WebUser – 21 August 2019

Overrated software

COVER

FEATURE

IMAGE EDITOR

Adobe Photoshop
http://www.photoshop.com
Don’t get us wrong, Photoshop is an
excellent image-editing program. In
fact, it’s easily the best softwareof its
kind. It’s also very expensive, however,
and you can no longer buy it as a single
program – you have tocommit to
paying for an Adobe Creative Cloud
subscription. If you only do some
occasional image-editing, buying a
subscription really isn’t worth it –
especially when even the cheapest
option, the Photography plan (which
includes Photoshop, Lightroom,
LightroomClassic and 20GB of cloud
storage) costs £9.98 a month, or £119.76
a year. Like all advanced programs,
Photoshop also suffers from quite a few
problemscaused by bugs and other
issu es, as you can see from the list at
bit.ly/psprob482.

GIMP
http://www.gimp.org
The GNU ImageManipulation Program
(GIMP) has long been viewed as a grea t
open-source alternativ e to Photoshop.
It’s available for Windows, Linux and

macOS and offers much of the same

functionality as Adobe’ s software,

including full layer support,colour

adjustments, automatic image

enhancement tools, customisable

brushes, horizontal and vertical

straig htening and more, as well as

plenty of effe cts and filters. It even

supports third-party plug-ins so you

can expand its feat ure set further.

GIMP received a major update in April,

which introduced a numberof new

feat ures , followed by a bug fix releas e

two months later (including additional

feat ures ). In the past,the biggest

complain t about the program

concernedits interface, which consisted

of a confusing selection of floating

windows. Thankfully, GIMP now has a

standard interface that you can

customise to suit your needs.

Krita

krita.org

Krita is a free,open-source painting

program with a huge numberof

customisable brushes that also allows

you to fix and improve your photos.

It offers a decent array of filters and

is packed with feat ures , including

drawing assistants for working with

straig ht lines and circles, and brush

stabilisers that make sketchin g with

the mouse easier.

Krita’s development started in 1999

when it was originally conceived as an

image-editing tool to rival Photoshop

and GIMP, but then in 2009 the focus

switched to painting. It’s now available

for Windows, macOS and Linux, and

nightly builds keep it up to date with the

latest feat uresand bug fixes.

TEXTEDITOR

Notepad

Built-in Windows tool

Notepad may be a key Windows feat ure,

but it hasn’t changed much over the

years. It’s still a very basic text editor

and lack s many of the features you’re

likely to need. Confusingly, Windows

also offers a more advanced text editor,

WordPad, but even that’s not grea t.

The latest version of Windows 10 (the

May 2019 Update, or 1903) introduced a

21 Aug - 3 Sept 2019 43

Photoshop is too expensive and advanced
for most people’s ev eryday image editing

GIMP offers an in credib le set of to ols considering it’s free to use

If GIMP seems too complex for your creative projects, try Krita instead

Many Wind ows user s think fondl y of

Notepad, but it’s verybasic