Table of Contents
Industry-standard art and design applications like Adobe Photoshop are very powerful packages aimed at professional users. For hobbyist artists and designers or those just embarking on an exploration of their talent, the pro tools can be both expensive and dauntingly difficult to learn. Quite often they are also over-featured for those looking to make the occasional photo touch-up. Many Windows users have traditionally associated free software with shareware or limited functionality, but over the last decade the open source movement has made huge strides towards creating applications that meet or exceed the needs of all but the most stringent professionals.
Tip! Download teamviewer or Use Teamviewer without installing.
GIMP
Inkscape

Whereas GIMP is a general purpose image editing application based on raster graphics, Inkscape is a vector graphics editor akin to Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw. Vector graphics are created using primitive shapes and paths that are mathematically modelled. One of the great strengths of vector graphics is that they are scalable without pixelation. Inkscape aims at full support of the SVG standard.
Scribus
Blender
Krita
Krita is a digital art and illustration application. It’s part of the KDE collection of applications and was originally developed to offer an alternative to GIMP for those who were unsatisfied with GIMP’s interface. Krita is mainly intended for digital drawing and painting, rather than photo manipulation, and so does not function as a full replacement for proprietary applications like Photoshop; however, it is very capable and feature-rich for its intended purpose.
Seashore
Dia
The open source world has a multitude of applications for almost every purpose, and we’ve tried to pick the best available in each class. If there’s an application you love to use that we haven’t included, let us know in the comments.
About Robyn Warner:   Robyn works at Ink Technologies, and has been writing since she learned how to hold a pen.  Check out more of her posts on printing on Ink Technologies’ blog on ink and printing, or subscribe to her updates on Twitter (@InkTechnologies) and Facebook.