Photoshop Alternatives for Students

Sep

Photoshop Alternatives for Students

Photoshop is a must for most art and design students, but the full version is extremely expensive. However, there are a few alternatives.

GIMP

Although GIMP may sound a bit dodgy, it is in fact an excellent free piece of image editing software that is available for all operating systems. It has a large section of features, however it is a little buggy and takes some getting used too. But if you have the time for it, it can be an excellent alternative to Photoshop.

Link: GIMP

Pixelmator

If you are lucky enough to own a mac, then you should have a look at Pixelmator. It contains many of the same features as Photoshop at a fraction of the price and it certainly fulfils it’s objective of being “image editing for the rest of us”. It can even handles Photoshop files.

Link: Pixelmator

Paint.NET

If you are a PC user and you don’t quite need all the features of Photoshop and you can’t get used to GIMP then the free Paint.NET may be for you. Like all of the other programmes mentioned in this article, it contains layers and it also has many special effects such as noise and distortion.

Link: Paint.NET

Free Image Editing Websites

There are a number of free image editing websites out there at the moment, which have many of the same features as full applications. Two of the best are Sumo Paint and Pixlr. Both of these excellent websites feature intermediate features such as layers and even have some more advanced features. They are definitely worth a look if you want to do some quick free image editing and have access to the internet.

Links: Sumo Paint & Pixlr

Still Can’t Live Without Photoshop?

Finally, if you must buy Photoshop, you should check out Software4Students. This site, which has featured on MSS before, has excellent discounts on Adobe software. Photoshop CS4 will still set you back £147.99, but this well below the £603.97 that Amazon are currently asking for it.

Link: Software4Students