While I’m an advocate for the Adobe suite of tools (having had them drummed into me through ports of employment and education), the cost of buying the full Adobe Creative Suite can be quite expensive, as can picking up individual copies of both Photoshop and Illustrator, especially now in their CS3 iterations.

While I put aside the hard-earned dough to fund CS3 purchases of both Photoshop and Illustrator, there are cross-platform open source alternatives available for designers.

GIMP

If you’re looking for something along the lines of Photoshop, then why not try your hand at GIMP? Billed as “the GNU Image Manipulation Program“, GIMP can be used in both a Windows and OSX environment and is suitable for the likes of photo retouching, image composition, manipulation and authoring.

You still get the use of alpha channels, layers, quick-masking, paths and all the usual features you would expect from an image editor, with the added bonus that it opens PSD files (Photoshop Documents).

Download the latest version of GIMP here.

Inkscape

Inkscape came recommended to me a few months ago as a strong open source alternative to Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape being a vector drawing program.

Ideal for illustrators, logo and graphic designers, it packs features similar to those found in 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. (via).

Support for Windows 98 or ME (shudder the thoughts) users no longer exists but you can download Linux / Windows / OSX copies, while the application has also been successfully used on FreeBSD and other Unix-based systems.

Download the latest version of Inkscape here.

When it’s not going to cost you anything, what have you really got lose? Plus, if you’re saving for that CS3 license, you’ve got two powerful, free packages that will act as a steady stop-gap until you spring for your preferred toolset.

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