5 Powerful and Inexpensive Apps for your Desktop Design
We are all acquainted with the giants in the software field—industry leaders like Adobe Photoshop, Corel Draw, Illustrator, and Painter applications. Majority of us most likely use these tools on a regular basis. However, effective software doesn’t have to be costly.
We have determined some fantastic design software that you might not have learned of—and they are all below $50. Perhaps, you will as if these software tools are as strong and powerful as their expensive counterparts. In reality, they are not. But they are still great-performing applications, particularly with their price tags. If you are one of those online entrepreneurs having a small budget or just trying to experiment, explore some of these following programs.
Sketch
This software app is a vector drawing tool for the Mac OS platform. Among the items on this list, Sketch is the most expensive having a price tag of $40. It offers a streamlined, neat workspace and a strong array of features. You enjoy all of the basic tools in this vector drawing app as you have expected it. It also includes additional features like symbols and libraries, smart objects, complex path conversion, multiple page documents and grouping. Although Sketch is not a competitive replacement of the standard Illustrator, it is still a smart alternative for lightweight mechanism illustrations.
Pixelmator
This image editor is designed for the operating system of Mac which includes a lot of features. It has been here for a while now but it has created a lot of gossip recently due to its latest success in the Mac App Shop. Having a price of $59.99, this great alternative to Photoshop includes free upgrade to its next second version during its launch. It is one of the excellent lightweight photo editors you can purchase at this cost.
Pixelmator has an incredibly sturdy set of features and an elegant, friendly UI that is easy to select on—it utilizes various shortcuts on your Photoshop keyboard. The application contains all of the fundamental drawing and choice tools you would expect to discover in any picture editor, apart from the presence of blending modes, layers, layer sets, retouching tools, blending and painting tools, support for the pressure sensitivity of graphics tablets and backup for third-party filters.
RawTherapee
If you want a free tool for handling and processing photos in RAW format, RawTherapee is a good choice. It’s compatible on Windows and Linux platforms. Using this app enables you to read and convert RAW images from your camera to various formats.
The image-processing components of RawTherapee contain support for bookmark-able change history, ICC color profiles and a complete bundle of image processing controls of 16-bit. This works for adjusting the white balance, exposure, image sharpening, contrast, and highlighting of images. Additional tools include Rotate, Crop, and Flip functions—effective for correcting chromatic aberration, lens distortion, and vignetting.
Inkscape
This next item is great and open-source software compatible for Mac, Windows and Linux. As a vector drawing app, it can provide you with a robust set of vector drawing features for paths, shapes, and freehand drawing. Though you can’t find more intricate manipulation tools just like the popular Illustrator 3D, Inkscape offers a collection of object transmigration and treatment tools, object combination, layers and cloning, pattern and gradient fills, editing tool for nodes, and a whole set of text functions. Sketch might be nicer compared to this but if you want a vector drawing software that’s free of charge and cross-platform; you can depend on the performance of Inkscape.
MyPantone Palette
Developed by Pantone, this Windows and Mac compatible software is good for making, managing, sharing and browsing color palettes. This is another free utility but you have to register on their website (which is free), because it links into its website API for palette indexing and sharing. This handy and fun tool is great for both print and web designers. You can use it in creating color palettes or browsing color sets by others when finding motivation for your next project.
