My Journey Begins: Open Source Softwares

It's monsoon season and my picture clicking is a bit slow as I don't want to take my beloved 350D out in rains. So spending a lot of time thinking about my post process work flows, thinking about the changes I want to make, and a lot of reading about how other photographers are working.

I am pretty amused at how many photographers have started using alternatives to commercial softwares - mainly to reduce cost of ownership, avoiding piracy, avoiding the guilt of using pirated softwares - not to mention avoiding all the virus attacks and Trojans / spy ware infections that sneak into your computer when you visit a cracks/serials site to get hold of that patch for a latest release of your favorite commercial software.

These alternatives are gaining popularity with folks who don't mind getting a little less functionality as compared to features in commercial softwares. I decided to make the move towards the open source world and started my journey.

I googled and found some suitable alternatives to my favorite commercial softwares. These softwares are "Open Source" in nature - that is no one company owns that software, but a group of interested people develop and support it and users double up as testers too!!

I am sharing the list of softwares that I have been using for many years now and the open source alternatives that I started using from this month. The shift works for me as I anyways did not use all the features provided by commercial softwares, I do not have deadlines for my work so productivity does not matter, and It does not matter if I do not get the latest fancy feature.

The features provided by these open source softwares are in most cases comparable with commercial softwares but before migrating you need to decide how it is going to affect your productivity.

Commercial S/w -------------------------- Open Source / Free S/w
Microsoft Office ------------------------------ Open Office
Adobe Photoshop ---------------------------- GIMP 2.4.6
Adobe RAW Editor -------------------------- UFRaw Plug-in for GIMP 2.4.6
Internet Explorer ---------------------------- Firefox 3
Corel Draw ----------------------------------- Inkscape
Corel Painter --------------------------------- ArtWeaver
Adobe Acrobat Reader ------------------------Foxit Reader
Windows Media Player ------------------------VLC Player
Microsoft Picture Editor -----------------------Picassa, IrfanView

I am especially impressed with ArtWeaver. This is a painting software aimed against Corel Painter. The best part of this software is that it even supports pressure sensitive tablets and is compatible with Wacom range of tablets!! That's pretty neat for a free software :-)

Hope you find your journey towards open source as interesting as mine. I am still exploring the pros and cons of each of these softwares. Do share any tools / open source softwares that you like and use it in place of commercial softwares.

Have a great day!!