Open Source alternatives to Adobe Creative Suite

With the take over of Macromedia by Adobe, they have increased their arsenal of design packages, as well as the price. No-one can do pretty much without the popular package of Photoshop for their images, and Dreamweaver for websites, especially aspiring design students who do not have much money.

Nevertheless, open source software has come to save the day. What is open source software? In a nutshell it is free software with its source-code freely available to those who would like to expand or improve on the software. To expand further, anyone who’s tinkered with the source code such as optimisation or additional functionality can resubmit it back to the holders and let others enjoy the fruits of your labour.

I have trawled through the World Wide Web to find out how everyone can benefit from Open Source to build up their own studio and compete against Adobe Creative Suite. All this for free, apart from the cost of the Internet. I am planning to have a facility where you can purchase the CD from here for the price of the CD and sending it, if you don’t have decent access to the Internet. There are some software that are not open source but are, nevertheless, free.

In the following, I look into the software available on the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS operating systems. While open source caters mostly for GNU/Linux and on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS users seam to have been left in the shade. I am going to turn that around and provide help to them as well, as I love the Mac.

Photoshop

Our favourite application, where you can perform a whole host of digital imager from the humble photo editing task right through to creating impressive designs. My favourite open source alternative is The GIMP, which is available on the Windows platform and the Apple Mac, and comes in different varieties namely GIMPShop which tries to mimic Photoshop’s interface.

The Mac, however, requires an X11 plugin which I for the life of me cannot get working. If you can get it working, nice one. Otherwise for those in the same boat as me an aspiring developer has created Seashore, which is based on The GIMP and does not require any additional plugins.

Another nifty alternative is Paint.NET for the Windows platform, which requires the .NET framework. This was created by two students for a university project and eventually got hired by Microsoft.

Illustrator

This is a vector based drawing application, which you can use for the print media such as business cards, leaflets and advertising. After much searching, I came across Inkscape, which is available for Windows and Mac OS. A handy functionality is that it has is the ability to export straight to a PDF. It can also be used to create pages for the web and be standards compliant (CSS, XML and SVG) at the same time.

Acrobat

A monolith application, which installs a print driver to convert pretty much anything to PDF, from Word documents to images. Additionally, it allows you to edit and view PDFs. A really fast loading PDF viewer is FoxIT PDF Reader, and combined with PDF Creator you’ve pretty much got the basis of PDF creation and viewing.

PDF Creator installs a print driver similar to Acrobat and is by far my favourite application, which is available on Windows and Mac OS. Another application is PrimoPDF, which is not open source but is just as good if not better than PDF Creator and allows you to merge PDF documents.

Sadly enough, these applications are not available on Mac OS. It is not easy to find a PDF converter/generator. However, the OS does have a built in viewer (Preview) which supports PDF viewing and there is a "Save as PDF" feature when printing from within your applications (more here). Also, I did find Free PDF Converter, but I haven’t tested it.

For the techy guru's you can still get hold of Ghostscript and an interface for it, which can convert postscript files to PDF.

Dreamweaver/GoLive

I haven’t forgot this one. It seems that Acrobat has dropped GoLive in favour of Dreamweaver for the purpose of website maintenance and creation, and I don’t blame them. However, all is not lost. NVU is available which provides a WYSIWYG interface and highlighting for you HTML code, and is based on the Gecko engine which is powers Mozilla Firefox.

The interface is slightly different to Dreamweaver’s interface, but is still straightforward to use. Recently, a new application called KompoZer which is based on NVU was released and extends the feature set a bit more, but is considered as a bug release for NVU. So maybe it is...

InDesign

Adobe’s flagship product is InDesign, which is creating waves in the Desktop Publishing (DTP) world. The open source alternative, Scribus, will not be able to match InDesign in terms of features and functionality, but it serves as an excellent introduction.

A handy feature to Scribus is the ability to work closely with The GIMP and OpenOffice.org. It is nice to see that open source software is becoming more “open” in the field of design and interlinking with one another, thus strengthening the playing field for freeware software.

Lucky for you guys it is available on Windows and Mac OS.

Soundbooth

This is, essentially, audio recording and editing software and the open source equivalent would be Audacity. Audacity has been around for a long time, and is available on Windows and Mac OS. It has a pretty tidy and uncluttered interface and is a powerful audio editor.

Flash

This is a beefy application, and the stand alone player has disappeared into browser only plugins. However there is an open source player called Gnash. As for the creation of Flash/SWF sites a great alternative is Synfig Studio, which has a crazy interface just like Flash. But don’t worry as there is a whole host of resources available on the Internet to get you going as well as being available for Windows and Mac OS.

There is another freeware application (for Windows users) called LiveSwift Lite if you're interested in alternatives.

After Effects

Oh yes. There’s even help for those who want to make funky effects on their home videos or want to make it in the broadcasting world. This comes in the form of Jashaka, which is available on Windows and Mac OS. Users of After Effects may eventually find they’re way around on the interface, since it has been modelled around Combustion.

While Jahshaka cannot is not fully there yet, it is the first application to be open source in this field. I am still impressed with what it can already do and there is a lot of functionality.

That’s a wrap

Well, that’s all folks. Casting an eye over the previous years freeware software has come a long way to perform wonders casting us away from the reliance on commercial software. I have already filled my Mac with a combination of freeware and open source software, which is used for my day to day work and definitely left my wallet alone.

Keep your eyes peeled for my next blog, which will cover getting free/open source software for daily usage at home and the office, and other festivities.