Open-Source Web Design (step 1, step 2, step 3, step 4, step 5)
Step 2. Graphical Tools:
There are amazing alternatives to highly priced products such as Adobe Photoshop or Macromedia Fireworks (now owned by Adobe) GIMP is an amazing image tool. What is GIMP? GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely
distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and
image authoring. It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert
quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass
production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.
- GIMP
(Photoshop Alternative)
- Painting
- Full suite of painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, Clone, etc.
- Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high quality anti-aliasing
- Extremely powerful gradient editor and blend tool
- Supports custom brushes and patterns
- System
- Tile based memory management so image size is limited only by available disk space
- Virtually unlimited number of images open at one time
- Advanced Manipulation
- Full alpha channel support
- Layers and channels
- Multiple Undo/Redo (limited only by diskspace)
- Editable text layers
- Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip
- Selection tools including rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy and intelligent
- Advanced path tool doing bezier and polygonal selections.
- Transformable paths, transformable selections.
- Quickmask to paint a selection.
- Extensible
- A Procedural Database for calling internal GIMP functions from external programs as in Script-fu
- Advanced scripting capabilities (Scheme, Python, Perl)
- Plug-ins which allow for the easy addition of new file formats and new effect filters
- Over 100 plug-ins already available
- Animation
- Load and save animations in a convenient frame-as-layer format
- MNG support
- Frame Navigator (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
- Onion Skin (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
- Bluebox (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
- File Handling
- File formats supported include bmp, gif, jpeg, mng, pcx, pdf, png, ps, psd, svg, tiff, tga, xpm, and many others
- Load, display, convert, save to many file formats
- SVG path import/export
- Much, much more! (source from GIMP)
- Download: HERE
- Painting
- InkScape(Image Editing Vector Based, Illustrator Alternative)
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Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editorwith capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Supported SVG features include shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, and grouping. Inkscape also supports Creative Commons meta-data, node editing, layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, text-on-path, flowed text, direct XML editing, and more. It imports formats such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and others and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats.
Download: HERE
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Info: Alternatives to Adobe Photoshop will save you US $649.00. Alternatives to Adobe Illustrator will save you US $499.00. Interesting huh?
GIMP is an amazing Photoshop alternative and has a huge user base. GIMP also has hundreds of tutorial located here. InkSkape is a very powerful open-source vector based drawing tool.
So here you have some great alternatives to commercial design programs out there. One for image editing and manipulation, and one for vector based drawing. Hopefully step 2. has really opened some eyes by showing how much you would have spend for a bitmap and vector based drawing tool. Doing a running total of savings so far here are the results.
- Web Authoriung Tool: US $399.00
- Graphical Design Tools: US $1,148.00
Total Savings so far: US $1,547.00
The next step of the website process is coming up with come content. So if you want a great open-source content tool go to step 3.
