Wayne Out There’s Favourite Open Source Software for Graphics Stuff
After many years, I decided to throw a short post up here as I continue to hear people suffering under Adobe’s regime. I just had lunch with a long time business contact and his ‘relationship’ with Adobe reminded me this. I’ve been free from it for a long while so sometimes I forget that people don’t even know that there are some heavy hitting software in all realms. For today, I’m going to focus just on the graphic art kind of stuff.
Just like Adobe, some of these open source software packages I will mention can cross into each other’s paths in terms of functionality, but I’ll try to list them off with their kind of ‘strongest positioning’ from my experience.
Before I give you list, just do me one favour: realize that the software you’re about to explore is 100% open source. That means that in many cases much less (or no) financial resources. This also means that real people (like your next door neighbour) have poured their lives into developing these so that we can use them. That’s the real exciting part, if you think about it. So, if you hit any learning curve or perhaps something that isn’t entirely to your liking, try to fight for the bigger picture – freedom and community is worth it.
And bonus! You don’t have to burn tokens trying to reverse engineer any of this because, it’s already open source by nature…
Without further adoo, the list:
THE UNSTOPPABLE TRIO: BLENDER, GIMP, INKSCAPE
For those who like to open ‘normal’ software and operate ‘normally’ this is your section.
BLENDER
BLENDER is arguably the most amazing project in this realm. Granted, I think they get a fair amount of funding but what a gem. Just go online and search for ‘movies made with blender’ and such search terms and you’ll be shocked at the commercial grade quality coming out of this. World’s best. And, unlike proprietary versions of software, if you happened to be a movie studio, you could just build whatever you want and make it do what you need. Oh, but it doesn’t just do full commercial 3D animation movies, but it can also render things like 2D house floor plans (which I learned to do) and even bottles for the business I’m involved with. Full control in your hands without burning tokens to get something you aren’t perfectly happy with.
GIMP is another beauty. It’s the open source version of Photoshop, I guess. Although from time to time there are little quirks with the ever-improving GUI, in general I have not found anything it cannot do for my purposes.
INKSCAPE is amazing. It does vector stuff. I feed it Adobe Illustrator files that people send me and then do what I need from there. I save to .eps and send stuff to the printers and get amazing results. Build vector stuff from scratch node by node. It’s great.
Download all these on whatever platform you find yourself on, but you better also find yourself on ubuntu if you don’t want to repeat the mistakes of your past 😉
COMMAND LINE SECRET WEAPONS
If you know how to use or like to use a linux terminal (about 2 years ago I became very comfortable and appreciative of this realm, amazingly), there are some neato-burrito secret weapons hidden within that I wanted to mention because they play a big part of my daily life:
- PANDOC comes complete with an old-skool html website to make sure that only the elite will discover its secret powers. What can it do? I just pretty much run one command:
pandoc myMarkDownFile.md -o myMarkDownFileisNowaPDF.pdf
This takes my markdown file and… converts it to a pretty PDF. I don’t know why but myself and many others have experienced increased productivity with markdown and this tool.
Then, you can, with one little addition, add a super functional Table of Contents and have instant access to your PDF sections from the first page. The same command looks like this if you want a Table Of Contents:
pandoc --toc myMarkDownFile.md -o myMarkDownFileisNowaPDF.pdf
- TESSERACT is able to read pictures and convert them to text (OCR) with amazing precision and results. I blogged about it here
If you heed my suggestions here and start sacrificing your time to learn these, you will send me your warmest thanks one day.
