Ubuntuland

I recently stumbled across a very promising alternative to Adobe Photoshop which runs on many different operating systems (and no, it’s not The Gimp!). This is especially good news for Linux users who are tired of running the outdated Photoshop 7.0 in WINE (although some have gotten CS2 to work).

For quite some time website developers using Linux as their operating system of choice have been pretty much forced to use The Gimp as their image editor. Since I use Linux as my operating system, this made things very difficult. I found that The Gimp wasn’t exactly my kind of image editor. It didn’t seem to have the same kind of feel as Photoshop. So like many others I used the very old Photoshop 7.0 in WINE. This didn’t really work either. It wasn’t nearly as powerful as Photoshop CS2 or CS3.

Now things are changing. A new image editing software is emerging. It’s simply called Pixel. It is very similar to Photoshop so when using it, there really isn’t very much to learn. It’s kind of like using Photoshop, just slightly different. Some of the features include:

• Multi-platform support: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and more!
• Extremely small and fast
• Support for layers, paths, channels, masks and selections
• Color Management support for RGB, CMYK, Grayscale and CIE Lab modes (8-bit and 16-bit)
• Realtime live effects for layers (adjustments, effects), sets of live effects can be saved as layer Styles
• Powerful text editing with spellchecking and support for IME/XIM (Asian languages)
• Includes variety of brushes, including full-color brushes and animated brushes
• Complex support for image slicing and image optimizations (GIF, PNG, JPEG, WBMP)
• Import/Export of Photoshop file format
• And much more…

However, this lovely bit of software is not free. But compared to Photoshop, it might as well be. At only $38 USD, you can’t go wrong with buying this (and no, they didn’t pay me to say that). You can still download the trial for free which has all the same features as the full version, but all your images will end up with a quite noticeable watermark on them. If your planning on buying, you better buy soon. Once Pixel is out of beta stage, it will cost as much as $89 USD, which is still a very decent price for software of this caliber.

You can download it here!