Software

The Most Popular Free Photo Editors

graphic designGraphic designing is one of the most booming markets in the world, with thousands of professionals joining it each day. Due to the advent of latest technologies and growing trends overall impact of graphic designing is increasing day by day. Therefore the designers can get insane amount of learning material online to polish their skills and increase their knowledge regarding this amazing field.

Though Graphic Designing is a very time consuming and pricey process, they are easily forgotten because of the huge impact the overall result and final output leaves on a business image online.

Due to the increasing demand of high-end graphics and its professionals more and more software products are coming to the surface and all of them claim to do the job of a graphic designer much easier. There are some very pricey software solutions as well, that most of the designers can't really afford. Hence, in this article we are going to list 4 of the Free Alternative to those over-priced software solutions so that even the beginner would be able to use these software updates. These software are free to use and share, and yet they have all the features that you expect from a very expensive software.

InkScape

InkScape

InkScape is feature-rich graphic designing software that is based on SVG format, i.e. Scalable Vector Graphics. Like any other paid tools, it has greatly easy to use GUI. When you talk about its features, you would find it much similar to the most popular graphic designing software, i.e. CorelDraw and Illustrator. It has the features of Alpha Blending, Re-scaling and Node Tracing that you can expect. Other cool tools and features include, various Blur Effects, Clone Brushers, Image resizing and cropping features that make it an extremely preferable choice.

GIMP

GIMP

This little program is a favorite of millions of graphic designers around the globe. This is considered as the best free alternative to Photoshop (the most popular software in graphic designing). Gimp is available for almost all platforms including, Sun, Mac and Windows. The interface is highly customizable to fit your needs. Features like effortless Cloning and Color Retouching along with Brushes modification make it a much desirable choice for most graphic designers.

Phoenix

Phoenix

Phoenix is basically offered by Aviary.com as a Free Online Image Editor with some advanced features, including Layer Filtering and Blending Filters on Images. There is quite a good amount of tutorials and documentation available on the internet which can help beginners learn the advanced skills without having to pay much. Though this software lacks some of the advanced features like, Gauss Blur, it's easy to use interfaces ensures that beginners can start using it without much training and benefit from it.

Pixlr

Pixlr

This is an online Image Editor that has a very sleek, web 2.0 like interface that makes it really fun to edit your photos and use some advanced features on the pictures. This product has various versions available, including: Pixlr-o-Matic, Pixl Editor, Express, and Grabber.

All these software offers a variety of features to the young and experienced graphic designers. Though they might lack a little in their features, they may be good enough for the rookie designer to learn the advanced stuff before investing in a paid application.

For a more comprehensive list, you may also consider this post on techradar.

Mark is a full time blogger at LeraBlog and he loves to write on print and digital media technologies. He recently got some graphic design work done by the experts at Manchester printers known as Printonomics.

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