Digital Painting/Drawing and Photography
Below is a list of very good Linux applications for photography, digital painting and graphic design. I have spent time out with these applications and think they are very good. My favourite is My Paint because it looks simple and is a joy to use especially when you are using a graphics tablet because the tablet responds to changes in pen pressure resulting in realistic paint stokes for digital painting and sketching
MyPaint
MyPaint is a powerful and easy to use digital painting application. It works with Wacom pressure sensitive pen tablets
and contains many built in brushes which are grouped by category. The canvas can be rotated and zoomed using keyboard strokes
of your own choosing and the application also supports layers. The interface is refreshingly simple and allows you to work with
minimal distractions and this in my opinion makes it a better painting program than Corel Painter
MyPaint is also available for Windows and Mac and the forum is lively which is always a sign of a good user community. In the forum you can see the finished works of other MyPaint users and there are links to video tutorials and resources
Inkscape
Inkscape is a vector graphics editor which does more or less the same thing as applications such as Xara (see below) and
Adobe Illustrator. Inkscape is great for creative art such as logos, web page graphics, posters, technical diagrams and free
hand illustrations like those you find in clipart libraries
Inkscape's toolbox provides tools for text and shapes such as ellipses, rectangles, spirals, stars, polygons and paths. Individual objects and cloned groups in Inkspace can be transformed by rotating, scaling and skewing you can fill and stroke objects with full colour, gradients and transparency. Inkscape also has layers, guides, grids to aid graphic designers and imports graphics in png, jpeg and svg formats while allowing you to save individual layers and selections as separate images
Xara Xtreme for Linux
Xara Xtreme is a great graphics editor and it now runs on Linux. Xara is a quick and powerful general purpose graphics editor and
there are tons of tutorials on how to use it. The Linux version is based on Xara Xtreme version 2 and is a bit outdated because
Linux developers refuse to work on it as the company behind Xara Xtreme would not reveal all of the source code but it is still
a very useful application for Linux users
Xara can be used for the same purposes as Inkscape and among it's features you will find tools for: transparency, bevels, drop shadows, gradient fills and 3D extrusion. You can also import photos and bitmaps from your file system simply by dragging the image into the Xara workspace. Xara is slick and very easy to use and offers some of the most powerful graphics editing tools on the market. It is great application and fun to use
Gimp
Gimp is my first choice every time for photography and web graphics because it is one of the best bitmap editors in the world.
It takes time to like it because it is quirky but after a while you grow to love it. Gimp comes with lots of raw power and
considering what it can do it amazes me that the download file size of Gimp is one twentieth the size of Photoshop's. It can do
most of what Photoshop can do and then some but unlike Photoshop it is snappy and starts up quickly. It is an ideal photo editor
for everyday use or for creating one off digital masterpieces. There is a great community behind Gimp and there are also lots of
online tutorials to teach and help you experiment with it's many features
Picasa
Picasa is a fine image management application which includes some very useful tools for performing quick edits to photographs and
graphic images. Picasa has all the features you would expect in a good image manager and it is great for managing large photography
collections
Images can imported either from your file system or a digital camera and then sorted into collections which are then easily tracked and searchable via tagging. Images can also be geotagged using google maps and then uploaded to Picasa Web Albums and shared with the world. One nice thing about Picasa is that it now allows you to create movies with selected images complete with transition effects and background music. Picasa just keep getting better and as user for 5 years now I find it to be the perfect compliment to Gimp for all my digital photography requirements. Highly recommended
gThumb
gThumb is an image viewer for the Gnome desktop and while it includes some basic photo editing features such as: brightness and
contrast; colour balance; resize, crop and rotate; it is much more useful when used as an image browser on steroids
gThumb works like an extension of your underlying folder structure and in the sidebar you can create catalogues into which you can group images from many different folders. You create a catalogue, name it and then you can later add any image on your hard drive to any catalogue. gThumb lets you view your collections as slideshows and has a web page gallery generator offering a few clean and functional layout styles
Final thoughts
These applications are all good individually but put them together and then you have a lot of imaging power at your fingertips. There is no reason why a gnome desktop version of linux loaded with these applications can't be used for serious photography and graphic design work in a highly polished and aesthetic looking workspace. Only a poor tradesman blames his tools :-)
Linux Photography Software Links
Open Source Photography Tutorials, Techniques and How-tos - Open Source Photography
Linux Photography Software and Tutorials - Linux Photography Blog