I Don't Have Enough Money For Photoshop Alternatives

Photoshop is a very nice utility to have, whether you are an animator, graphic designer, photographer, among many other professions! Sadly, a lot of people are unable to get access to this program to practice and grow their skill, or even learn they have it.  Little known to some people, there are a few programs that work almost as well as Photoshop that you can get for free. All programs are ones I have used and would recommend.

The brushes!

Fire Alpaca is a Japanese art program you can download and use on your desktop. This program is for both mac and windows! It's interface is really only made for art and drawing. 

It has quite a few types of brushes and filling tools, The latest update has included the ability to download and create your own brushes! All the default brushes (-fire alpaca brush) including Blur, smudge, and both erasers, work with pen pressure if you use a drawing tablet. I haven't seen anyone who's had a problem with it. For the fill tool, you must have closed lines- even one pixel can screw you up. For the gradient, make sure you have utilized both your foreground and background colors, as those are what will be used in the gradient (ex; i used black and brown.) Before you fill the gradient you have to fill in the shape with a solid color, then turn protect alpha on that layer, otherwise the gradient will fill the entire canvas.  

Another new feature added in the latest update is a comic book selection! You can create your own templates, or use ones already given to create panels like in a comic book.

The only file type Fire Alpaca can save and open with layers intact is a .mpd. It can save .jpg, .png, and .bmp. If you draw on this program, but want to move it with layers to Photoshop, another program called Medibang Paint Pro can open both .mpd and .psd files, and is able to change .mpds to ,psds. Link to Fire Alpaca main page (translate from Japanese) 

As you mess around, you can find a lot of different things on Fire Alpaca. Using command/control T for freetransforming a layer is a thing, as well as selection tools & rotation. Over all, though, Fire Alpaca is a pretty basic tool, and I don't use it often.

Online Image Editor is a web editor. I use it for editing gifs, mostly. For your canvas you can upload an image from your computer or url, or create a blank canvas. It does have transparency, and automatically saves as what ever file type you upload it as. Be careful, because you can only have one file open at a time (even if you try to multi-tab.)

selecting a frame for your gif or photo.

OIE is pretty basic, but very helpful for what I use it with! The most basic tools which I use frequently is re-size and crop. These tools work almost the same as they would any other program, except you can preview what it would look like before you apply it. There is also a basic type tool, but it doesn't have many fonts to pick from. There's lots of fancy tools that I don't think anyone uses because lets face it. Glitter text is cheesy looking. My favorite tool to use is the shape cutting tool. I use it when I am making gif avatars for myself or others on forum websites, along side the re-size. There are quite a few frames you can pick from. I generally use the square or the large circle, but I do sometimes go to the fun frames if they fit with the theme or if someone requests it. Before applying the frame, you can re-size the photo and/or frame, move the frame around, and edit the "fuzz factor", which is really just the blur or fade on the edges of the photo. Mostly I just re-size the frame and move it around so that the photo fits. If I do have to re-size the photo, I make sure not to re-size it enough to make it all pixelated.
When you want to save your photo, you have the option to save it straight to the downloads on your computer (you cannot name it before hand, you will have to go in and move and rename it), or uploading it to Facebook or a webapp called Picassa. Here's my finished photo if you'd like to see!
I really enjoy OIE for my forum coding purposes. I often use it in pair with Pixlr, as they do well with creating, cropping, and re-sizing images to fit my forum formats. I've created a lot of cool stuff using both programs, which I'm sure I'll blog about in the future! Link to OIE main page

Pixlr Editor is one of my favorite free programs to use to date, as it is super close to Photoshop in both interface & tools. You can use Pixlr through its web app or download it to your desktop, though I prefer the web app because it has all the same capabilities and is quick to access. Pixlr is by autodesk!!! Through the web app, you can open a photo from your computer, a url, or from any sort of library (Pixlr photo library, Facebook, ect.) 

I made the background
transparent and added the bars

In this image I fixed the
transparency and added the card
to the background

I use Pixlr for a lot of graphics for my forum posts, and I edit a lot of images on it. Lots of times I take the color schemes and make things with them such as borders. The tools I use most are the shape tool (line), the color picker tool, and when removing backgrounds from images, the select tools. I don't actually have much to say about this program, because its so much like Photoshop, but I have a few items I've made to show what you can do on the program! link to pixlr main page.

Coding Using work from OIE and Pixlr paired

All the images were coded (via bbc) into a forum. I may have made the silhouettes on photoshop, but i dont recall. This was made way before I realized those pixels in the gifs were bad.