Can’t Afford Photoshop?
June 15, 2009 by Melanie
Filed under Programs - Utilities - Gizmos
Unless you are one of the lucky people who can get an educational version, or somehow “poach” a free copy … you may have experienced the shock of Photoshop’s hefty sticker price.
If you have not purchased a photo editing package because of the price, you will be very interested in my latest discovery.
Aviary.com
Aviary is receiving rave reviews and rightly so. It is a powerful combination of design and image editing tools that allow you to indulge your creativity to the max.
The cost? Free for the basic tools and tutorials … and a mind blowing $24.95 per year for the full range of editing tools and advanced tutorials.
The tutorials are fabulous and easy to understand. So far, I have found the image editing tools to be intuitive and easy to use.
AND, there is no downloading necessary … everything you need is online.
Take a look at what some of the Aviary devotees have created:
Take a look at this really GREAT video review of Aviary:
That cat photo is awesome and amazing.
It IS rather amazing. I’ve been going through the tutorial on how it was done. It is a bit too advanced for me … but maybe one of these days I will get there!
I tried Aviary out, it’s good, but Photoshop is still better. Another program photographers use is called GIMP.
http://www.gimp.org/downloads/
Click on
Download GIMP 2.6.6 – Installer for Windows 2000 and above
if you don’t like messing around with lengthy installations that need code.
GIMP is completely free.
Yes, GIMP is another free image editing program. I’ve heard from many photographers that because it is open source, it is very poorly documented and can therefore be very intimidating to beginners. What is your experience with that? I guess the hole Aviary is trying to fit into is somewhere between paintshop and PhotoShop or GIMP.
wow really sweet images I need to find some time to mess around in photoshop with my images.
I really like the shot with the colored pencils- very unique.
What an amazing and affordable software! I like using this software a lot!