If you want to learn the fundamentals of graphic design, there’s no need to splash out on costly premium software – there are some superb programs programs available to download completely free, many of which are comparable to their premium counterparts.
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For seasoned professionals there’s no real substitute for Adobe Creative Cloud, but if you’re not ready to invest in a subscription yet, these free graphic design programs are ideal.
Your pick of the best drawing software from this list will depend on the kind of digital art that interests you. Either way, there’s always a software that’s right for you. Either way, there’s always a software that’s right for you. Best Mac for designers 2018 Which is the best Mac for graphic design? Designers have long loved Macs, and macOS remains a leading environment in which to be creative. Here’s Our Run Down Of The Best Drawing Tablets for Artists 2018. Below, we discuss the best tablets on the market, and who they are suited for. Wacom Intous Draw – Best Choice For Beginners. Click on image to see prices on Amazon. One of the biggest names in drawing tablets, Wacom is always sure to provide an excellent user experience with any of its tablet products.
Whether it’s creating and editing vector graphics, illustrations or infographics, we’ve picked out the best free software for the job. All of these tools will help you achieve great results, and won't spoil your work with watermarks.
1. Inkscape
A powerful vector graphics tool that's free and open source
Open source vector graphics editor Inkscape is widely known as the free counterpart to Adobe Illustrator – and for good reason. This free vector editor is a great choice for budding graphic designers thanks to its huge array of advanced tools and effects, including complex path operations, node editing, bitmap tracing and path-based text.
Like most free vector editing software, Inkscape’s chief format is SVG (scalable vector graphics) – an open source standard based around XML.
Inkscape is available for Windows, Mac and Linux, and is a great cornerstone of any amateur graphic designer’s toolkit.
2. Krita
Free software packed with advanced drawing aids and templates
Krita was created by artists, for artists, with the belief that top-quality drawing software should be accessible to all graphic designers – regardless of income.
Krita is designed primarily for comic book artists, with a set of carefully designed tools including halftones and pre-made templates, but it’s also great for other forms of drawing. It offers a great set of drawing aids, including vanishing points, smooth shapes, layer masks and advanced selection functions.
If you’re venturing into illustration or comics, Krita is amazing. It's so feature-packed, you might find it a little overwhelming, but there's an excellent set of tutorials to get you started.
3. GIMP
An incredible tool for any designer who works with photos
GIMP is the free photo editing and graphic design software we use most here at TechRadar, for one simple reason: it's brilliant.
Whether you're adjusting photos, creating a digital painting or compositing several different elements, GIMP is fantastic. It doesn't have all the tools you'll find in Photoshop, and the fact that it's produced by a huge team of volunteers from around the world means its interface can be a little inconsistent in places, but it's packed with advanced brushes, filters, layers and masks.
In the event that it doesn't provide everything you need, you can always expand it using a huge archive of extensions, or install Photoshop plugins.
4. Blender
The ultimate free tool for graphic designers creating 3D content
Blender is a 3D content creation suite that's completely free – even if you use your creations commercially. Whether it's modeling, rigging, rendering or animating, Blender has it covered.
Animators use Blender to create short films, TV shows, and even feature films, and its creators are constantly working to develop it further.
Its interface might look intimidating at first, but it's fully customizable and you can even create your own tools and extensions to suit the way you want to work.
5. Easel.ly
Infographics made easy with free templates and a clear interface
When you need to create an infographic, you can do it manually using a vector graphics suite like Inkscape, or you can reach for a dedicated tool like Easel.ly.
There's no shortage of web apps for visualizing data, but Easel.ly is one of the best. It offers a good selection of templates for you to experiment with, plus a wide selection of shapes and other tools for editing the existing designs or creating your own from scratch.
You can download your completed infographics in PDF or JPG format, with quality settings optimized for web and print use.
The basic tool is free and extra elements are available for a small fee, but unlike many free data visualization tools, Easel.ly won't watermark your work.
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Easiest to Dive In | |
Photography Plan | Photoshop Elements |
How We Found the Best Photo Editing Software Programs
5 programs tested
The Best Photo Editing Software Programs
To find the best photo editing software, we pitted the best programs tech-giant Adobe has to offer (Photoshop, Lightroom, and Photo Elements) against three highly commended competitors to find out which one was user-friendly enough for beginners and powerful enough for professionals.
The 3 Best Photo Editing Software Programs
- Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Plan -
Most Powerful
- Serif Affinity Photo -
Easiest to Dive In
- Adobe Photoshop Elements 2018 -
Best for One-Click Editing
Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Plan
Access to Lightroom CC and Photoshop CC
Customizable image editing tools
Easy to learn
Why we chose it
Access to Lightroom CC and Photoshop CC
The Adobe Photography Plan combines two Adobe applications — Lightroom CC and Photoshop CC — into one bundle. Lightroom CC is Adobe’s dedicated photography software. If you’re working with large quantities of photos, you’ll want to take advantage of Lightroom’s organizational system: With it, you can rank photos out of five stars, tag photos, and edit information to keep track of where you took a photo. Subscribing to Lightroom CC (either on its own or as part of the Photography Plan) also gives iPhone and iPad users access to a mobile version of the software.
Photoshop CC, meanwhile, won’t do much to help you stay organized — but it has more advanced tools than Lightroom, like layers, masks, and customizable toolbars.
Customizable image editing tools
Photoshop has over sixty basic tools and customizations to choose from, in addition to its more advanced color, lighting, filter, and 3D tools (among others). These basic tools themselves are customizable, so you can do more than just correct red eyes; you can also specify how large, dark, or light you want pupils to appear. More advanced tools — everything from saturation and contrast to lens correction, liquefy, and RAW photo processing — are similarly customizable. Actions are also processed rapidly, allowing you to quickly assess whether your experiments are working.
Easy to learn
Despite the number of tools (and how easy it is to fall into the rabbit warren of adjustments and filters), we found Adobe surprisingly easy to use. You should expect a learning curve, since Photoshop is intended to be an extremely hands-on program, but Adobe supports you at every step. It has an abundance of online resources — a hidden benefit to choosing a company that’s been in the field for decades — and Photoshop CC particularly impressed us with its tutorials and guidance, helping us learn both terminology (what exactly the clone tool does) and technique (how to create and add to masks).
Hovering over the individual tools in Photoshop's left-hand bar pops up five-second gifs that demonstrate each tool — though you can easily change your settings and remove this feature once you get the hang of things.
Points to consider
Subscription service
Our only complaint about Adobe’s Photography Plan is that it’s a subscription service; you’ll sign up for a year-long contract and pay fees monthly rather than making a one-time purchase. While this subscription is significantly cheaper than the one-time purchase model that Photoshop used to follow (complete with a painful $1,500 price tag), if you cancel your subscription, you’ll lose access to all of the programs and tools, as well as any photos that remain in Adobe’s proprietary format. Make sure you’ve completely exported your library if you decide to cancel your contract.
Photoshop CC | |||
Photoshop CC | |||
Serif Affinity Photo
No organizational tools
Why we chose it
Easy to use
We were primarily drawn to Serif Affinity Photo because of how easy it was to use. Its customizable control panel initially appears overwhelming, with 22 adjustments options immediately available on your right-hand dashboard. However, each one is neatly packaged so that no matter what you want to do, you can quickly find and open the relevant folder.
Helpful presets
We also appreciated how Serif provides a number of immediate preset options on all of its effects. You can also manually adjust each effect for more control, but the presets offer a nice introduction for beginners.
One-time purchase
One of the keenest edges Serif Affinity has over Adobe’s Photography plan is that it’s a one-time purchase of $50, rather than a $10 or $20 monthly subscription. This means that, depending on your cloud storage needs (in turn based on how many photos you have and their editing needs), Serif Affinity becomes the more affordable plan after five months, possibly as early as three months.
Points to consider
No organizational tools
However, Serif Affinity’s budget plan comes with one significant drawback: It doesn’t offer any organizational tools. If you’re dealing with hundreds or thousands of photos that you need to organize, or would like to sort by place, date, or personalized keyword, you’ll want to consider Adobe’s Photography Plan or take a look at Photoshop Elements 2018.
Adobe Photoshop Elements 2018
One-click editing
Settings for different skill levels
Why we chose it
One-click editing
If you’re just trying to create, say, annual holiday cards, and the idea of learning new photo editing terms, tools, tricks, and techniques feels daunting, Adobe Photoshop Elements transforms the process into a few simple clicks — with a couple of sliders you can adjust if you’re feeling adventurous. That’s it. Photoshop Elements 2018 gives you high-quality photographs without a technical learning curve, so long as you stay within its predetermined adjustments.
Settings for different skill levels
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We love that Photoshop Elements offers three tiers of photo editing: Quick, Guided, and Expert. Quick is simply that — with a few auto-adjustments, possibly a camera filter or picture frame, you can take your photograph from raw image to printer-ready. Guided gives you almost 50 options, where it will walk you through step-by-step the process of adjusting brightness, straightening or resizing a photo, or adding filters. Finally, the Expert mode lays out all of the program’s tools with minimal instruction.
Points to consider
Light on advanced editing tools
Even though the Expert mode of Photoshop Elements is more advanced than either the Quick or Guided modes, it doesn’t compete with our top picks. In addition to its clunky ‘90s-era design, it lacks all of the tools found in Photoshop CC or Serif Affinity Photo. That said, it could be a good introduction when you feel like trying out some additional techniques outside of the guided programs.
How to Find the Right Photo Editing Software for You
Decide what tools you need
Different types of image editing require different tools. No matter what you’ll be doing, you’ll want to know which ones you need for your most common projects — these functions might not be immediately necessary, but they’ll let you tackle tasks a little more complex than wiping away corgi footprints.
- Layers let you combine separate images or edit specific areas of a photograph. These are helpful if you’re trying to remove a photo-bomber from your wedding ceremony on the beach or swapping out the snowy background of your cute dog photo to send him floating through space instead.
- Applying a mask layer is another technique to isolate areas of a photo for specific editing. If you’d like to make changes to the background of your photograph without affecting the subject, or if you’d like to create a cut-out of a tiny dog from one photograph to layer him into a desert landscape in another, you’ll probably use a mask.
- Finally, preset filters let you adjust your photos with a single click. These could either take the form of a typical Instagram filter (you click “Black and White” or “Landscape” and it automatically alters your photo) or auto-adjustments on a tool-by-tool case.
Knowing what types of editing you’ll be using the software for will help you narrow down which tools are essential and which are just nice to have.
Test drive several options
All of our top picks offer a free trial, and we recommend taking full advantage of them. You probably know what you’re going to be using the software for, and now’s a good time to see how each of them perform on the type of image editing you need. Pay attention to the number of tools and effects provided, how easy they are to use, and the organization features of each program.
Determine how much you’re willing to spend
Prices for photo editing software vary a lot, and depending on what you’ll be using it for, you may not need to pay a premium. The most powerful tool on the market, Adobe’s Photography Plan, runs on a subscription model for $10 per month. If you don’t need all of that technical prowess, Serif Affinity will meet all your image editing needs for a one-time purchase of $50. There are even a number of free photo editing software options available if you don’t want to make any investment.
Photo Editing Software FAQ
In most situations, you should edit your photos in the raw camera format as opposed to a standard format like JPEG. The raw files will contain a lot more information about the picture, so you can be more precise in your editing. Once you’re ready to show it to the world, you can then convert it to a shareable format like JPEG or PNG.
You can download and install Photoshop on up to two computers, regardless of the operating system. However, you’ll only be able to use one Photoshop on one computer at a time.
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Photoshop CC is the more powerful editing tool — you’ll need to manipulate multiple layers here — while Lightroom CC offers sorting and organizing features into its slightly more basic editing capabilities. Both programs offer preset filters as well, so you can adjust your photos to a preset perfection with only a few clicks. Adobe’s Photography plan includes both programs.
The Best Photo Editing Software Programs: Summed Up
Our Other Software Reviews
Over the years, we’ve put just about every type of software imaginable through the ringer to find the best of the best. Check out some of our favorite reviews below: