Most designers on a tight budget can get an uncontrolled rapid heartbeat by considering what an investment in a Photoshop license will do to their economy. While it is difficult to argue against Photoshop being the top pick for nearly any photo manipulation, non vector design job etc. there are actually some pretty OK alternatives you can use without spending a single dollar. Question is of course which alternative to use and to help you out I have collected a set of Open Source Photoshop Alternatives you need to be aware of. One of the serious disadvantages you face when not using Photoshop is that you can’t learn and self study using the huge number of excellent free tutorials you can find for Photoshop online. Depending on what alternative you pick there may be some tutorials available, but it will never really match Photoshop. Another thing to be aware of is file formats. Adobe PSD, the Photoshop file type is almost an industry standard for exchanging layered designs e.g. in the web design niche. In GIMP, one of the tools covered below it is possible to save layered files to PSD in stead of the GIMP native format XCF which is useful. Make sure you consider stuff like this when you evaluate your free Open Source Photoshop Alternatives.

All websites require their contents to showcase in a very professional way. Since it is very difficult for a single person or team to do it by himself/herself, they look for help in designing and maintaining the websites. This is where the importance of CMS systems props up. These systems are not only helping to create a good site, but also help in managing and updating the site.

These days, most of the web designers/developers are migrating to open source CMS because they got lot of support on the web from online communities. The rapid development of these communities have made them popular software and web designers first choice. Depending on the media, online communities, and participants in the plugins / add-ons give you the ranking of these CMS. Here is a selected 10 Free and Best Content Management Systems.

Flowplayer is an Open Source (GPL 3) video player for the web. Use it to embed video streams into your web pages. Built for site owners, developers, hobbyists, businesses, and serious programmers.

Edit as fast as you can think...
Spend more time looking at the picture, and less time navigating menus and buttons with an intuitive interface and a user-friendly toolset.

Everyone has heard of Adobe Photoshop. It is one of the most popular and expensive image editing programs you can buy. For those of you who do not have the hundreds of dollars to plop down on software I have compiled a list of nice photo editing applications you can use instead.

The Pencil Project's unique mission is to build a free and opensource tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping that everyone can use.

Top features:

* Built-in stencils for diagraming and prototyping
* Multi-page document with background page
* Inter-page linkings!
* On-screen text editing with rich-text supports
* Exporting to HTML, PNG, Openoffice.org document, Word document and PDF.
* Undo/redo supports
* Installing user-defined stencils and templates
* Standard drawing operations: aligning, z-ordering, scaling, rotating...
* Cross-platforms
* Adding external objects
* Personal Collection
* Clipart Browser
* Object snapping
* Sketchy Stencil
* And much more...

Although there is the huge amount of free softwares available online but open-source softwares have numerous advantages, apart from their price (i.e. free), they provide you the right to modify and redistribute the software with modifications. The right to modify is important, it enables you to change the software the way you like, also there are plenty of softwares developed but never updated, in this case if you have the right to modify then they can be very handy for needy people as anybody can update it. So looking at their importance, in this article we will feature 50 essential “open-source” applications for your Mac; those which will help in performing your daily life task easily.