The Adobe Creative Suite is a brilliant collection of powerful design and web development programmes. Whilst Adobe lead the field with desktop publishing and image manipulation programmes, they do come with a hefty price tag so I’ve compiled a list of alternatives below.
Inkscape as an alternative to Adobe Illustrator
http://www.inkscape.org/
An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.
Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more. We also aim to maintain a thriving user and developer community by using open, community-oriented development.
GIMP as an alternative to Adobe Photoshop
http://www.gimp.org/
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 is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.
Scribus as an alternative to Adobe InDesign
http://www.scribus.net
Scribus is an Open Source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/UNIX, Mac OS X, OS/2 Warp 4/eComStation and Windows desktops with a combination of “press-ready” output and new approaches to page layout.
Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, Spot Colors, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.
Nvu as an alternative to Adobe Dreamweaver
http://nvu.en.softonic.com/
Nvu is the new Web editing environment based on the Mozilla platform and its Gecko layout engine. Primarily made for Linspire and other Linux flavors, its cross-platform architecture makes it available on a wide variety of other platforms.
Nvu binary test builds are now available for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X and FreeBSD. The easiest-to-use, most powerful Web Authoring System available for desktop Linux users.
Online tools
If you like to keep your software in the clouds, check out this site for some online alternatives – http://aviary.com/
What do you use?
Have you come across any good alternatives – please comment below.
[...] Here is a really simple and quick way of creating a vectorized rubber stamp effect using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop (CS4). Don’t have the Adobe Creative suite? Check out these open source or free alternatives here. [...]
[...] Open source and free alternatives to Adobe Creative Suite software … [...]
Really useful, especially since CS5 is so expensive, even the upgrade cost is too much. Not heard of Inkscape before.
This is all very useful, i think i try some of these. though to say the truth gimp was a nightmare of an app! it went crazy and glitches every time i tried it!
if i need a quick optimization or reducing pics – i use google photos or its russian version – yandex.ru photos service.
These are all good alternatives, but I thought I should add something: Inkscape is only in version 0.48 now. It’s still an experimental program. When I used it, it didn’t seem as smooth as Illustrator, and it would sometimes crash or just close by itself without prompting me to save my work first. I’d suggest to wait until a full 1.0 version of Inkscape is released before using it. Other than that, I agree with the other alternatives.