: Good and Cheap alternatives to Photoshop for CMYK I have been using GIMP for many years and do not want to go through the expense and learning curve issues of Creative Suite/Photoshop but occasionally

@Cooney243

There's only one free, as in GNU GPL, alternative afaik:

www.scribus.net/category/about/ https://www.scribus.net/category/why-scribus/


... exerpt from their website ...


Libre Desktop Publishing

Welcome to Scribus, a page layout program for Linux, FreeBSD, PC-BSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, OpenIndiana, Debian GNU/Hurd, Mac OS X, OS/2 Warp 4, eComStation, Haiku and Windows. Since its humble beginning in the spring of 2001, Scribus has evolved into one of the premier Open Source desktop applications. Encouraged by professionals and beginners alike, the Scribus Team, with support from a large and growing number of enthusiastic contributors from all over the world, is dedicated to develop and improve “one of the most powerful and useful open-source projects out there” (TechRepublic). Underneath a user-friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK colors, spot colors, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation. Scribus has many unexpected touches, such as powerful vector drawing tools, support for a huge number of file types via import/export filters, emulation of color blindness or the rendering of markup languages like LaTeX or Lilypond inside Scribus. The Scribus file format is XML-based and open. Unlike proprietary binary file formats, even damaged documents can be recovered with a simple text editor – sometimes a challenging …

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@Voss6371140

It's been a while since this question has been asked, but a 'cheap' alternative to buying Photoshop is subscribing to it.

If you buy a 1 year subscription, the current price is /month (or if you prefer, month to month is ). As much as I love Gimp's philosophy, its CMYK support is still limited.

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@Welton168

The short answer in no. Gimp, Inkscape, Imagemagik and others do not natively support CMYK. These programs have RGB to CMYK converters which is fine for images but that's it. When designing for print, starting in the CMYK colorspace is a must. Most printers will not accept RGB files unless it's kinkos and getting files converted to CMYK can cost -0 an hour. You can probably find an old version of photoshop for cheap or free. If you are going to do a lot of print work then I'd recommend CS Design Standard or the cloud services offered by Adobe.

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@Kaufman565

I doubt that Photoshop's CMYK features have changed much in the recent past, and you would probably be well served by a much older version - such as CS1 - Which can be very affordable on eBay. I don't know if a cheaper older version counts as an "alternative" to Photoshop, but decent graphics software that isn't Photoshop is hard to find.

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@Mendez620

Unless you work in a big printing place then you should ALWAYS work in RGB and leave the CMYK nonsense to the experts in wasting dead-trees. Pro printers and their software will do a better job of CMYK than you will. Besides, do you really want to fill up your disks twice as fast with extra-dull CMYK-ness? And then when you have a colleague put those images online that they don't show up in some browsers because they end up as half-supported CMYK-jpeg's?

You have heard 'if you cannot do, then teach', well, there are a lot of teachers out there killing the minds of keen art students by instilling the overstated importance of CMYK into their brains. Nobody really cares about dead-tree CMYK no more except these 'teachers' and those they brainwashed.

If you do happen to have to work with a batch of CMYK images that you NEED to get into RGB, then Photoshop 'batch' is your best option, however, if Linux is your preferred tool of choice then apt-get install imagemagick and put your own command-line batch file together.

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@Martha945

Check out Paint.NET. There's a great, great amount of plugins available to do practically everything you'd want to do. Take's some playing around to get it set up just right but well worth it and totally free.

The basic functionality is fair as well but once you get the right plugins, watch out.


Edit: Here is a link to one psd loading plugin which handles CMYK. There are quite a few, perhaps that will help more than PDN alone.

www.boltbait.com/pdn/ <-- I can't seem to find the CMYK plugin info in this plugin pack but I remember the plugins being pretty good in general. Apologies for the oversight in CMYK, I was focused most on the cheapness :P I'm not saying PDN is a replacement for Photoshop but it goes a good distance if you put in the extra effort.

And here is one I know practically nothing about just for kicks.

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@Vandalay110

Well, if you are on a Mac, Pixelmator can do the job. I really like it.

But, if you really want the best software on the market, you should use Photoshop. Very huge community, a lot of tutorials, and everything else you can imagine.
www.pixelmator.com/
Good luck :)

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