Free alternative to Adobe Photoshop – GIMP
At Persoonlijk Proefschrift, we use programmes from the Adobe Creative Cloud suite. Our designers are trained to use these programmes to create a professionally designed thesis. If you’d like to design your thesis yourself but don’t want to invest in these expensive Adobe programmes, there are free alternatives available. Read more about a free alternative to Adobe Photoshop in this article.
Adobe Photoshop
These days, Adobe Photoshop is more than just an image-editing programme. It has become a household name known to everyone around the world. People don’t ask whether an image has been edited, but whether it has been ‘Photoshopped’. The programme’s image-editing capabilities have expanded enormously. No matter how outlandish your idea, it’s possible in Photoshop. This can therefore make working with this programme rather daunting.
Essentially, in Photoshop, you can open an image and then divide it into selections and layers to edit the image either in part or in its entirety. By creating a selection, you can isolate an element from the image to edit it separately. A “layer” in an image is similar to a page in a book. A simple image usually consists of a single layer, much like a single sheet of paper. More complex images consist of dozens of layers that overlap and together form a single image.
GIMP
Despite Photoshop’s extensive functionality, there is an alternative that offers almost all of this functionality for free. With the GNU Image Manipulation Programme, or GIMP for short, you can usually achieve exactly the same result. Unfortunately, you can’t get the best of both worlds for next to nothing. GIMP’s interface isn’t as well thought-out or as attractive as Photoshop’s. As a result, it will take a while to get used to working with GIMP; however, once you’re familiar with it, you’ll be able to carry out all the image-editing tasks that are possible in Photoshop.
