Photoshop alternatives

You can do pretty much anything for free using open source software. However, what you save financially, you may have to pay for with your time and patience.

You will have to learn your way around the differences in how alternative software works -- but the end result will be the same even if you aren't using the industry standard software and you're not on a Mac! Its your choice!

Here's a list of some reasonable alternatives to commonly needed expensive software suites. Incidentally all of these are platform agnostic and have versions for Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux which is a bonus:

• Raster images (like Photoshop) use Gimp (http://www.gimp.org)
• Vector images (like Illustrator) use Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org)
• Code editor (like Textmate/SublimeText) use gEdit (https://projects.gnome.org/gedit/)
• Programming IDE (like xCode but not for iOS apps) use Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org/)
• Document editing (like MS Office) use Libre Office (http://www.libreoffice.org/)

Also, all of the above have tutorial sections referenced on their websites, not on Treehouse though.

Have fun! :-)

Abegael, are you on Mac? If so, have you looked at Pixelmator and Sketch?

Yeah I can totally understand your concerns. There is a lack of easy-to-find and good quality tutorials on other software packages. It would be interesting to hear if Treehouse will do even just a few videos on other software.

Hey thanks Mat! :)

ahhh no I should have mentioned I'm on Windows 7 though I own Win8 too so if I need to upgrade for this I will. I just don't like Win8 so I went back. Also, there is no course on Treehouse for those. That is my main question (I know about alternatives for Windows like Gimp). I can't take the courses offered because I don't have the expensive products the courses are based on.

I am actually really surprised since Treehouse seems to me to be targeting people just like me. That is, people who are planning to do their own projects, not projects that can budget in hundreds of dollars just for the software. If I wanted to run a design company I'd take $400 courses locally, not such inexpensive online courses. And it seems especially strange to me that they would market themselves as such an inexpensive way to learn and then teach products that require a lot of money to use.

Treehouse courses are teaching you the current industry standards. Photoshop has been the king of the image editors for many years, and shows no sign of letting that go. It's unfortunately pricey but is a necessary skill for someone looking to get into design. Resume item.

As Matt said, there are tons of alternatives out there. Free and Paid, I'm personally a heavy user of Sketch. But that doesn't help you either, being in the Windows world. Paint.NET has been around for a long time, it's free and might be worth checking out - http://www.getpaint.net/

The other thing that you will notice here, Macs tend to dominate with the development and design crowd, for good reason. You'll notice this is the tutorial videos and a lot of the users on the forum. That's just how the industry worked out and if you plan on sticking around the design world, perhaps a good investment would be looking into a Mac down the road. Mac minis can be had relatively cheap and work with your standard monitor).

While not a completely ideal solution, you might still be able to find a student edition of Photoshop CS6 at a local community college or something like that--it will still be in the ballpark of $200, but it'll be a one-time payment, rather than a monthly charge. However, Adobe is moving toward a subscription-based cloud for all of their software, so over time CS6 will become dated. That said, it'd be fully capable of doing all the basic design work you'd need to do for years to come.

Some of the freebie alternatives, like GIMP, are functionally similar to Photoshop and it may be possible to do a lot of the Treehouse coursework with those tools--you'll just probably spend a bit more time looking for the GIMP equivalent in menus. Hope this helps somehow.

> I want to learn how to make my own graphics/buttons/design elements

I've been learning web design and I've never opened graphics software. With CSS3 and icon fonts you can do quite a lot, here's some of the stuff I've done http://codepen.io/jamesbarnett. You can use mockup software & photo editing software to do most of what you need to do in Web Design.

Of course being a graphic designer is totally different, they live in Photoshop/Illustrator.