Being a graphic designer on a budget, over the years I’ve had to find free (usually open-source and cross-platform) alternatives to the popular programs by Adobe such as Photoshop and Dreamweaver, due to the prohibitive pricing (even for students) for the product licenses. I have put together a list of my favorite alternatives to Adobe. Most of the following programs work in Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.

Photoshop. Use: raster graphic creation, photo manipulation. Price: $699.

Alternatives. The open source alternative which most replaces Photoshop is the GIMP. This program has tools very similar to Photoshop’s for drawing graphics and manipulating images.

GIMP

For most of my photo editing needs, however, Google’s Picasa is the best. It has a very fast and elegant photo browser, and its levels control, retouching abilities and other effects are usually more than enough.

Next to Picasa, two commercial (though affordable) programs that I use for some more advanced editing are Apple Aperture (Mac only) and Helicon Filter (Windows only). Apple Aperture includes an image browser, and Helicon Filter has some handy image stacking abilities.

Illustrator. Use: vector graphic art. Price: $599.

Alternative. For all my vector graphic design work (which is the source of all the logos and web graphics I do), I use the open-source Inkscape. The program has an amazing set of drawing tools and features with a level of simplicity that far surpasses Illustrator. And since it is vector-based, all images can be made infinitely large without any loss in quality.

Inkscape

Dreamweaver. Use: web coding/development. Price: $399.

Alternative.  Dreamweaver allows people to manually code, have the program code it while the person uses it like a word processor, and upload the files to a server. Although it lacks the automatic WYSIWYG features of Dreamweaver, Aptana is a powerful coding tool that makes it easy to manually code and check it with real-world in-program browser previews.

Aptana