Free
Alternatives to Creative Suite
Here at The Print Lab, we understand not everyone has the same budget as "big companies" but why should that mean you can't produce work at the same quality as everyone else. Great programs to create professional designs is not out of reach. These programs will help small businesses, and even individuals have the ability to create professional quality and relieve the headache of using "what you have" and getting poor results. Stop trying to "get by" and check out these free alternatives to industry standard programs.
There's no question that Adobe Photoshop is excellent image editing software. But for those who can't afford up to seven hundred dollars or more to buy it, there is available the same image manipulation power at our fingertips as the high-priced, closed-source programs. Layers, channels, masks, filters, levels, advanced pattern matching—the remarkable feature list of Gimp is an excellent alternative to Photoshop in every way except one: the price. Restore, touch up and manipulate photos, create complex animations, or just use Gimpshop as a simple paint program. The only limit is your imagination.
Check out and download Gimpshop
Whether you are an illustrator, designer, web designer or just someone who needs to create some vector imagery, Inkscape is for you! Inkscape is an open-source vector graphics editor similar to Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, Freehand, or Xara X. What sets Inkscape apart is its use of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), an open XML-based W3C standard, as the native format.
Check out and download Inkscape
Welcome to Scribus, a page layout program for Linux, FreeBSD, PC-BSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, OpenIndiana, Debian GNU/Hurd, Mac OS X, OS/2 Warp 4, eComStation, Haiku and Windows. Since its humble beginning in the spring of 2001, Scribus has evolved into one of the premier Open Source desktop applications. Encouraged by professionals and beginners alike, the Scribus Team, with support from a large and growing number of enthusiastic contributors from all over the world, is dedicated to develop and improve “one of the most powerful and useful open-source projects out there” (TechRepublic). Underneath a user-friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK colors, spot colors, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation. Scribus has many unexpected touches, such as powerful vector drawing tools, support for a huge number of file types via import/export filters, emulation of color blindness or the rendering of markup languages like LaTeX or Lilypond inside Scribus.
Check out and download Scribus