70+ Best Free Alternatives to Paid Software

 Image Editing

Pixlr – Fully functional alternative to Adobe Photoshop. (Web, Windows, Mac)
GIMP – Another Photoshop alternative. (Linux, Mac)
Paint.net – GIMP for Windows (Windows)
Seashore – Basic image editing with layers, textures, gradients and more. (Mac)
ImageOptim – Image utility that compresses your images for the web (Mac)RIOT – Batch image compression for Windows (Windows)
InkScape – Professional vector graphics editor, replaces Adobe Illustrator (Windows, Mac, Linux)
Pinta – Another great Illustrator alternative. (Windows, Mac, Linux)
Canva – Makes design ridiculously easy with templates for infographics, banners, newsletters, and more. (Freemium, web, iPad)
Pixlr-o-Matic – An app with fun, quick and easy effects that is a joy to use (Web, Windows, Mac, Chrome, iOS/Android)
Photoscape – Fun and easy photo editing software. (Windows, Mac)

 Photography

Polarr – Great alternative for Adobe Lightroom. (Web)
Shotwell – Photo manager with powerful organizational and RAW support features (Linux)
Picasa – Google’s photo organizer and editor is actually great, if a little bloated (Everywhere)
RawTherapee – Complete solution for all your RAW needs. (Windows, Mac)
FSpot – Full-featured personal photo management system (Linux)
FastStone Image viewer – Fast, stable and user friendly image browser with basic editing features
Irfanview – Lightweight image viewer and editor with batch processing abilities.

 Video

Playback & Entertainment
VLC – The video editor everyone loves. Super fast, plays almost every video format, and has many other hidden features – from video format compression to streaming podcasts. (Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS)
Pluto TV – Forget Netflix and cable, Pluto TV is your new best friend. With over a hundred channels – from Cats 24/7 to Science to Baseball, Pluto TV combines the variety of web content with the leanback experience of TV. (Everywhere) (Disclosure: I currently work at Pluto TV)
Miro – Just like VLC and also open source, with a beautiful interface. (Windows, Mac, Linux)
Kodi (formerly XBMC) – Your personal home theater. (Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS)

Editing
OpenShot – Fully featured video editor, alternative to Final Cut Pro/Premiere Pro. (Linux)
Lightwork – Professional grade video editor (Freemium, Windows, Mac, Linux)
Miro – Video convertor that converts almost any video format
Blender – Powerful video and animation editor with exhaustive documentation.
Handbrake – Indispensable tool that can convert and compress any format (Windows, Mac, Linux)

  Productivity

Productivity ToolsWunderlist – The best task-management app ever, period. (Everywhere)
Pocket – Found an awesome article but don’t have time to read it? Add it to Pocket with one click and read it later. (Everywhere)
OneNote – Microsoft’s free and powerful note manager (Windows/Mac/Android/IOS)
Evernote – A must have at this point, Evernote is your personal-everything manager. (Everywhere)
Trello – Project management software that will supercharge your productivity, (Web, iOS, Android, Win 8)
Pomodoro One – A free time management tool using the famous Pomodoro technique. (Mac)
Howl Timer – A time management tool with customizable time slots.
Sunrise Calendar – Beautifully designed with numerous integrations (including Google Calendar and Evernote). (Mac, iOS, Android)

Office Software
Google Docs – A complete alternative to Microsoft Office in the cloud. Say goodbye to crashes and lost unsaved documents. (Web)
LibreOffice – Downloadable alternative to MS Office and Google Docs (Windows, Mac, Linux)
Atom.io – Hackable text editor from our friends at Github. (Windows, Mac, Linux)
Sublime Text – The best text editor ever. (Freemium, Windows, Mac, Linux)
Foxit PDF Reader – Great alternative to Adobe Acrobat Pro. Create, convert, and edit PDFs. (Windows, Linux)

 Messaging

Slack – Say goodbye to email. Slack is a one-stop solution to all your messaging needs in and out of the workplace.
Adium – Cross platform IM client.
Pidgin – The ‘universal chat client’. Works with everything from Google Talk to IRC.
Telegram – Alternative to WhatsApp. (Android, iOS, Windows Phone)
Skype – Free video and audio calling.
Viber – Just like Skype.
KarmaBox – A tiny utility that sites in your menubar and notifies you when you get new reddit mail. (Mac)

 Music

fooBar – My favorite personal music player ever. Don’t be fooled by the not-too-pretty interace. foobar is the fastest, most lightweight and customizable music player available. (Windows)
Spotify – Ad-supported free music streaming. (Everywhere)
Audacity – Create, record, edit and remix music. Your personal home studio. (Windows, Mac, Linux)
Pandora – Like Spotify for radio.
Rdio Radio and on-demand streaming, available in more countries than Spotify and Pandora.

  Utilities

Everything Search – The fastest search for your computer, ever. Find anything in miliseconds. (Windows)
Flux – Protect your eyes by automatically adjusting your screen’s brightness according to the time of day. (Windows, Mac, Linux)
Dashlane – The best password manager ever made – it is an even better alternative than its many paid counterparts. Nothing is stored in the cloud and everything is encrypted – and the best part, it’s all cross-platform. (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android)
Ccleaner – The best tool to clean your computer, manage startup programs, and so much more. An essential. (Windows, Mac, Android)
BetterTouchTool – This will change your life. Open apps, close tabs, dock windows, delete files – all without lifting a finger from the touchpad. If you had to get only one app for the Mac, let it be this one. (Mac)
TreeSize – Scans your computer and visualizes exactly where and which apps are using up your disk space. (Windows)
DaisyDisk – Like TreeSize, except for Mac. (Mac)
Alfred – Search files and web, open apps and so much more. (Mac)
7-Zip – Zipping and unzipping software that is truly free – no nagging trial periods. (Windows)
The Unarchiver – 7-Zip for Mac. (Mac)
Calibre – Complete e-book manager, convertor and reader. (Windows, Mac, Linux)
App Cleaner – Completely uninstall apps and their hidden files with one click. (Mac)
Rocketdock – Get a Mac OSX-like dock for your Windows computer. (Windows)
Rainmeter – Completely customize and transform your desktop with skins, weather forecast, app launchers, quotes, and more. (Windows)
FileZilla – The best FTP client. (Windows, Mac)
Dropbox – The essential file backup solution. (Everywhere)
Memory Clean – Keep your RAM use under control with one click. (Mac)
coconutBattery – Track your Macbook’s battery health. (Mac)
Jing – Capture screencasts or screenshots and share them instantly. (Windows, Mac)
FastStone Capture – Image capture with a full-page (scrolling) screen capture feature. (Windows)

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20 Fantastic Photoshop Manipulation Tutorials

1.How to Create a Flaming Manipulation in Photoshop

2.Create an Intense Apocalyptic Photo Manipulation

3.How to create a Death Angel Concept Design in Photoshop

4.How to Create a Fantasy Banana Ship in Photoshop

5.The Babel Tower Photo Manipulation

6.Create a Dark and Surreal Photo Manipulation in Photoshop

7.Create this “City to Country” Photo Manipulation with Photoshop

8.How to Paint a Surreal Scene in Photoshop

9.Design Surreal Composition Fallen Angels Dream Fly

10.How to create Fantacy Woman in Amazing Photo Manipulation

11.How To Create Dark Surreal Photo Manipulation

12.Organic smoke and spatter effects

13.How to Create a Comic Book Styled Photo Manipulation

14.How to Create an Amazing Apocalyptic Photo Manipulation in Photoshop

15.Create a Dark and Gloomy Photo Manipulation in Photoshop

16.Breathtaking Underwater Apartment Photo Manipulation

17.The creation of A Life Of Aquatic Sounds

18.Create a Cosmic-Inspired Dreamy Scene in Photoshop

19.Create a Devastating Twister With Photo Manipulation Techniques

20.How to Make an Eerie Looking Photo Manipulation Scene

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18 Quick Photoshop Tips for Beginners

Photoshop is a vast program, packed with all kinds of sophisticated tools and functions to keep the professional photography world turning. Whatever your level of experience with the software, though, there are some quick and easy tips you can take advantage of to improve your Photoshop game — here are some of our favourite ones.

1) Rotate the view, not the image

You might want to use a different angle for retouching, but you don’t have to rotate the image itself: press R (or click-and-hold on the Hand Tool icon) to find the Rotate View Tool, which then lets you spin the picture around on screen without rotating the actual image.

2) Edit multiple text layers together

You don’t necessarily need to edit each text layer individually if you’re making the same changes to all of them. For example, hold down Ctrl or Cmd when selecting the text layers from the Layers window to snag multiple ones, then make your changes via the toolbar.

3) Size and move selections

Photoshop is packed with all manner of keyboard shortcuts that extend its features in some way. Here’s one example: when dragging out a selection window, hold down Space to move the selection as well without releasing the mouse button.

4) View one layer on its own

Here’s another shortcut that can save you lots of time: if you need to see one layer on its own, there’s no need to uncheck all the other eye icons. Instead, hold down Alt and click the eye icon on the layer you do want to see (and click it again to go back).

5) Drag selections between tabs

If you need to move a selected part of a picture into another image, and your files are open in tabs, there’s an easy and intuitive way to do it. Drag the selection as normal (using the Move Tool) up to the tab of the other picture, then wait a second for it to appear.

6) Make use of paste in place

When you paste in a new layer, it goes in the centre of the current image or selection by default, but you can get around this by using the Shift button as well as Ctrl+V (Cmd+V on a Mac). This retains the selection’s original position and it works between images.

7) Save files up to 20x faster

From Preferences, choose File Handling then check the Disable Compression of PSD and PSB Files box. Your layered files will no longer be compressed — and take up substantially more room on disk—but saving them will be significantly quicker.

8) Use the Magnetic Pen Tool

The Magnetic Lasso Tool is useful for automatically finding color boundaries when you’re making selections, but you can turn the Freeform Pen Tool magnetic as well to make it easier to draw shapes. With the tool active, just check the Magnetic option on the toolbar.

9) Quickly straighten an image

Use the Ruler Tool (hidden behind the Eyedropper Tool) then drag out a line across the horizon or another reference point that should be horizontally or vertically straight. Then pick Image, Image Rotation and Arbitrary, and Photoshop picks the required value.

10) Remove fringes on cut-out objects

When you cut and paste something into an existing image, you might (depending on your selection) see a coloured fringe of pixels around it. Don’t panic: use the Matting option on the Layer menu to access several tools to help you clean up these pixels.

11) Dehaze landscape photos

Here’s a very useful new feature added in the most recent Photoshop update. Choose Filter then Camera Raw Filter, open up the Effects panel and there’s now a Dehaze slider that reduces the haze effect you get when shooting sweeping landscape shots.

12) Add blurs without losing realism

This is another recently added feature for Photoshop CC users: adding grain at the same time as a blur to make photos look more realistic. Choose any option from the Filter, Blur Gallery list, and there’s a new Noise tab to the right that you can make use of.

13) Insert dummy text

Many people use Photoshop to mock up layouts for websites and the printed page, and if you need to fill in an area with some dummy text then you don’t need to tire out your fingers typing it: just choose Paste Lorem Ipsum from the Type menu instead.

14) Quickly export individual layers

Photoshop offers a wealth of export options, and if you need to quickly export individual layers from a project without saving it all you can do this with a right-click or Cmd+click on the layers panel. Use the Preferences, Export option to set the quick export format.

15) Use any image as a brush

Open the Edit menu, then pick Define Brush Preset to use the current image (or selection) as a brush. White areas in the source image count as transparent and black areas are where the virtual ink will hit the virtual canvas, so tweak the picture accordingly.

16) Cycle between fonts

Photoshop doesn’t have the most user-friendly text editing interface, but this quick tip can make life easier: with some text selected inside a layer, click on the font selection drop-down list on the toolbar, then use the up and down cursor keys to preview each font.

17) Get more undos

Ctrl+Z undoes the last action (Cmd+Z on a Mac) but you can hold down Alt as well to go back extra steps. Set the undo limit through Preferences and Performance (under History States), though the higher you go, the more system resources the program needs.

18) Be more precise with brushes

If you’ve got some precise editing to do, then the virtual brush tips Photoshop uses by default can obscure whatever it is you’re painting on (especially at larger sizes). Switch to a crosshair instead by going to Preferences then Cursors and changing the configuration.

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The Power of Photoshop’s Refine Edge Tool

One of the most difficult and frustrating tasks in Photoshop is making a clean and decent selection on photos that involve super fine hair, fur, leaves, and any fiber like elements. When using the standard selection tool or the masking process, you may able to accurately select smooth edges. We may use the color range tool and the tweaking of levels and channels to select much difficult areas but that would also take too much time on manipulation and very complicated to follow.

The good news is that, PS5 or Photoshop CS5 has a tool called the QUICK SELECTION tool.  This tool also includes a very powerful sub tool called the REFINE EDGES tool, using the refine edges tool will greatly help and speed up editing tasks especially when you need to select out the hair or fur on subjects.

For example, we have here a wonderful haircut. And then you want to cut out the background so that you could use another image as background or import the image to another document without having the white parts included.

Normally we would start at the marquee tool. If that proves too tedious to do, we then proceed to using the magic wand, masking, and other selection techniques and so on. However we can use the QUICK SELECTION tool which can be accessed by right clicking the Magic Wand tool. In using the quick selection tool, it is just simple as LEFT clicking + Drag. You may take time to learn how to handle this tool. Basically it is just simple as using a normal brush.

Now when you have selected the necessary parts, find the Refine Edges option found at the right top area. Click it and then a panel for options will appear. Here you find that the panel offers options to view the selection in marquee or running-ants appearance, in overlay or masking mode, on black or white background, on black and white or silhouette, and etc. to check the selection, you may want to choose the on black background for now.

On the strip image below, you can that I am using the black and white as the view mode, because we can clearly see the effectiveness of the tool. Now, apply 1 radius to Edge Detection, enable or check the Smart Radius. Apply on the hair to further improve the selection. Click OK to apply, and check by changing the view mode.

After that, we can now remove or apply a masking layer to remove the background. Choose masking layer to prevent accidental deletion. Once the background is removed, apply a gradient background or anything you like to see if the technique really works. If not satisfied with the result you can always try using the other options such as changing the smooth, feather, contrast, and shift edge under the adjust edge on the refine edge options.

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Remove Backgrounds Automatically with a Free Photoshop Action

There are hundreds of ways to isolate an object or remove a background in Photoshop, and this is one of the absolute easiest. See how a quick download and some simple techniques can help you cut out images with ease.

Photoshop actions, as we’ve covered before, are recordable programs users can create and save without even any knowledge of programming. The bottom line is they can do some incredible things in seconds, and automatically removing backgrounds is now one of them. Keep reading to see how to remove a background by pressing one button.

Download the Photoshop Action “Transparent Channels”

Visit the author’s website, and grab the action from the “Downloads” page. The action is named “Transparent Channels” and is the first download on a very short list of downloads.

Note: Keep in mind, the downloads page is SFW, but other pages may be NSFW. Surf with care!

• Transparent Channels Photoshop Action

Install the Transparent Channels Action in Photoshop

If you missed it, HTG has covered how any action can be installed in Photoshop with a simple How-To. This also applies to the “Transparent Channels” action. Skip ahead if you’ve already read it to learn how to remove backgrounds from light and dark images.

Removing Light Backgrounds with Transparent Channels

The Transparent Channels action works by digging around in the color channels and grabbing only the image information out of your picture. You’ll want to start with images sort of like the ones above, ideally isolated on white fields like this. It is not necessary to work perfectly, but you can expect it to work best in images where you want to lighter colors to become transparent.

To remove light colored backgrounds navigate to Image > Mode and select CMYK Color. There are two actions, and they only work in a specific color mode.

CMYK > Trans Layer will remove light colored information from your image, even if you have multiple layers, so don’t worry about flattening your image. Select

Press “Play selection” in the Actions Panel to start the action, and stand back! It’s seriously that easy.

Not every image is created equal to be cut out with this technique. Darker images on lighter backgrounds are what it likes best.

This image, while not exciting, is a good candidate for the action. It is cut out nearly flawlessly in mere seconds.

Shadows are cut out as well, which would have been an absolute nightmare to work around with methods using the paint bucket, eraser, or pen tool. Shadows blend to transparency, rather than to gray, the way they should. Even if you don’t like the results of the other parts of the action, cutting out the shadows this way can be helpful, even to the most seasoned Photoshop user.

Some lighter colored images can be run through the action multiple times, creating stacked “transparent layers” that increase the opacity of the more translucent areas. Search for images that will work well and combine the action with what you already know to create your perfect solution.

Artists will find this action is an excellent way to remove line drawings from white pages, among many, many other clever uses.

Removing Dark Backgrounds with Transparent Channels

There are two actions included in the set, and the second one is good for removing light information from dark backgrounds, like this galaxy.

This action only works with RGB Color mode images. If your image isn’t already in RGB, Navigate to Image > Mode > RGB Color to set it to RGB. Don’t flatten your image, as this action will work with a layered file or a flat one.

Make sure that RGB > Trans Layer is selected to remove all the dark background information out of your image.

Press “Play selection” and the action will do the rest for you.

Before…

After. All of the subtle blues blend to transparency, rather than to grays or gross colors that the paint bucket or eraser would have left.

Here’s the same image with a striped background placed behind it for emphasis. All the detail is retained, with the information placed conveniently in a separate layer for you to do with what you will.

• Download Transparent Channels Photoshop Action

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