For some time, Linux was popular to be geeky. People were reluctant to come and try out Linux, thinking that it needs a lot of technical knowledge for one to just operate Linux. Therefore, people were not aware of the facilities offered by Linux, specially the free and open source software programs that did cost nothing to users.
Although Linux is not popular as the best place for graphics designing, Linux does offer a competitive set of tools and technologies for graphics designing. Let’s have a look at a few image editors in Linux platform, so you can understand the level of software tools offered.
GIMP
GIMP needs no introduction to the users who are familiar with Linux. GIMP is the image editor for Linux platform and it was originally written for Linux. Later, GIMP was ported to work in other platforms such as Windows and OSX.
GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. Kind of geeky abbreviation, right? Don’t bother about the name; what this program offers is awesome. When it comes to the world of Linux, GIMP is the closest competitor to any other commercial tool, such as Adobe Photoshop. GIMP offers majority of the features offered by the commercial tools for zero price. Therefore, GIMP has become the popular choice for majority of users who want their graphics done.
The collection of retouching and manipulation tools is the best feature offered by GIMP. The tool can do everything you want to do to an image. In addition, GIMP’s output formats are compatible with many commercial tools out there, including Adobe Photoshop’s PSD file format.
Unlike commercial tools, GIMP is supported by a large community. If you want to learn about GIMP or trying to solve a problem that you encountered, you can always reach out the community for help.
GIMPShop
This is an improved image manipulation tool based on GIMP. When it comes to features, this tool offers the same features offered by GIMP, but with a different GUI. The GUI of GIMPShop has been designed to resemble Adobe Photoshop, so the Photoshop users can easily use GIMP for graphics needs. This is a good strategy for converting hardcore Photoshop users to open source tools.
Krita
Krita is a great tool for image manipulation and painting in Linux platform. Although not as popular as GIMP, Krita actually offers a great set of functionality and features to the graphics designers.
Krita uses KOffice technology in the back in order to offer all these great functionality. KOffice is the office package offered to Linux users by KDestop environment. In addition to being desktop graphics software, Krita supports many tablets PCs, so the users can actually use this tool for sketching creative art in tablets. Krita is constantly working on enhancing the tablet PC support across many new tablet devices in the market.
Unlike GIMP, Krita focuses mainly on creation of comics, drawing concept arts, and textures for rendering. Therefore, you will find fewer features for image manipulation and more features for above focus areas.
KolourPaint
KolorPaint is no sophisticated software. This is a simple tool which does the same thing done by Microsoft Paint. This is a primary level tool for basic sketching and image manipulation. As the name indicates, this tool is part of KDE and being developed by a set of volunteers. In addition to image manipulation and painting, KolorPaint also offers the facility to edit Linux icons. Therefore, KolorPaint is quite popular among the Linux users who constantly paint their Linux systems with eye candy. Of course there are many other software programs for editing icons in Linux, but KolorPaint comes for free with a number of useful features.
