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A recent review of Corel Digital Studio 2010 got me close and personal with the consumer-oriented multimedia suite. Corel's studio excelled at providing a consistent, unified look, navigation, and toolset across its applications for editing photos and videos, making movies, burning content, and playing videos. It also copies photos, videos, and music to your mobile device, and can create photo projects like photo books and cards.
All good stuff, but it doesn't come cheap. Multimedia suites like this will put you out about $100. They're worth the price if you frequently use the tools, or if you vastly prefer the convenience and accessibility of a consumer-friendly setup. However, if you don't mind being scrappy, you can cobble together a spread of multimedia tools--your own "suite"--for next to nothing.
Edit and create
FastStone Image Viewer has quick-access editing tools.
(Credit: Screenshot by Jason Parker/CNET)Photo editing, video editing, and making movies are the three largest focal points of multimedia suites like Corel Digital Studio 2010 and Roxio Creator 2010 (unfortunately, no download trial is available for the latter). Google's Picasa is one of my favorite freeware tools for casual users, and one of the closest direct matches to what's offered in a multimedia suite. Its uses are multifarious: organizing your photos and videos into albums, editing images and videos, sharing online, creating projects like collages and movies, and ordering prints.
The image-editing tools are serviceable, with red-eye removal, one-click lighting fixes, cropping and straightening, and finer tools for addressing blemishes and lighting. There are also 12 effects, like sepia tones and soft focus. This contrasts with Picasa's low-grade video editor, which can at least rotate videos and trim them. The movie maker has many more controls, but is basic; it doesn't build in the polished templates of a premium program. Picasa does, however, offer to sell you prints from a choice of providers (choice is good), and can help create a collage.
For standalone photo editing, the freeware applications FastStone Image Viewer, IrfanView, Paint.NET, and GIMP range in features from the accessible to the powerful. Read more about them in this resource guide.
Vista and Windows 7 users can try out Microsft's new Windows Live Movie Maker (review), freeware that can slap photos and video clips into a new movie in seconds. Deeper controls let you tweak transitions, captions, and effects after the automation. Editing tools include splitting, trimming, and applying fade points. As a point of comparison, video editors in these consumer-focused multimedia suites are better-equipped, perhaps with audio-tuning tools and features to adjust video lighting.
Windows Live Movie Maker works on Vista and Windows 7 computers.
(Credit: Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)Creating calendars and photo books are a DIY project within your reach if you have an excellent photo printer and a home bookbinding kit. Otherwise, you can spend your energy on the editing and captioning and get a project printed somewhere else. Retail shops, like FedEx Office in the U.S., will print projects. Online photo albums and services like Shutterfly, Snapfish, and Zazzle will also gladly accept your business. The 12-month calendars run from $15 to $20; large photo books are often in the mid-$30 range (online services often charge for shipping). Corel Digital Studio is similarly priced.
... Read moreSeveral major changes have been implemented in the latest upgrade to the open-source freeware called The GNU Image Manipulation Program. Known as The GIMP, these changes include some midlevel user interface adjustments and improvements to several tools. Version 2.6.0 is also the first release that attempts to integrate GEGL, a graph-based image processing framework that allows for non-destructive image editing.
The GIMP 2.6 implements 32-bit color support via GEGL.
(Credit: CNET Networks)The GEGL integration is mostly a back-end change with a tentative implementation. In other words, the bugs are not necessarily all worked out. As such, it is not turned on as a default. You can use it in two places. Its color operations can be activated in the Colors menu by clicking Use GEGL. This will enact color changes in 32-bit floating point linear light RGBA, as opposed to the standard 8-bit.
The second option for exploring GEGL in GIMP 2.6 is the GEGL Operation tool. The technical explanation is that this applies GEGL operations to an image, with on-canvas previews of your edits. When you select the tool, it will give you a list of about two dozen global edits you can make to an image, including Gaussian blur, adding noise, and sharpening, all supported by the nondestructive GEGL code.
Although it worked fine when I tried adding noise, it crashed when I tried using the c2g grayscale tool.
Two tools have been improved. The Free Select tool now supports polygonal segments, as well as mixing those segments with freehand selections, and editing a selection area. The GIMP's changelog states that the free select tools is one of the most versatile in their toolbox, and I'm inclined to agree. Users can now map different brush parameters, such as size or opacity to pressure or velocity, using Brush Dynamics. This should result in better responsiveness to tablet input.
Interface changes include integrating the Toolbox menu bar with the Image Window menu bar, cutting down on clutter. You now can pan beyond an image border, too. There's also an option for quickly reopening recently closed docks--not a major change, but a useful one nonetheless.
The GIMP 2.6 has not yet been ported to the Mac. Full release notes can be read here.
Despite occasional oddities and a distinct lack of polish, Scribus offers up an open-source freeware desktop publisher robust with a full complement of useful features. Available for Windows, in a portable edition, and for Macs, too, they compare very favorably against more expensive competition.
The detailed Web site includes a wealth of documentation, tutorials, and notes on everything from installation problems to drawing a grid to creating a text frame. As with other similar open-source apps like Blender, the online resources for Scribus are nothing less than invaluable. The interface doesn't sing, but it does hit all the right notes: Buttons are laid out logically and grouped according to function, without any unusual placement.
Scribus' quirks are mostly related to the scaling of imported images, but there's something else about it that's far more interesting: It painlessly brings in documents from the OpenOffice.org suite and it uses The GIMP for image editing. By taking advantage of these other freeware apps to boost its own productivity, Scribus enhances its appeal by forming a virtual freeware suite.
Freeware image editor the GNU Image Manipulation Program, or GIMP to its friends, gets a bucketload of small tweaks and bug-fixes.
The freeware Photoshop analogue includes improvements for a wide range of features, but doesn't include anything new. Many of the changes fix tool errors. Curves, antialiasing, the Healing brush, TIFF loading and others received retouching. Several plug-ins and how the program handles them also got a boost, including Unsharp Mask, JPEG saving, Gaussian blur, and others. The full list of changes can be read here.
The volunteer developers of The GIMP have been working hard to develop a polished, user-friendly, and freely distributed image editor. Available for Windows and Mac users, and in a portable edition for the PC, the separated palette windows may disturb those users who are used to more traditional layouts. Still, your comfort level should grow exponentially as you discover how pain-free the program is.
One of the most powerful general-purpose image editors around, the GNU Image Manipulation Program is eminently comparable to Photoshop. Older features include channels, layers and masks, filters and effects, tabbed palettes, editable text tools, and color operations such as levels. New improvements include scalable brushes, revised selection tools, a new color menu, full-screen editing, a new crop tool, improved printing, red-eye removal, perspective clone, lens distortion, and more. It even has regex-based pattern matching for power users.
Extremely powerful and easy to work with, GIMP is ideal for both amateur and pro photographers, Web designers, or anyone who wants to create and edit professional-quality digital images on a budget.
UFRAW gives GIMP the power of 16-bit image editing.
(Credit: CNET Networks, Inc.)So you've been convinced to make the leap from Photoshop to GIMP. You've downloaded the program, run the executable, figured out that old instructions decrying the difficult installation are outdated for the current version, but now what? Now, my GIMP Padawan, is when you start treating GIMP like it's Firefox and you get your plug-ins on.
What about GIMPshop, you say? No worries, as my Australian friends would say. We're going to take a look at the GIMP-plus-Photoshop mash-up, too.
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Molly Wood and CNET TV's Insider Secrets takes you through a tripartite of free alternative to Adobe Photoshop. Although Photoshop's a great program, for some users it provides way too much editing power and it's way too expensive. Try one of these freeware substitutes, and also check out our series on building your own Adobe Creative Suite using top-notch freeware applications. Part One; Part Two
Right on the heels of the big tryptophan doping event of the year, three of my favorite programs have gone through some minor tweaks and changes. Firefox, Pidgin, and The Gimp have all received a bit of tweaking. Let's take a look at the changes.
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It's been nearly three years since the GIMP has seen a noticeable feature-set upgrade. The new version of the popular freeware image editor makes changes in all the right places, streamlining the installation process, fine-tuning and overhauling old features and introducing some really cool new ones.
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The free app Paint.NET offers strong image-editing features in a small package.
(Credit: Paint.NET)Adobe Photoshop is a fantastic software product. I use it at CNET every single day. However, I don't own a personal version at home, and I find that I don't miss it much for my own limited image editing and graphic design needs. For cropping snapshots, removing red-eye, resizing, or creating LOLcat images, I turn to the free image editors available at CNET Download.com.
The grandaddy of free design software is the GIMP (short for GNU Image Manipulation Program), which provides much of the functionality of Photoshop, with a very large and dedicated community that produces tons of valuable tutorials. However, the GIMP isn't the most user-friendly application. Newbies would be advised to try GIMPshop, which puts a Photoshop-like interface on top of the GIMP's core functionality. ... Read more
