The Graphics Software List

I have no doubt people will check out the FREE graphics programs before checking out the ones that they need to pay money for. The following graphical programs are worth checking out.

Gimp - A very powerful image manipulation software, the amount you get to do in it while also being free is quite nice. It is a raster graphics editor used to process digital graphics and photographs. It is the most wildly used free bitmap editor in the graphics and printing industries. It is often regarded as the free replacement for Adobe Photoshop.

Paint.NET - It's a raster graphics editing program for windows, developed for the .NET framework. It has layer support, blending, transparency, and supports plugins. It is often used as another form of Adobe Photoshop alternative. It was originally a Washington State University student project. As of 2006, it's been downloaded over 2,000,000 times.

Ultimate Paint - It's a bitmap graphics editor for Windows, modelled after Electronic Art's Deluxe Paint. A lot of functionality of Deluxe Paint has been been implemented into Ultimate Paint, while there are also other additions such as built-in filters and support for Adobe plug-ins. It's not as fully functional as Adobe Photoshop or GIMP, but it's a small and lightweight program.

Inkscape - An open source vector graphics editor. If your looking for an alternative to Adobe's Illustrator software concerning creating vector graphics, this would be a good one to consider. It's goal is to become a powerful graphic tool while being fully compliant with SVG, XML, and CSS. Inkscape is under active development and new features are being added regularly.

Karbon14 - A vector graphics editor software. It's a component of KOffice, the KDE office suite. The name is a play on the radioactive isotope Carbon-14. It includes a whole suite of tools in KDE.

The following are FREE animation & 3D programs.

Terragen - A freeware scenery generator for Windows and Apple Macintosh, developed and published by Planetside Software. It is popular among amateur artists who want to create photorealistic landscapes. The program contains facilities for importing and exporting heightmaps to images, for use in other programs.

Art of Illusion - It's for 3D modeling, texturing, ray tracing, and rendering computer generated imagery and animations. Although the interface is simple, it contains many features found in high-end commercial graphics programs. It is written in the Java programming language.

3D Canvas - It's a 3D modelling and animation tool developed by Amabilis. It's available in 3 different versions, 3D Canvas (free), 3D Canvas Plus (commercial), and 3D Canvas Pro (commercial). The software is designed to be user-friendly and has an easy to use drag and drop interface.

Blender - A 3D graphics software. It can be used for rendering, animating, skinning, compositing, creating interactive 3D applications, texturing, UV wrapping, water simulations and more. Also includes features for rigid body, cloth, node based material, fluid and soft-body dynamics. There is a learning curve for this software, it can be pretty deep, but its worth checking out.

Synfig - It's a 2D vector graphics and timeline-based animation program. The goal of the developers is to create a program that is capable of producing "feature-film quality animation with fewer people and resources." The software is capable of simulating soft-shading using curved gradients within an area, so the animator doesn't have to draw shading into each single frame.

The following are commercial graphics programs.

Photoshop - A graphical editing program developed by Adobe Systems. It is the current market leader for commercial image manipulation, and is the flagship product of Adobe Systems. It's been described as the "industry standard for graphics professionals". Photoshop is a pixel-based image editor, unlike Adobe Illustrator, which is vector-based.

Illustrator - It's a vector-based drawing program developed by Adobe Systems. Due to it's vector-based nature you can easily resize the graphics without it blurring (pixelation), which happens with other pixel-based graphics programs. It can also export files from Illustrator into Photoshop, and vice versa.

PainterX - It's a raster-based digital art program created to simulate traditional media associated with drawing, painting, and printmaking. It is intended to be used in real-time by professionals as a creative tool. With the use of a graphics tablet, the user is able to reproduce the effect of physical painting and drawing media.

The following are commercial 3D, Animation, and Video Editing Programs.

Maya - A high-end 3D computer graphics and 3D modeling application. Maya is used in the film and TV industry, as well as computer and console games, and architectural design. It features NURBS, polygons, subdivision surfaces, particle system, rigid-body, and more.

After Effects - A high-end digital motion graphics and compositing software. The main purpose is for film and video post-production. After Effects uses 3D channel effects, 3D renderer, keyframes, tracks, and has multiple high quality plugins, some which are free and some which are commercial.

Autodesk 3ds Max - It's a widely-used off the shelf 3D animation program. It has strong modeling capabilities, and a flexible plugin architecture. It is mostly used by video game developers, TV commercial studios, and architectural visualization studios. It's also been used for movie effects and movie pre-visualization.