Roll your own creative suite

So, you need to complete a design project that requires the image-editing capabilities of Photoshop along with the vectorised lines of Illustrator, and it needs to be animated in Flash with documentation in a PDF. However, your software budget is looking somewhat threadbare. Take your head out of the oven — there is a way to save your project and your wallet from the eye-watering price tags of the various versions of Adobe's Creative Suite 3 (especially in the UK). You just have to be a bit…creative.

Photoshop is arguably the most powerful and certainly the best-known of the Adobe lineup. In fact, the term 'photoshop' is now in common usage as a verb that describes altering an image. The program’s popularity is well-deserved, with an array of features that is mind-boggling. Unfortunately, that incredible feature set comes with associated bloat, and Photoshop is quickly becoming the juggernaut of image editors: yes, it gets the job done, but no, the job description should not include cruising down country roads.

There are two great, free alternatives to Photoshop. First, Paint.NET utilises the Microsoft .NET Framework to create a stable, lightweight program with nearly every major function the average user could want, from a Lasso tool to Gaussian blur. The interface is completely familiar, with the added benefit of translucent panels that make it easy to see what’s going on when the windows get cluttered. Paint.NET doesn’t yet support RAW format, however, which certainly limits its appeal.

The second major image editor far more closely rivals Photoshop in features and functionality, if not in appearance or price. The GIMP is a freeware editor that started off in Linux and was eventually ported to Windows, boosting its audience and popularity. It seems to include almost everything that Photoshop does: channels, layers, masks, more than 100 filters and effects, tabbed palettes, RAW support, editable text tools and colour operations such as levels. And if the feature you’re looking for isn’t in the main program, the chances are very high that someone has created a plug-in for it, including digital printing. Although the GIMP may be more difficult to install and start using than Photoshop, it takes less time to get up and running once you’ve got it set up the way you like.

Photoshop is not the only Adobe design juggernaut with a free analogue. The tools in Illustrator, everybody’s favourite vector-graphics software, also can be emulated without too much fuss. Enter Inkscape. It’s not the only one of its kind, although it seems like it at times. Many of the now-essential tools found in its competition show up here, including paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns and grouping. The program also supports Creative Commons metadata, node editing, layers, bitmap tracing and direct XML editing. It does all this, and more, without an enormous system footprint or any installation hassle.

Much like its siblings, Adobe Acrobat does its job well, except that it, too, can become a black hole for system resources. If you’re looking for a good PDF reader, Foxit PDF Reader has been a favourite, deserving of its popularity. It opens PDFs from the Web quickly and without hanging our system, not even for a few seconds. Adobe Reader has improved recently, but it can still take some time to load.

PrimoPDF is a great PDF maker for similar reasons. It’s lightweight, with a small footprint, and is easy to use. Primo installs as a 'Print' option in every program you’ve got, so you can create a PDF using anything from HTML documents in Firefox to images in Paint.NET. Simple PDF publishing doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that.

Now let’s look at Adobe’s Dreamweaver. Although Dreamweaver is the acknowledged leader in the web design field (beating Microsoft's FrontPage), there have been full-featured web editors floating around since the early days of the web. KompoZer, built on the NVU architecture, is a good free option that's beginning to approach the functionality of Dreamweaver.

The interface is different to Dreamweaver’s, but it should still feel familiar. Major editing buttons live in a three-tier toolbar at the top of the program that includes a one-click Publishing icon as well as one-click buttons for Image insertion and Table and Form creation. Font tweaks like Size and Style live in toolbars just below for easy HTML editing. A Site Manager, including File tree, is anchored on the left, although it can be collapsed. We didn’t notice any glitches when playing with the WYSIWYG function. Running lean and mean lets KompoZer compete more than adequately with better-known competitors.

As the cost of high-end graphics editing software rockets, and digitally produced art continues to improve in quality, it’s going to be increasingly difficult for struggling artists to acquire the tools they need. These programs show that not only can those tools be made for free, but in many cases they run better than the expensive paid-for industry standards.

See the following page for some free alternatives to Flash, Premiere, InDesign and other applications in Adobe's Creative Suite.