Software to enhance your creativity

Hello Zazzlers and friends.

Today I bring you a list of programs you can use to pursue your creative endeavors. Some are free to use, and others will have some limitations but still, you can download them and give them a try. I'll be updating this list as I can.

1. Adobe Creative Suite - This is very good software even if an old version. You can use it to make your first contact with Adobe. You'll find Photoshop, Illustrator, and all the other programs like InDesign.

2. Inkscape - Draw freely - Inkscape 0.48.4 is out. Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps, and much more. Inkscape is used for creating vector drawings, such as laying out a poster or creating a fancy logo, whereas bitmap editors are for working on raster images, such as touching up a photograph. In many projects, you would need to use both Inkscape and a bitmap editor (such as GIMP or Photoshop.)

Inkscape provides source tarballs for Linux (binary packages are offered by the distributor), packages for Windows XP/Vista/7 (fully self-contained installer), and Mac OS X (DMG). Inkscape is successfully used on FreeBSD and other Unix-like operating systems. Note that Windows 98/ME and 2000 are no longer supported.



3. GIMP - GNU Image Manipulating Program - GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition, and image authoring. It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc. As an example, for digital painting, Gimp has painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, Clone, etc, sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high-quality anti-aliasing,, an extremely powerful gradient editor and blend tool and it supports custom brushes and patterns.

Supported Platforms

GNU/Linux (i386, PPC)
Microsoft Windows (XP, Vista)
Mac OS X
Sun OpenSolaris
FreeBSD






4. Free Serif Software - For Design Graphics you choose Draw Plus Starter Edition. It's an accurate vector drawing program, with a realistic brush, pen, and pencil tools, also has text on a path. It has blend modes for advanced artistic effects and it's compatible with graphics tablets.

DrawPlus Starter Edition System Specs
Pentium PC with mouse
Microsoft Windows® 8, 7, Vista, or XP (32-bit) operating system
512MB RAM
250MB free hard disk space
1024 x 600 monitor resolution









5.JTL Ultimate Paint - It's a full-featured 32-bit Windows graphics program for image creation, viewing, and manipulation. t has a flexible brush handling method that encourages creative drawing. You can also retouch and enhance photos using a comprehensive set of built-in tools and plug-ins. Features include resizing, rotating, flood filling, text operations, and a lot more.




6. Paint.Net - Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins. Paint.NET includes simple tools for drawing shapes, including an easy-to-use curve tool for drawing splines or Bezier curves. The Gradient tool, new for 3.0, has been cited as an innovative improvement over similar tools provided by other software. The facilities for creating and working with selections is powerful, yet still simple enough to be picked up quickly. Other powerful tools include the Magic Wand for selecting regions of similar color and the Clone Stamp for copying or erasing portions of an image. There is also a simple text editor, a tool for zooming, and a Recolor tool.



7. Blender - Blender is the free open-source 3D content creation suite. It's used for creating animated films, visual effects, interactive 3D applications, or video games. Download it here and check all its potential at this gallery.



8. Terragen 2 - The free version may only be used for non-commercial purposes but I am listing it also because I find it pretty amazing. You can create the most realistic images possible without taking a photograph. This software is a powerful solution for rendering and animating realistic natural environments. Create entire worlds from your imagination, or import real-world terrain datasets and use Terragen 2 to create the most realistic visualizations possible. You control the weather, landscape, rivers, lakes and oceans, suns, moons, and stars. With Terragen 2 you have complete control over the shader networks used for terrains, textures, micro polygon displacements, clouds, and object distributions. You can reorganize the planetary shading pipeline to suit your goals. Place grass and trees wherever you want, as well as other objects in OBJ format that you can model in third-party software. Check the potential of Terragen at the gallery, here.





9. Sculptris - Sculptris is an elegant, powerful, and yet easy-to-use 3D sculpting software, allowing the artist in you to simply focus on creating amazing 3D artwork. Gone are the technical and often tedious constraints typically associated with digital art.
If you're new to the world of digital sculpting, Sculptris is the ideal ground on which to get started. If on the other hand you're experienced in CG, what you will find in Sculptris is a blazingly fast way to realize your concepts. It's intuitive, fun, and user-friendly, so you can focus as an artist on pure creativity. Check the gallery here and be amazed by Sculptris. (This one I wanna try!!)



10. Sumopaint - It features many of the same tools, but Sumo Paint is geared towards illustration, whereas other software such as Photoshop is more suited for heavy image editing. The app has the web's most versatile collection of image editing features blurring the line between desktop applications like Photoshop or Gimp. Watch it in action in this video.