Design

10 Free Alternatives for Creatives

Broke? Feeling the financial hurt but still wanting to stay in the game? If your like me you still want to invest in new software that will take your freelancing skills to the next level and build your skill set. From expensive to free this list will help you do just that.

Check out 10 free alternatives for creative types like yourself and save that extra dough you just found in your couch.

Photoshop

Photoshop will always be the king in this arena but GIMP 2.6 is a true alternative for those not ready to shell out some serious cash.

Photoshop to Gimp

• Photoshop $699 to $999 depending on version
• Gimp is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.
  

Office Suite

At one point in time most of us deep down would want to step away from Microsoft Office products. In the work place this will be nearly impossible for a while. Personally its quite easy to make the switch and to use alternatives such as ZOHO, GoogleDocs with Google Gears, and Open Office 3.0.

Office 2007 to Open Office 3.0 with OOO2GoogleDocs Extension

• Office $89 to $179 based on version
• Open Office just had a huge release of features with version 3.0
  

Email

Outlook 2003/2007 to Thunderbird w/lightning & provider for Google calendar

• Outlook between 50-100 depending on the type
• Thunderbird is not as mature as Outlook but the functions it has are perfect for me.

Compression

WinRAR to 7zip

• WinRAR starts at $21 per computer
• 7-Zip is a file archiver with a high compression ratio and its free!
  

Web Developing / CSS / Javascript

An interesting switch but Aptana offers code suggestions and highlighting that has helped with many projects. It is also great for Adobe AIR, Ruby, iPhone dev and PHP.

Dreamweaver CS* to Aptana IDE

• Dreamweaver $176 to $598
• Aptana Studio is a powerful, free and open source Ajax development environment which runs stand-alone or within Eclipse.
  

3D

Depending on what you would like to achive their are many choices for getting into 3D. Most of the big 3D names have personal learning editions so they can hook you in, for instance Maya ($995 to $4,000) VS Maya Personal Learning Edition (free) and Poser ($250 to $450) VS Endorphin (free). For more basic use, I use Blender to create 3D objects for other programs and also Google Sketchup.

Xara 3D to Blender

• Xara 3D $89 to $250 depending on version
• Blender is the open source, cross platform suite of tools for 3D creation.
  

Quick Code Edit

At some point in time Notepad/Wordpad just won’t cut it. Code Highlighting is keep for quick and dirty edits.

Editplus to Notepad++

• Editplus $35
• Notepad++ is a free (as in “free speech” and also as in “free beer”) source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages.
  

FTP

You must be using Firefox for this easy alternative, if not shame on you but we still have you covered with an excellent standalone FTP called Filezilla. Since most of my edit are already in Firefox, FireFTP was easy to pick up and use.

SmartFTP to FireFTP

• SmartFTP $36 to $50
• FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers.
  

Screen Recording

HyperCam to CamStudio

• HyperCam $40
• CamStudio is able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using its built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs)
  

Picture Organization

It must be the fact that Photoshop is in the name because there are a lot of other things I could think of buying before shelling out $139 for Elements.

Adobe Photoshop Elements to Picasa 3

• Adobe Photoshop Elements $139
• Picasa 3 The easy way to find, edit, and share your photos.
  

© 2008 Bloglicious.