Some of my contacts have been asking me about open source and freeware alternatives to mainstream creative editing suites. Frankly, unless you are doing extremely high level rendering for highly commercialised projects, there’s very little need to purchase mainstream software anymore – the open source community has provided! I’ve included some links below for anyone interested.
Video:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_editing_software#Closed-source_freeware
Images:
http://www.picnik.com/
https://www.photoshop.com/express/landing.html
Drawing:
http://www.inkscape.org/
http://www.freebyte.com/graphicprograms/
Sound:
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
And when it comes down to it, OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org/) for documents, presentations and spreadsheets and Google Groups/Google docs for collaborative document management is sufficient for pretty much anyone outside a large-scale commercial enterprise. So there’s really no excuse for wasting your money on software these days!
(Oh and anyone who has any other suggetions, please feel free to add in comments below!)
Hi Joanne,
I’ve been reading your blog since I saw you present at the Brisbane Ideas festival a couple of years ago.
One of the best sources of freeware/open source information can be found here:
http://techsupportalert.com/dr/
…mainly because it’s huge and wiki-based (so it’s evolving thanks to contributions of the masses).
Lots of links to lots of good tools, sorted into neat categories and fairly easy to navigate.
I hope it’s of some use to you.
Excellent suggestion, Andrew – thanks for this!
Bring out the GIMP!