Resources & Support

Layout, Design and Image Editing

When you are working on your latest project, there are many tools that can improve the process to allow your creativity to flow. From simple graphic conversion utilities and image viewers to commercial software packages, our list of Layout & Design software is a good starting place for helping you create a masterpiece.

Page Layout & Design

• GIMP®

  GIMP (short for GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a freely distributed open source program for such tasks as photo editing, image composition and image authoring. It may be the closest thing to Photoshop® you can get for free!

• Gadwin PrintScreen™

  Gadwin PrintScreen is a freeware utility that can capture the entire Windows screen, the active window or a specified area. The captured screen can be sent to the printer, or saved to disk as a file in six different graphic file formats.

• InDesign

  Adobe's InDesign has become the industry's choice for page layout. You might create logos and other vector graphics with Illustrator (although InDesign is surprisingly good for this too), and you'll probably edit images with PhotoShop. But InDesign has the perfect tools for laying out pages, booklets and books. It is by far our number one, preferred application for page layout. Our clients seem to agree, since a large majority of the output files we receive use InDesign. Windows/Mac

• PluginsWorld.com

  A large download directory of plugins for Adobe® (Photoshop®, Illustrator®, InDesign®, Acrobat®) and Apple® (Aperture®, AfterEffect®, FinalCut®) plugins. Includes reviews and user ratings.

• Quark Xpress Quark Xpress would be the primary alternative to inDesign. It is also a true page layout application. It doesn't quite have the seamless integration with Illustrator, PhotoShop, and Acrobat that InDesign does, but it still has a large following, especially in the magazine publishing industry. Windows/Mac

• The Font Thing™

  Browse installed and uninstalled TrueType fonts, view sample text, individual characters and detailed font information all with The Font Thing, the freeware font management utility. It lets you install, uninstall, print, copy or delete any number of fonts at once. You can even store your own notes with them, filter them according to type and group them into collections for convenience.

• The Print Shop™

  The Print Shop includes all the tools you'll need to create the perfect greeting card, stationary set, calendar, CD label and more. Choose from more than 115,000 photos, graphics and web art. Select from more than 8,000 professionally designed project templates.

Image Editing & Organization

• Adobe PhotoShop

  If you can afford it, nothing is as powerful or versatile as PhotoShop for editing photos and other images.

  Warning: while unsurpassed for image editing, it is not a page layout application. Please be sure to set type and define page sizes in a page layout application, such as inDesign, if at all possible.

  Windows/Mac

• Art Text™

  Art Text from BeLight® is a tool for creating custom logos, icons, headings, and banners. You can modify text and vector shapes, turning them into fancy graphics for your own use and exporting the result in PDF, TIFF, JPEG, GIF or PNG format.

• FontExplorer™ X

  FontExplorer X from Linotype® delivers powerful font sorting, font shopping and font discovery capabilities in one easy-to-use font management tool. Best of all, FontExplorer X is free!

• GIMP

  GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages. Can't afford PhotoShop? Maybe GIMP is for you. Windows/Mac/Unix

• GIMP

  GIMP (short for GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a freely distributed open source program for such tasks as photo editing, image composition and image authoring. It may be the closest thing to Photoshop® you can get for free!

• MegaView

  MegaView comes from the same people that made Ez-Pix. It features enhanced multimedia and file management capabilities. Windows Only

• Paint Shop Pro

  Paint Shop Pro is a critically-acclaimed graphics editor for the PC. It works with over 40 different file formats and comes with a wide range of tools and filters to achieve the look you want.

  Windows

• PluginsWorld.com

  A large download directory of plugins for Adobe® (Photoshop®, Illustrator®, InDesign®, Acrobat®) and Apple® (Aperture®, AfterEffect®, FinalCu®) plugins. Includes reviews and user ratings.

• Snapz Pros X™

  Snapz Pro X is a shareware screen capture utility offering a multitude of options and rock-solid performance. You can save captures in a number of popular file formats, such as PNG, GIF, JPEG, TIFF, and PSD. It may be the best screen-capture utility for Mac OS X.

Linux

• GIMP

  GIMP (short for GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a freely distributed open source program for such tasks as photo editing, image composition and image authoring. It may be the closest thing to Photoshop® you can get for free!

• gPhoto™

  gPhoto lets you take a photo from any digital camera and load it onto your computer and then print it, e-mail it, put it on your website, save it to your storage media in popular graphics formats or just simply view it on your monitor.

• HFM™

  Hamster Font Manager™ (HFM) is a font manager for Linux systems. With it you can control the availability of fonts in all of the supported applications from a central place. Included modules support X-Window, Ghostscript and TeX, as well as PostScript® fonts.

• Jahshaka™

  Jahshaka is the world's first open source real-time editing and effects application. It takes advantage of the power of OpenGL and OpenML to give its users exceptional levels of performance. It currently supports Linux and Mac OS X. Jahshaka is licensed to the public under the GNU GPL agreement.

• RenderPark™

  RenderPark is a photo-realistic rendering tool developed at the Computer Graphics Research Group of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, in Belgium. The program offers many photo-realistic rendering algorithms, including several state-of-the-art rendering algorithms that are not yet present in other packages, not even in expensive commercial ones.

• Scribus™

  Scribus is an open source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, Mac OS X and Windows desktops with a combination of "press-ready" output and new approaches to page layout. Underneath the modern and user-friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.