Digital image manipulation is the altering of an image using computer program tools and software to produce a contrived image, often generating new meaning. It involves already existing imagery, such as photographs, films or videos, being subsequently worked on in a multitude of possible ways.

Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator  are still the best softwares to use when it comes to image manipulation.  But for the budget conscious and those just trying it out for the first time or working on personal projects.  Some might even feel intimidated buying the premium soft wares so we have put together 12 alternative digital tools.  The aim here is to empower our readers to try out different tools and use which one they would feel they can be comfortable with.

The GIMP

The “GNU Image Manipulation Program” (originally the General Image Manipulation Program) sired by Spencer Kimball & Peter Mattis.   In their own words, “GIMP is our answer to the current lack of free (or at least reasonably priced) image manipulation software for GNU/Linux and UNIX in general.”

It is a raster editor, which means that it performs operations directly on the pixels that make up the image, and not a vector editor.  Users wanting to edit photographs will certainly want a raster editor like GIMP. Graphic designers and illustrators may prefer a vector editor depending on their tastes.

Inkscape

An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.  Yes! While Inkscape does not have all the features of the leading vector editors, the latest versions provide for a large portion of basic vector graphics editing capabilities.  People report successfully using Inkscape in a lot of very different projects (web graphics, technical diagrams, icons, creative art, logos, maps). For example, thousands of images on Wikipedia are created with Inkscape, as is the majority of the content on openclipart; many examples of Inkscape art can be seen here and here. We try to always keep the codebase usable for real users, as we believe that a tight iteration cycle between users and developers will give best results. You can start using Inkscape alongside your other tools now!

Line Form

Lineform is the ideal Mac app for vector art, diagrams and illustrations. Useful features combined with a simple interface to create a wonderfully intuitive artistic process. Lineform has all of the most popular tools, including everything from freeform gradients to compositing effects, enabling you to create the designs you want without getting in your way with superfluous “features” you don’t need. Lineform is the clear modern Mac alternative to Illustrator, FreeHand, and other more costly or bloated vector drawing apps. Giving it a spin to try out its features and interface is sure to showcase its powers.

Blue Fish

Bluefish is a powerful editor targeted towards programmers and webdesigners, with many options to write websites, scripts and programming code. Bluefish supports many programming and markup languages, and it focuses on editing dynamic and interactive websites. See features for an extensive overview, take a look at the screenshots, or download it right away. Bluefish is an open source development project, released under the GNU GPL licence.  The latest stable version is Bluefish 1.0.7. This is the preferred version. It requires gtk version 2.0 or newer (gtk 2.4 or newer is recommended), libpcre 3.0 or higher and (optional) libaspell 0.50 or higher for spell checking and (also optional, but recommended) gnome-vfs for remote files. More information is available in our manual.

Creative Docs.NET

Creative Docs .NET is a vector-based graphic design tool with support for rich text, ideal to quickly write short documents, manuals, posters, illustrations, schemas, plans, flow charts, and much more.  The interface is tailored for high productivity: it does never get in your way. Creative Docs .NET tools are simple, yet powerful. All styles and attributes can be modified interactively with a minimum number of mouse clicks. A color gradient, for instance, can be modified directly by dragging its handles in the document window.

Note: This software is being actively developed.

Pixlr

While it’s not the most full-featured image editor you’ll ever use, Pixlr makes it fairly easy to do some sophisticated (and unsophisticated) things with images online. The Flash-based web app has an impressive set of tools, from a text engine that can use nearly any font available on your computer to layers and filters for masking and effects, respectively. Incredibly, there’s even a multilevel undo! You can import images from your machine or via URL, or paint something up yourself, and either way save it to your desktop. It’s fun to play around with, though quickly frustrating if you’re used to more powerful tools.

Sumo Paint 1.1

If you’re looking for an alternative to Photoshop or would just like to be able to create and edit images from any computer with a flash enabled browser, then Sumo Paint is your answer. While Sumo Paint May not be a Photoshop killer, it is a great alternative for those who either can’t or won’t pay the price for Adobe’s Photoshop.  Check out the video of Sumo Paint in action after the jump.

Sumo Paint is a free online image editor that operates within any flash enabled browser. Surprisingly fast loading and stable, Sumo Paint is packed with many great features and tools that will be very familiar to any Photoshop user. Some of these great features include: layers with blending modes and layer effects, filters, shape tool, brush tool, eraser tool, magic wand, clone stamp, blur tool and many more. There are also a few unique tools like the symmetry and curve tools. The user interface looks a lot like Photoshop and is very straight forward and clean.

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Artweaver

Artweaver is a Windows Freeware program to simulate natural brush tools. It is therefore suitable to leave your creativity free run. Artweaver offers you a clear program window, which can be used without training immediately.

Artweaver is available in English and German language. Through support for language files, the Artweaver program window can be translated easily into other languages.

Artweaver supports only 24-bit color depth. Other color depths (e.g. 256-colors) are automatically converted to 24-bit. I.e. pictures with another color depth than 24-bit are converted to 24-bit when opening/importing. For what can I use Artweaver? Artweaver is meant for users, who want to bring their creativity on digital paper. Artweaver can be used for different work, e.g.:

• Digital art, for creating realistic works.
• Photo improvements, for converting photos into realistic paintings and changing or improving parts of them.

Aviary

Aviary is a suite of free web-based multi-media applications currently in development from Worth1000, using the Adobe Flex platform. The individual tool names are bird-themed, hence the suite name. The scope of proposed tools has drawn comparisons to the Zoho Office Suite. Aviary exited their invitation-only beta in October, 2008 and announced subscription plans for private collaboration under their blue plan. They have 2 plans: a free plan and a Pro plan. Only Aviary Pro members can test current alpha releases ahead of time. Pro Members also have the ability to remove the Aviary Watermark, create groups, and view Premium Tutorials as well as unlimited storage. Aviary released Raven, their web-based vector editor on February 9, 2009.  ^(source)

Choco Flop

ChocoFlop is a graphics manipulation Mac-based solution.

ChocoFlop is based entirely on Core Image.

ChocoFlop allows you to edit your photos or design stuff using Apple’s CoreImage technology. It takes advantage of the power of your graphics card (GPU). Thanks to this it is able to show real-time previews of filters and keep modifications live for as long as you want.

This means that you can add for example a blur filter on your text and keep everything dynamic. You can change the strength of your blur filter at any time or edit your text, the blur will apply on the updated text. That’s called non-destructive image edition and it really saves you a lot of time.

Sk1

sK1 is an open source vector graphics editor similar to CorelDRAW, Adobe Illustrator, or Freehand. First of all sK1 is oriented for “prepress ready” PostScript & PDF output.

sK1 editor is a fork of Sketch 0.6.15. It was a result of day-by-day patching of Sketch in an attempt to migrate our printing firm to free software. Sketch development seemed to be stalled already, so when the Sketch/Skencil maintainers decided to switch to Gtk+ widgetset, we were forced to fork. We migrated to Ttk (former Tile widgetset), added CMYK support, color management, and Cairo-based engine.

The “sK1″ name derives from “Sketch/Skencil” and second large K character means that application layout is similar with KDE applications althouh sK1 has no dependencies on KDE libraries. Number 1 means our goal – stable application compartible with Corel Draw and Adobe Illustrator and useful for regular usage in prepress.

DrawIt

DrawIt is a vector editing application with support for bitmap-like image filters. Vector editing as well as the filters are completely non-destructive which means that a vector layer can still be edited even after a stack of filters has been applied.

Every vector, image, or text object is a layer. Layers can be grouped and because a group is also a layer, a group can in turn contain other groups. Groups can be resized and filters can be applied to its contents. This in turn creates a truly powerfull tool that can be applied and used into almost endless possibilities.

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