atw: Free graphics software

At the Central Sydney ASTC meeting about graphics last
night, Daryl (presenting) mentioned the high cost of
vector drawing tools like Illustrator. With so much
open-source and other free software around, I asked if
anyone knew of any free alternatives, but no-one could
think of any.

Having had a look tonight, I?ve found a couple of
tools that sound well worth a look:

http://www.inkscape.org/
"Open Source Scalable Vector Graphics Editor"
Their website looks very professional, and it says
that just yesterday, Google provided some funding to
the project, so it sounds very promising.

http://www.freeserifsoftware.com/software/DrawPlus/
"DrawPlus 4 - Free Graphic Design and Vector Drawing
Software"
Again, a very neat website, but this time from a
commercial venture ? the company gives away old
versions of their software and sells the latest ones.
(DrawPlus 7 is the current version.) They offer a
whole suite of free tools: PhotoPlus (which I?ve just
downloaded too!), PagePlus for desktop publishing,
WebPlus and 3DPlus.

(I haven?t used OpenOffice.org Draw much, but that too
is a free alternative for vector graphics.)

Also, for raster graphics, there are free paint
programs such as "the Gimp", which has many great
Photoshop-like features (such as selecting areas by
colour similarity). I?d downloaded it a while ago but
not really used it, partly through a lack of need and
partly a lack of decent documentation. Just the other
night though I had good cause to try it out, to
touch-up some close-up photos of people. I tried its
Clone tool, which like the one in Photoshop copies a
soft-edged area of pixels so you can erase things, and
it removed some blemishes really well. 

In the archives on Yahoo, there?s another short list
of free graphics tools:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/austechwriter/message/10943


Having previously also mentioned Picasa and Photoshop
Album Starter Edition, I?m just amazed at how much
great software you can get for free!

Thanks, Daryl, for a very stimulating meeting, and I
hope some of the attendees who were interested in
alternative tools see this message.

Regards,
Craig

===== My e-mail address is:
===== craigh(at)attachesoftware(dot)com
===== (I may not see messages sent to my Yahoo address)

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