Four FREE Alternatives to the Rip-off that is Adobe PhotoShop

This application has to have the weirdest name of any graphics app! Project Dogwaffle 1.2 is a free virtual paint style application from the makers of a range of commercial graphics programs but it doesn't nag you to upgrade to a paid version.

While I found the program great fun to use, and it is clear from the gallery that some people make amazing images with this program, I found that it was limited to "painting" with the mouse or a graphics tablet rather than the all purpose image editor I was looking for. An example of the limitations is that I could find no way to paste.

While totally free and open source products tend to gradually evolve, the free version of Project Dogwaffle is basically an old version of the commercial product and so is unlikely to be improved.

If you are interested in virtual painting then this would be hard to beat as a free introduction - but for image editing you should look elsewhere.

A free Photoshop alternative from... Adobe? Yes! Photoshop.com is a free version of Photoshop available only in a web-based version.

Photoshop.com allows you to upload images from your computer or transfer directly from Flickr, Facebook, Picasa or Photobucket. You are given 2GB(upgradeable at a cost) of space online in which to save your creations, or you can transfer back to the online services mentioned already. There is no way to create a new image from scratch.

There are some impressive effects you can apply to your images but there are no simple tools like brushes and line tools. I found that many effects were applied instantly and none of them took a long time.

The online help site is impressive with a good selection of video tutorials.

Clearly Adobe would like you to buy the $700 Photoshop CS4 - but they don't push it at you to an offensive extent. This being the case I would mention that there are some obvious features left out of Photoshop.com and it seems likely they will not be adding them anytime soon.

The award winning Paint.net started in 2004 as a 15 week student project at Washington State University mentored by Microsoft which aimed to replace the Paint prgram which ships with Windows. Since then the original programmers have continued to add features to the program. Today at version 3.36 and available in 8 languages, Paint.net boasts support for layers, blending, transparency, and plugins.

Despite being a free product Paint.net is updated regularly and has a busy and informative forum containing many tutorials and plugins as well as the usual chit chat.

In some ways Paint.net should seem familiar as it is based on Paint - but there are now so many features it will take you a little time to get used to it. While it would be hard to argue that Paint.net has all the features of Photoshop it certainly does have more features than most users will ever need and is actually quite enjoyable to use.

If Project Dogwaffle wasn't in this list I would feel obliged to comment on the weirdness of the name GIMP - actually it is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. This is an open source program deliberately designed to rival Adobe Photoshop and is by far the most complete alternative in this list having been in development since 1995.

Open source means that the source code of this program is freely available for anyone with the necessary skills to modify or add to. This is a huge bonus for regular users too - this program will never cease development or improvement because of a company going under or being bought out and whatever features you use will be improved as time goes by.

The program is powerful which inevitably means it will take more effort to learn than a simpler program like Paint.net. Like Photoshop there are a massive amount of tutorials available online and there is also huge support by way of plugins.

GIMP supports reading and writing of most Photoshop files as well as a plethora of other formats. Plugins for GIMP are not Photoshop compatible though some Photoshop plugins can be used with GIMP using a plugin designed to interface with them.

One interesting aspect of Open Source is that the main code can be taken as the base for a new program. This has happened with GIMP several times resulting in new programs such as GIMPshop (for people used to the interface of Photoshop) and Cinepaint (used for editing frames of motion pictures).

In spite of a slightly difficult to learn interface I believe GIMP is the most promising free graphics application available. It is powerful enough that users are unlikely to outgrow it - and more features are added regularly both in new versions of the program and in plugins.