Free Image and Photo Editing Software, 3D Content Creation Tools

Free drawing and painting programs, photo manipulation tools, image and animation creation software, 3D content creation tools

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Free Drawing and Painting Programs, Image/Photo Manipulation, Photo Editing, Animation Creation Software, 3D Content Creation Tools

This page lists programs or tools which you can use to create graphic images, edit pictures, manipulate or modify digital photographs (photos), create animations (animated graphics) and otherwise draw or paint an image. The tools often handle a variety of formats, such as GIF, JPEG (JPG), PNG, TIF, BMP, and others. Also listed are 3D content creation software. These allow you to create 3D content, model them, shade them, animate them, composite, etc.

Note that this page does not list the well-known (and powerful) but expensive Adobe Photoshop CS3 and its cheaper cousin, Adobe Photoshop Elements .

Furthermore, if you need something to stitch together photographs to create a particularly wide-angled panoramic photograph (or even tall photographs or 360 degree shots), you might prefer specialized (commercial) tools like ArcSoft Panorama Maker for Windows and ArcSoft Panorama Maker for Mac to make the process relatively painless.

Disclaimer

The information provided on this page comes without any warranty whatsoever. Use it at your own risk. Just because a program, book, document or service is listed here or has a good review does not mean that I endorse or approve of the program or of any of its contents. All the other standard disclaimers also apply.

Free Drawing and Painting Programs, Image Manipulation and Photo Editing Software

Google Picasa ( ): Picasa is a photo editing program that allows you to edit and organise your pictures on your computer. You can add visual effects to your digital pictures, write captions, pan, tilt, zoom, crop, eliminate red eyes, change the contrast, colour and enhance them. Other features include the ability to create slide shows, upload your photographs to your blog or website, burn them to CD or DVD, make a desktop image, create a screensaver, etc. The software is available for Windows and Linux.
Dia: Dia is a diagram creation program inspired by the commercial "Visio". A drawing program rather than a painting one, it has many facilities to help you draw diagrams, including special objects for drawing entity relationship diagrams, UML diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, etc. It saves files to a custom XML format, but can also export to other formats like EPS, SVG, XFIG, WMF and PNG. Other features include the ability to print multi-page diagrams. Dia works on Windows and Linux. Source code is also available.
IrfanView: IrfanView is primarily an image viewer that can double as a simple image editor that can perform tasks like resizing of images, converting images between formats, renaming of files, etc. It is able to perform batch conversion of images and pictures as well as batch renaming of files, which is a handy feature when you have many files you need to process.
GIMP - GNU Image Manipulation Program: GIMP, often touted as a Photoshop replacement by its fans, allows you to create and edit images and photos. It has the usual facilities found in many commercial paint programs such as a variety of paint tools (Brush, Airbrush, Pencil, Clone, custom brushes and patterns, etc), full alpha channel support, layers and channels, transformation tools (rotate, scale, sheer, flip), multiple undo and redo, selection tools (rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy, intelligent, bezier, polygonal), animation support (including MNG), numerous file formats (BMP, GIF, JPEG, MNG, PCX, PDF, PS, PSD, PNG, SVG, TIF, TGA, XPM, etc) including conversion between different file formats, and so on. Supported systems include Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD and Sun Solaris. This is an open source program.
Tux Paint: Tux Paint is a drawing software designed for young children. It has cute looking buttons, sound effects and a mascot that encourages children as they use the program. Supported systems include Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD and NetBSD.
Paint.NET: Paint.NET is an image and photo manipulation program that supports layers, unlimited undo and redo, special effects, drawing tools (tools for drawing shapes, splines, Bezier curves, etc), etc. It runs under Windows 2000, XP, 2003 and Vista. It requires the Microsoft .NET Framework (hence its name).
Inkscape - open source scalable vector graphics editor: Inkscape is a scalable vector graphics (SVG) editor. It is open source, and versions are available for Windows 2000, XP, 2003, and OS X.
DrawPlus 4: DrawPlus 4 is a drawing and painting program. It supports the GIF, JPEG, BMP, PNG, WMF and EMF graphic file formats. The program is no longer maintained. It supports Windows 95, 98, 98 SE, ME, NT 4.0, 2000 and XP. You have to register with your email address to use the program.

Free 3D Content Creation Software

Blender: Blender is a 3D content creation software that allows you to model, shade, animate (etc) interactive 3D objects. Among its modelling features are its support for polygon meshes, NURBS surfaces, bezier and B-spline curves, metaballs, vector fonts (TrueType, OpenType and PostScript), Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces, multi-resolution sculpting with 2D bitmap and 3D procedural brushes, modifier stack deformers (Lattice, Curve, Armature, Displace), mirror modifiers with middle vertices clipping and automatic deletion of inner faces), non-destructive real-time Boolean and Array modifiers, Python scripting access, etc. If you are creating games, it includes collision detection, dynamic simulation, a variety of shape types (including convex polyhedron, box, sphere, cone, cylinder, capsule, etc), support for vehicle dynamics, OpenGL lighting modes, playback of games and interactive 3D content without compiling or preprocessing, multi-layering of scenes for overlay interfaces, etc. There are also numerous features that support rigging, animation, rendering, shading, UV unwrapping, image and composition, physics and particles (particle system, fluid simulator, hair strands support, etc), and so on, which are too numerous to list. The software supports a wide variety of file formats, including, for 2D: TGA, JPG, PNG, OpenEXR, DPX, Cineon, Radiance HDR, Iris, SGI movie, IFF, AVI and Quicktime GIF, TIFF, PSD, MOV (Windows and OS X); and for 3D: 3D Studio, AC3D, COLLADA, DEC Object File Format, DirectX, Lightwave, MD2, Motion Capture, Nendo, OpenFlight, PLY, Pro Engineer, Radiosity, Raw Triangle, Softimage, STL, TrueSpace, VideoScape, VRML, VRML97, Wavefront, X3D Extensible 3D, xfig, etc. Platforms supported include Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, Mac OS X (PPC and Intel), Linux (i386), Linux (PPC), FreeBSD 5.4 (i386), SGI Irix 6.5, and Sun Solaris 2.8 (sparc). The suite is licensed under the GNU GPL (an open source licence).