Free and Open Source Software

17916 readers

95 users here now

If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

Gaywallet@beehaw.org

alyaza@beehaw.org

Recommendations For A Simple Graphic Design And Photography App? (lemm.ee)

submitted 2 weeks ago by Churbleyimyam@lemm.ee to c/foss@beehaw.org

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Can anyone recommend a simple and noob/nonprofessional-friendly cross-platform app for simple graphic design and photography uses?

I normally recommend GIMP for this but for some people who I help with their projects it's overkill and not worth learning for infrequent use.

What can I recommend/teach such people to use, which is more stripped back?

Common use cases are putting together basic flyers & ads, restaurant menus, cropping photos etc.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

As you're dealing with digital print output, Scribus may be a good option. That's layout (something of a mix of Illustrator and InDesign), not image editing, but cropping photos is easily done in a variety of FOSS without having to be subjected to the learning curve of GIMP (so long as your RIP can translate RGB into CMYK, which was a solved problem in the aughts). I've admittedly only played around with Scribus a bit, but from what I can tell from your use cases, you're not looking for the bells and whistles like trapping one needs for offset.

[–] IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Ive tried Scribus, and found the interface very hard to get used to. For folks coming from Adobe, I find Inkscape the easiest for design. I would use a separate program for cropping, I don't have a great recommendation for that.

[–] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

GIMP suffers the same problem. If you're used to CS, anything else is going to be a horrific experience.

I've not tried Inkscape. Is it a bit more friendly?

[–] IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I actually use GIMP regularly these days, I found Scribus harder. Yes, Inkscape is more friendly. It doesnt follow the Adobe paradigm, but it's pretty quick to learn and is closer to the Adobe layout than other software.

The only thing that's kinda funky in Inkscape is cropping, which is done via "clipping", using another polygon to mask the component below. The selectable image stays the same size (but mostly invisible), making automatic alignment kinda annoying. However, thats for bitmap images, and Inkscape is meant to be vector-first, so that's not the end of the world.

[–] Churbleyimyam@lemm.ee 2 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah, Scribus has come up a lot when I've been looking into FOSS & Linux printing workflows. I will give it a proper look! Thanks :)