not against paying $2600 for having professional-quality products to handle certain tasks -- that's why I own the products both for OSX and XP, because I can justify the cost to myself, since I'm a software trainer in a previous life. However I find taht it's not just enough for a company to own a few cool pieces of software at a single desk; we need to inspire employees across our organization to develop their graphics skills, so implementing multiple workstations at $2600/each is simply not an option. If we could find a quality package in the $500 range, not only could we justify setting this up for a handful of employees, it's also not out of range for them to afford if they wanted to purchase a copy for their own use at home.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
I've trained people to use software for over 20 years. If the software is anything like the industry-leading programs by Adobe, I'll be able to figure out the basic skills in a day or two of use for each program. Then I'll train the users. If the software is useful to them, and they have an interest, and it doesn't cost an arm and a leg, they'd likely buy copies for home use and the company will pick up the tab for their use at the office.
You're right in asserting the basic fact that the most useful software is that which one knows how to operate.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Gimp aint bad, it's just different. Once you learn it, it's VERY powerful, even if it is lacking some features. I don't care about CMYK, so it's not a shortcoming for me. I find the paths much more intuitive in Gimp, than PS, for example. It works well with my Wacom tablet, and I'm even using the latest 2.3.x build on Ubuntu Feisty.
e ck_Ember_wallpaper.jpg
;)
I've studied it enough to do ALL the graphics for my web comic:
http://www.spellcheckcomic.com/
and this cool wallpaper:
http://www.spellcheckcomic.com/wallpaper/Spell_Ch
It's just a different animal. Perhaps if you think the Gimp sucks, you didn't give it an honest chance. And if you still think it sucks, well, perhaps you just don't have any talent...
sure, we don't need the whole suite. but the 2-3 people doing print graphics will need illustration, layout, and photo editing plus the ability to save to PDF and submit for printing to a 4-color printing system (through a printing company for more than 5000 impressions). and the 2-3 peopl doing web design will need photo editing, web layout, and possibly the ability to handle pdf's. sadly, adobe's 2 versions of the creative suite in past either included acrobat or they didn't; the new version adds a lot of web ware we won't use (golive, fireworks, imageready, flash) which jacks up the price.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
So, just buy a Wacom Graphire4 4x5 USB Tablet, Price: $89.99
S ilver/dp/B000BBCTHU/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/002-8460058-47 96851?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1181079175&sr=8-2
http://www.amazon.com/Wacom-Graphire4-4x5-Tablet-
It Includes Adobe Photoshop Elements 3, Corel Painter Essentials 2, nik Color Efex Pro 2 GE, JustWrite Office 4, and EverNote Plus.
Photoshop Elements is vastly better then any other Gimpy thing you can get for free, and Painter is great.
If you can't afford $90 for all that your really not that serious...
web development: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/vwd/
The latest and greatest software is always tempting, but what are you really getting? I must admit, I rushed to buy CS3, but I use the tools professionally and needed the new stuff.
I strongly suggest buying older copies of Adobe products if you can. After years of use, I really haven't found the changes to be that drastic. A beginner would hardly notice any difference, and there are some serious benefits aside from the cost.
Old Adobe products run with excellent performance. Opening up Photoshop 7 side-by-side with CS3 makes me wonder why I'm even using CS3. Each upgrade gets slower. Unless you absolutely need the latest & greatest feature, not likely as a beginner, then prior versions will do just fine.
So EVERY post suggesting Corel gets modded to 0? C'mon guys. Corel Draw and Paintshop are Darn good products. As others will surely note, Gimp is not for serious work for a number of good reasons. Is there an free vector drawing program? I know of none. This kind of software is VERY complex, and built by well paid people that really know what pros need. As for Adobe video production software, that's another story, but for graphics, there isn't a real free alternative.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Well I know it's not opensource, but the Corel suite (version X3) would be a good cheap option. I've been using it for years. Draw is a good Illustrator alternative... Paint is a good alt for photoshop and includes some of the Kais Power Tools plug-ins. You can produce CMYK, SWOP, SPOT and beurau ready output also PDF, and file formats up the wazzoo. It can also output to html for those web designers and has a Trace tool for turning bitmap gfx into vector art (some results better than others as with anything). some print shops down this end of the world use corel as well as adobe and so can take the programs native .cdr format. i reccomend you check out a trial download.
apart from this i reccon GIMP would be your next best bet.
Cheers...
David (from New Zealand)
Hello,
I've been making a great living with CorelDRAW for 10 years. You couldn't pay me to use Illustrator or Photoshop. If someone is serious about making a living with graphic design, they should check out CorelDRAW and also PhotoPAINT. There's practically nothing you can't do with these products.
IMO, Corel products are twice as productive as Adobe's offerings, and that's why I'm on track to become a millionaire as a graphic designer. Start using CorelDRAW, learn it well, and you'll find yourself on that path too.
The CorelDRAW environment is highly flexible and intuitive. Custom solutions through VBA macros eclipse anything Adobe offers. The print engine is outstanding.
There are some good things about Abobe products, some effect processing is faster, and some filters work a bit better. Layer styles are very powerful. But... overall, I find their environment too painful to look at 8-12 hours a day. In many ways, the basic operational logic is awkward IMO. Here's an example: by default, when you scale an imported raster image in Illus, you need to hold the Shift key to keep it proportional. Why? It should be proportional by default. CorelDRAW works this way.
There lots more. Sorry, gotta go. I have work to do, and money to make.
I thought I would toss this in as well....
v iew2.html
Photoshop Elements ($85 from Adobe) is a pretty capable package if you want to work with general image editing. There's also a bundle that gives you basic video editing as well by including Premiere Elements ($128 from Adobe) available. I've worked on teams where the $650/seat licensing for Photoshop was a bit much to swallow and so Elements got us through.
The Elements line is geared towards the casual user base instead of the full blown Photoshop. You won't be designing award winning layouts, but it's great for croping and resizing photos etc for web and powerpoint docs. Take a look at their capabilities list to see if it's right for you: http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopelwin/over
AF-Design, web development.
"2) More importantly, even if I had the time or money and did get the code written, it would do no good. My understanding is that the GIMP managers have already decided to NOT support Pantone, because Pantone requires a licensing fee (I even read one post indicating that the support was already mostly written)."
But the people you might may to write this support could just fork GIMP, since it is GPL'd. It's been done before (see CinePaint, again GIMP programmers were stubborn so it was forked).
The licensing fee of course would still be the problem (what is it, a software patent?), you can't distribute GPL'd software that requires a royalty. You could hire someone to implement it outside of the US.
Actually, there could easily be a legal Pantone color plugin for the GIMP, once its non-RGB / CYMK support is improved. They simply have to actually license the system.
While I agree that Pantone is not useful on the web, and that there is a lot of color drift between the camera and any screen, I cannot agree that no-one uses it.
The first time I went to have our materials printed for our trade show, the FIRST printer alerted us to a potential color problem with our files, and the FIRST thing he asked is if I could provide Pantone color specs. This happened with all three printers. Once I checked and found out for sure that GIMP was not supporting it, we went off on the color-guessing game, and fortunately got it mostly right, but the biz cards were a purple disaster.
The physical swatches are not much of a problem. You can buy a set if you need them, or you can go to any printer and sit down with their kit and your materials for a few hours, and you'll be able to specify what you want.
Even in another startup 15+ years ago, we deliberately chose quite basic colors for marketing materials to be able to use simple color setups (and avoid the then-costly 4-color setups), and we're not talking about some obscure "beautiful golden brown". We still bought the Pantone swatches so we could make exact specs, and check the results. Consequently, our marketing looked professional, and we gave the impression of being much bigger than we were, and this impression definitely helped grow the business.
I do not know where you get the impression that it is not important for a customer to be able to specify precisely what she wants, or a printer to specify precisely what he can produce. Color matching and exact specification is not just some trivial concern only for nit-picking dweebs. It is a basic communication requirement critical for reliable results.
Every industry has standard methods for specifying the work to be done or the parts. In manufacturing, one looks to standard SAE or Metric charts maintained by engineering societies. The fact that the printing world most widely uses a proprietary standard does not make it less useful or legitimate -- it still serves the purpose of providing a common language to specify the work to be done.
I just hope you don't do your coding or accounting as sloppily as you seem to do your color work. I don't know where you find your clients, but if I or my designer make a proper spec, and get back a different color on my banner, biz cards and mugs, there will be some explaining to do.
But first, I need to get on a system that I can use to get our part right, and GIMP is clearly not it, as much as I'd like it to be.
So, GIMP can do one of two things if it wants to play in the professional arena. The quickest solution would be to work a deal with Pantone to include Pandone support in GIMP. The alternative method is to develop a competing, open source, color-matching scheme, and get that propagated through the market. The latter is a nice dream, but the former is the quick route to success (and could even be a bridge to an OS color-matching system). Meanwhie, I'll be purchasing some software that can produce professional results that our printers can use.
Serious problems with CorelDRAW in a real (pre-)press environment:
1) Custom shading effects that can't be represented correctly in any format other than CDR, although it pretends to do so with PDFs.
2) Crashes more than PageMaker on complex (> 8 pages with 4 elements per page...) documents (even on the recently updated X3)
3) A confused sense of colour management where colour spaces aren't simply unavailable, but misrepresented, often to the point that it looks like someone sent a l*a*b document through the RIP...
4) Horrible object frame rendering, such that contents only appear on certain zoom levels, even though clicking or selecting the objects will highlight the conents...
5) Poorly implemented file backup strategy that decides to randomly automatically backup a 100 MB file without warning, by saving a complete copy of it under a different name
5a) Poorly implemented file recovery strategy such that it locks itself into a repeating crash/recovery cycle after crashing to multiple borked files
6) Poorly implemented file structure which borks an entire document if some kinds of external linkages/files aren't immediately available
7) Poorly implemented typeface/font substitution strategy which does not appear to know about TTF/ODF hinting
8) Files not previewable at more than 96x96 DPI by any non-Corel app
9) Exported EPS files that are somehow neither postscript, nor enhanced postscript
10) Poor handling of latin-1, especially j/k on glyphs outside of those in common use in Western Europe.
I would have to disagree that it's "very high quality, at a quarter of the price", especially when poor software design/implementation choices would cost me as much in lost productivity in one day as purchasing CS3.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
Hello, Thanks for the points. Serious problems with CorelDRAW in a real (pre-)press environment:
wait a sec... serious problems? I get work done in Draw 5-6 days a week for over 10 years - in a prepress environment.
1) Custom shading effects that can't be represented correctly in any format other than CDR, although it pretends to do so with PDFs.
I work with large format where banding can be potentially be a problem. No problems here...
2) Crashes more than PageMaker on complex (> 8 pages with 4 elements per page...) documents (even on the recently updated X3)
Not even close. This is totally untrue. 4 element s per page? Lie down on a bed before you start dreaming like this.
3) A confused sense of colour management where colour spaces aren't simply unavailable, but misrepresented, often to the point that it looks like someone sent a l*a*b document through the RIP...
I haven't had any major output problems in this regard.
4) Horrible object frame rendering, such that contents only appear on certain zoom levels, even though clicking or selecting the objects will highlight the contents...
not sure what you mean, I'll agree that the screen needs to be refreshed manually once in a while - Control-W does that.
5) Poorly implemented file backup strategy that decides to randomly automatically backup a 100 MB file without warning, by saving a complete copy of it under a different name
I agree, and I disable auto backups. No more problem.
5a) Poorly implemented file recovery strategy such that it locks itself into a repeating crash/recovery cycle after crashing to multiple borked files
I lost one file in a decade. That's it.
6) Poorly implemented file structure which borks an entire document if some kinds of external linkages/files aren't immediately available
I don't link external files, so I haven't had this issue.
7) Poorly implemented typeface/font substitution strategy which does not appear to know about TTF/ODF hinting
You could be right, but it's never held me back.
8) Files not previewable at more than 96x96 DPI by any non-Corel app In my case
I organize my work by file names and folders, not by a preview.
9) Exported EPS files that are somehow neither postscript, nor enhanced postscript.
Not once in 10 years have I had an EPS go bad. I send EPS to Roland versaworks (54" vinyl printer/cutter), and out for CNC machining too.
10) Poor handling of latin-1, especially j/k on glyphs outside of those in common use in Western Europe.
you could be right, but this has never held up production for me. If these are deal breakers for you, I'm sorry to read it. results are what matters to me, and here are some galleries of pro Corel users; http://gallery.oberonplace.com/showgallery.php?cat =500&ppuser=684
http://gallery.oberonplace.com/showgallery.php?cat =500&ppuser=825 http://gallery.oberonplace.com/showgallery.php?cat =500&ppuser=523
Buy used versions. The precursor to Creative Suite was Design Suite. All of its apps--Acrobat 6, InDesign 2, Photoshop 7, and Illustrator 10--do a fine job. Sure, the newer versions have the most up-to-date improvements and bell-and-whistles, and no doubt added features that make life easier for designers (we hope), but the older stuff still has plenty of gumption. Their output is fine for production work.
And used copies are cheap. I say all of this by way of saying that I think of a realistic alternative to the Adobe products.
What version of CorelDRAW are you referring to? The latest (X3) is fully Unicode based and handles everything from US-ASCII to Japanese. There are even 35 WGL4 fonts that come with Draw.
My short answer is: It all depends on what you need.
My long answer is:
When looking for an affordable alternative to CS, you need to look at different things. First, the feature set. You mention that you're looking for printing and CMYK output, which tells me that you look for a package that does photo-editing, vector illustration and page layout, all this with with the capability to output for professional printers (e.g. color separation and more). I guess you're also looking for color management and potentially also for spot color support such as Pantone.
The second aspect you should consider is the actual user of the product. As you mention, you look at a product that can be used and learned by people who are not necessarily trained in graphics, and who might also not be the most power-users when it comes to computers in general. If the software could help them a little throughout the process of "discovery" it, that would certainly help you with your training.
In addition, as you're talking about your company, the IT department might have a say in the software you use. According to your post, you're mainly in a Windows environment, so I guess the IT team uses a tool such as SMS to manage the desktop software. They will be looking for a package that is network deployable and easy to maintain on multiple computers.
Now, if you're a CS user, you are certainly also looking at a package that is compatible with your product (PSD, AI and PDF file formats) and potentially also that is not to difficult for you to get used to, so that you can have both side by side.
If this matches what you're looking for, I would recommend you try out CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X3 and see for yourself. If you have any questions about the product, a great place to go is http://coreldraw.com/.
And to add a little disclaimer: I am part of the CorelDRAW product management team, so some of you might consider this comment biased. I understand that and all I am saying is that you should find out for yourself and get your product questions answered by Corel of the CorelDRAW community.
Gérard
I would suggest crayons and a piece of paper.
Still, sRGB is not device independent and neither is any CMYK space. Did you actually read what I wrote? All RGB space and CMYK are device dependent because their color gamuts are limited. Even ProPhoto RGB, which claims to have the largest color gamut, is still device dependent. If you want to print anything, it's going to have to get converted to some form of CMYK profile in the end, and to do that, it goes through the CIELAB space, which is device independent. CIELAB and CIEXYZ are mathematically calculated. In terms of the web, the only browser that even recognizes all profiles correctly is Safari. Firefox can't do it, IE can't do it, all the others can't and don't do it. Therefore, color management on the web, at least at this point, is somewhat of a joke.
Appears to be using it's own GUI toolkit, which I can't say I like much, but it's probably inevitable with such wide platform support. It certainly looks full featured.
I did immediately strike a bug in that the airbrush doesnt update the screen correctly when zoomed out, until mouse is released. But it is a beta, so thats pretty fair.
It's probably fair not to push it too hard while it's a beta, anyway.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
When most people say "device independent", they mean that the color space is tied to CIE-XYZ or (rarely) some other scientificly measured determination of color. The colors can be replicated on any device, subject only to the limitations of gamut and bit depth.
Since sRGB is defined in terms of CIE-XYZ, it is device-independent.
Web standards specify sRGB. Firefox and IE both expect sRGB for input and output. The display is supposed to be set to sRGB by default by the manufacturer. Thus, color management on the web works OK. (yeah, somebody could play with monitor settings or have a monitor that is going bad)
I never said that if you use more than 20 that you are automatically doing something wrong, I just said that it throws up a red flag that you might be doing something wrong.
:)
:)
For you, you have made a reasoned case that the way you work most efficiently is with many levels of undo. I'm happy for you. For me, I've never really hit up against the 20 undo mark. For instance, if it takes me that many clicks to make a tricky selection or whatever, I'm usually going to just deselect and try a different selection/mask technique to get what I want. I've never found myself at step 35 saying, "Dang, I really wish I could go back to step 6, but darnit, there aren't enough levels of undo."
Admittedly, I'm not generally doing any serious cloning in my workflow. In real estate, buyers tend to get really irritated if you clone out an oil refinery here, a decaying tree there, and a few high-tension power lines for good measure.
In the case of the commenter that I originally replied to, however, would you honestly make a case that he was using the tool properly?
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Actually, this is one place that Adobe really shines. Once you buy an academic version, you can use it professionally once you graduate -- and later upgrade it to a full version using the standard upgrade path when a new release is produced. This can cut the initial cost down to about 1/4 of the full price on the entire CS3 suite -- which, frankly, contains several excellent programs.
i'd pay for microsoft office and adobe creative suite if they were available on desktop linux. i don't mind the money -- software is hard and both adobe and microsoft make some things worth paying for. but i won't run os/x or windows, and they won't sell their premier products on a platform i'm willing to run, so there we sit. (paul vixie)
Ah, fond memories of my Tech Illustration days. I think I encountered every one of those problems, but I wouldn't have it any other way.
Software and Games for Wii's Opera Browser
- ODF is nothing to do with fonts - it's the OpenDocument office file format. You probably meant to say OTF, which is a file extension often used for OpenType fonts with CFF outlines.
- TrueType/OpenType hinting has nothing to do with font substitution. It's a method used to improve the readability of text at extremely low resolutions by distorting the outlines to fit the pixel grid better.
So it's not at all clear what you're trying to complain about.In case you were trying to refer to the typeface substitution feature that's used to provide more-or-less good matches for missing fonts -- why do you care how good it is? In a professional prepress environment, you want to use the exact typeface your clients specified, not some random alternative.
GIMP isn't a photoshop replacement, not for pros. It doesn't even have 16 bit colour depth yet however PS has 24 and 32 bit colour depth. A few months ago another /.er posted a link to another FOOS graphics editor that did support 24 bits though I don't recall what it was. However if you want to use an SVG editor, both GIMP and Photoshop are bitmapped, there's inkscape. How well it works for editing photos though I don't know. It does have CMYK, along with others, support though.
FalconShould there be a Law?
It seems to me that photoshop is just designed to appeal to computer-illeterate designers who just can't be bothered to learn a new medium,
Photoshop is for photographers. And GIMP doesn't approach what many photoraphers need. Hell it doesn't even have 16 bit colour depths whereas PS has 24 and 32 bit colour depth. I'm hoping CinePaint works at these depths, that or inkscape works well with photos. I'm hoping to break into photography as a pro and want to try both before I spring for the cost for PS.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Wow you are an idiot. I help implement ICC at macromedia in 1995 you are a fucking idiot. Just go read about subtractive and additive colors. sRGB BLOWS MONKEY CHUNKS it is A DISPLAY PROFILE. Offset printer (or desktop printers only work in CMYK(plus other colors in certain cases)because they HAVE TOO print in SUBTRACTIVE COLOR. Again I just have a fucking Masters in Digital pre-press from the Best printing school on the planet. RIT.edu.
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
Kate works great for html and css WYWIWYG (what you WRITE is what you get). And yes, I remember cutehtml and LOVED it too.
Bluefish and Quanta Plus are excellent wysiwyg editors, but I don't often desire that function.
The GIMP might not do CMYK (I don't know) but is my favorite graphics tool since Photoshop and photofiltre. I guess krita does CMYK but all this may be out of date.
In any case, if someone doesn't want to pay for software they shouldn't steal it. Excellent alternatives are certainly available.
Pixel32 is pretty crappy on Linux. Beyond the look & feel being completely off and the Photoshop-like interface being a hassle to use since it doesn't respond to sloppy focus, it's also got a distinctly unstable feel to it... sort of like windows. I'd rather run Photoshop in WINE than deal with it.
The Farewell Tour II
I know this is really late in the discussion, but the Scribus/Gimp/InkScape suite, along with GhostScript and a host of other one-shot products and add-ons are your best bet. The problem I can see from your question is that you are not a "designer". I am not dissing you. Not being a designer is akin to not being a crack-head, akaic. If you WERE a designer you wouldn't be asking those kinds of questions because they are ALL addicted to Adobe/Quark. The fact that you are willing to propose abandoning the Adobe/Quark products to real designers shows a refreshing innocense.
One tip from someone who has had to support REAL designers for 10 years (shudder) - get someone else to propose the idea for you. If they survive, take over the project. Its much easier than being "that guy who hates designers".
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
Pardon me, but neither Quanta Plus or Bluefish do WYSIWYG.
Scott
©20014 angrykeyboarder & Elmer Fudd. All Wights Wesewved
(I'm jack455) Thanks for the correction. Please mod parent up and grandparent down as I screwed up!
For those who are curious -- I'd had such dissappointing results with WYSIWIG editors, that even while I still used them, I was only using tools on the "markup" view and then previewing my page. This is not the intended use.
I now have a html aware text editor (Kate) and a regular browser open in separate windows.
After hearing great things about both Quanta Plus and Bluefish I tried them, but again only using the tools and then previewing. I never tried to use the imaginary WYSIWIG functions and wouldn't have found them.
If I'd recommended only programs as tools for how I'd used them, all would be well, but alas I assumed and made an ass of myself. Hopefully no one has tried to use them as WYSIWIG and gotten frustrated. Otherwise excellent tools would then seem difficult or cryptic as functionality would seem to be "missing".
Apologies to all. and angrykeyboarder -- Good catch!