Top open source creative tools in 2016 (opensource.com)

[Posted December 23, 2016 by jake]

Over at opensource.com, Máirín Duffy has a lengthy overview of the open-source creative tools available. She covers the core applications (GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, MyPaint, Blender, and Krita) for design, as well as tools for video, photography, 2D animation, audio, music, and more. "These six applications are the juggernauts of open source design tools. They are well-established, mature projects with full feature sets, stable releases, and active development communities. All six applications are cross-platform; each is available on Linux, OS X, and Windows, although in some cases the Linux versions are the most quickly updated. These applications are so widely known, I've also included highlights of the latest features available that you may have missed if you don't closely follow their development. If you'd like to follow new developments more closely, and perhaps even help out by testing the latest development versions of the first four of these applications—GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, and MyPaint—you can install them easily on Linux using Flatpak."

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Top open source creative tools in 2016 (opensource.com)

Posted Dec 24, 2016 8:37 UTC (Sat) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

<p>I thought it weird that she only mentions flatpak... Until I saw the red hat she's wearing.

<p>Apart from not mentioning that most of these projects also have people making appimages, the article is also a bit out of date, missing the recent releases of OpenShot and Krita.

Top open source creative tools in 2016 (opensource.com)

Posted Dec 24, 2016 22:49 UTC (Sat) by flussence (subscriber, #85566) [Link]

Does GIMP even need bleeding-edge container packages? Last time I heard any signs of life from the project, it was using the old odd/even versioning scheme — and last time it had a stable release, so was the kernel.

Top open source creative tools in 2016 (opensource.com)

Posted Dec 25, 2016 14:35 UTC (Sun) by prokoudine (guest, #41788) [Link]

> Last time I heard any signs of life from the project

You make it sound like that was years ago. Which is not, of course.

Top open source creative tools in 2016 (opensource.com)

Posted Dec 26, 2016 0:27 UTC (Mon) by flussence (subscriber, #85566) [Link]

I'll admit, the last time I saw any announcements reach the wider internet was when they promised to fix the OMDB issues always brought up by users of Adobe Photoshop 6 - the multi-window UI and complete lack of support for CMYK and 16bpc colour formats.

The last time I *used* it myself, the text tool couldn't put black on white without highly visible colour fringing but I believe they were promising that'd go away too in the next big update. Maybe Gentoo's partly to blame for shipping a 2 year old version as “stable”...

If all that's fixed upstream - great! Maybe I can finally convince those PS6 users to give it a try without getting laughed at again.

Top open source creative tools in 2016 (opensource.com)

Posted Dec 26, 2016 2:21 UTC (Mon) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]

Most regular users probably use the development releases (which work quite well and fix at least some of the issues you mention).

Top open source creative tools in 2016 (opensource.com)

Posted Dec 26, 2016 9:02 UTC (Mon) by luya (subscriber, #50741) [Link]

GIMP already has single windows view since 2.6. Development version i.e. 2.9.4 supports 64 bits per channel thanks to the complete migration to GEGL engine. CMYK support is still missing but frankly is a low priority considering the complexity of different printers for majority of users and should be only used printing export.

Top open source creative tools in 2016 (opensource.com)

Posted Dec 25, 2016 18:57 UTC (Sun) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link]

Obviously, you haven't been paying attention because there have been a steady drip of updates. Major releases do take years though. 2.9 / 2.10 seems to be coming along nicely... and you can try then, including the port to GTK3 with flatpak (and others).