Are you searching for free download Adobe Graphic Design Software? Of course, you are. With this, you can manage your logo design project or other graphic designs of yours easily. Don’t you find it hard to design the perfect logo only with Photoshop?
When you are working on projects that require design software, then you need to know about the best graphic design software available online. There are several top graphic design software programs you can choose to use, and it can be challenging because there are so many different options. The best Adobe Photoshop alternative will meet your needs. Here are some of the best alternatives to Adobe Photoshop other than Adobe Illustrator, so keep reading for more information about them
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is synonymous with photo editing for graphic designers. It is one of the most popular photo editing software tools in the market in a robust package that offers excellent graphic design capabilities.
Key Features:
- Design Tools: Offers a lot of design tools for both mobile apps and web
- Creative Cloud: Its active synchronization with Adobe Creative Cloud offers a lot of unique features, including Content-Aware Crop, Face-Aware Liquify, Artboards, the Design Space view, synced libraries, a glyph panel, Cloud Documents, touch, and stylus input support, among others.
- User Interface: Adobe is continuously working on delivering a more customizable user interface. It offers several targeted workspace layouts, including Graphic and Web, Motion, 3D, Painting, and Photography, Designer can also create your own custom layout of panels and windows.
- Open-Source GIMP Software: If you don’t want to pay a dime, then you can download and install this software for free. Consider installing it on a powerful machine to avoid lag and other performance issues.
Pros:
- It offers a complimentary mobile application
- Its slick user interface offers a lot of assistance for easy use
- Got a rich set of typography and drawing tools
- Comes loaded with 3D design capabilities
- Offers a library and photo management with Adobe Creative Cloud
- Efficient file transfer between different programs
- Multiple design tools come with responsive graphics
- Ability to edit animation and video layers
- Users can define the size of the canvas, create custom brushes, work in 3D, isolate elements from backgrounds, among others.
Cons:
- Adobe now offers Photoshop along with the subscription of Creative Cloud. The recurring payment turns out to be more costly, and people who want to buy software forever don’t have the option to buy a perpetual license
- A plethora of features might overwhelm a new user
- Offers lessor support for raster and vector images like SVG files
Pricing Plans:
Adobe offers Photoshop at a subscription price of US$33.99 per month per license.
CorelDraw Graphics Suite
CorelDraw Graphics Suite packs some pro-level features and offers a highly accessible interface that is easy to use. It is a bundle of multiple applications that deliver powerful editing features.
Key Features:
- Content Exchange: It is Corel’s online digital library through which registered users can get access to thousands of high-resolution photographs and digital images. It also offers over 2000 vehicle templates, 1000 fonts, 350 professionally designed templates, more than 500 interactive frames, over 600 gradients, vector, and bitmap fills.
- Flexible Payment: Corel offers three payment programs through which users can buy the software along with nominal charges for regular upgrades. It also offers an upgrade program for existing users.
- Customizable UI: You get a customizable UI environment for the desktop, icon sizing, toolboxes, options for how your documents open, and window border color scheme. Users can also visit Corel’s developer community website to design macros that suit their workflow.
- New Pointilizer: Corel’s new pointilizer offers a lot of variable parameters that are not just limited to regular dots.
Pros:
- It offers app-wide workflow and under-the-hood innovation and performance enhancements to boost productivity
- Works perfectly without any lag with Surface Pen
- Users get the option to choose GPU acceleration over the default CPU while working with system-intensive sophisticated vector graphics
- Smooth transition from desktop to tablet mode to leverage touch features
- It offers better EPS and third-party PDF importing capabilities and leverages with their GPL Ghostscript feature
- It is capable of exporting files in up to 48 file types, including AutoCAD, JPG, PNG, SVG, AutoCAD, JPG, and TIFF. It can also open 35 file types, including EPS, HTML, AutoCAD, PDF, PowerPoint, SVG, and even old FreeHand files
Cons:
- Unlike Adobe, there are no complimentary mobile applications offered by Corel
- Two many payment options might confuse the user
- Not easy to operate for beginners
Pricing Plans::
CorelDraw is available for a 15-day free trial. Its full version is available for $474 with a 30-days money-back guarantee. You can also pay for an annual subscription for $198, or just $16.50/month.
Sketch
The sketch is a vector-based graphic design tool that is best suited for app, web, and interface design. It is best suited for creating interactive prototypes for UI/UX purposes.
Key Features:
- Low Cost: Sketch offers a yearly subscription that is significantly lower than other subscriptions
- Great For Mobile and Web: It leverages grids, snap to grid functionality, and snap to pixel functionality to avoid half-pixel renders or imperfect alignment. These perfections are critical to ensure perfect responsive design/multiple screen sizes and resolutions.
- Screen Templates: It offers a library of artboard templates for iOS devices and responsive web design layouts. Designers just need to select an artboard and the device.
- Custom Plugins: Designers can easily find custom plugins for specific tasks through robust community support
Pros:
- It allows easy sharing and collaboration through the cloud. Designers can share the entire interface in the cloud through a simple file sharing process
- Users can mirror designs on larger devices for team viewing to identify how the design would exactly look in a particular device
- Users can export any layer or group as a PNG file
- Sketch autosaves all the changes in the design step by step to avoid any loss of design. Significant relief for designers, indeed!
- Users can leverage libraries with standard Android icons, iOS icons, and Mac icons
- It requires a low learning curve
Cons:
- Being a new design tool, it is not entirely polished and requires a lot of enhancement
- It offers limited illustration capabilities that can hamper intricate illustration work
- Screens don’t render in high resolution while accessing from the cloud
- Available only for Mac users
- Absence of automatic layout flowing option
Pricing Plans:
The yearly subscription costs $99 per year.
Inkscape
A powerful software for vector graphics. Free even for commercial use
Pros
- Completely free
- Plenty of filters
- Contains new nice effect tools
- A lot of educational content
Cons
- Can be very slow in large projects
This open-source vector free graphics program is widely known as a free analog of Adobe Illustrator. The difference between them is in the fact that Inkscape uses Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) as the main format. Designers, who are familiar with vector graphics, will easily master this program. Here you can create projects of any complexity.
It is a winner in Inkscape vs Photoshop battle, if you need a program for beginning graphic designers as it provides a large number of modern tools and effects, including complex path manipulations, node editing, bitmap tracing, and path-based text.
As soon as you enter their website, Inkscape immediately shows that it’s a professional tool for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. However, there is a separate page that contains instructions and tells how to download it.
SUMO Paint
Image credit: Vecteezy.com
| Pros | Cons |
| Great digital drawing tools | Requires Flash to run |
| Engaged support community | Can be slow when working with large files |
| Simple interface | Many features only available in the paid version |
SUMO Paint is another great free Photoshop alternative. It’s a web app that’s great for digital drawing. It also has quite powerful photo editing tools, but many of those features are exclusive to the paid version. SUMO Paint has many of the same tools and features as Adobe Photoshop, although its strength lies in its illustration capabilities.
Best for: Digital illustration; basic image editing
Level of expertise required: Medium
Available on: Web, mobile app
Pablo by Buffer
| Pros | Cons |
| Easy to use | Can be a little buggy |
| Hundreds of stock resources and templates | Limited functionality |
Buffer, the popular social media scheduling and management app, has created Pablo. It’s a lightweight design tool, intended to speed up and simplify the process of creating great visuals for social media posts. The intuitive interface means anyone can use it, no matter the level of skill. It is perfect for quick social media artwork, but it does have very limited functionality otherwise.
Best for: Social media graphics
Level of expertise required: None
Available on: Web
Conclusion
With a myriad of options available, doing your research can be overwhelming. In this article, we’ve compiled a list of the best free graphic design software programs that include all major design disciplines for both Mac and PC. This article contains reviews of the best free graphic design software for those who are looking to transition from a hobby to a career.