Linux is a very strong platform for budding artists, photographers, animators, and designers. With inexpensive hardware, free software, and a modicum of talent and inspiration, anyone can create professional-looking computer graphics.

There is a huge range of Open Source software available to create, modify and convert 2D and 3D computer graphics. To provide an insight into the software that is available, we have compiled a list of 25 high quality Linux graphics applications. The vast majority of the software featured here sport an attractive graphical front-end, although we have not neglected console based applications.

3D Modeling and Rendering

Blender

Blender is a free open source 3D content creation suite available for many operating systems including Linux. It used to be developed commercially, but is now released under the GPL.

Targeted at media professionals and artists, Blender can be used to create 3D visualizations, stills as well as broadcast and cinema qualityvideo, whilst the incorporation of a real-time 3D engine allows for the creation of 3D interactive content for stand-alone playback. Blender has a huge variety of uses including modelling, animating, rendering, texturing, skinning, rigging, weighting, non-linear editing, scripting, compositing, post-production and much more.

K-3D

K-3D is a freely distributable 3D modeling, animation and rendering system. K-3D is a procedural modeler, meaning that the entire history of user modifications are stored when creating a model.

K-3D is designed to generate motion picture quality animation using RenderMan render engines. K-3D allows you to create and edit documents in multiple realtime OpenGL solid, shaded, texture-mapped views. Unlike Blender, third-party render engines (such as Aqsis, PRman, BMRT etc) can be easily integrated into K-3D.

Pixie

Pixie is a free, photorealistic raytracing renderer for generating photorealistic images.

The software is RenderMan-compliant (it reads conformant RIB, and supports full SL shading language shaders) and is based on the Reyes rendering architecture, but also support raytracing for hidden surface determination.Pixie is not a modeler or an animation system. It therefore does not have any graphical user interface.The scenes you want to render are described in a text file in a language very similar to Pixar’s RenderMan. Pixie also comes as a C/C++ library which you can link against your application.

Sunflow

Sunflow Global Illumination Rendering System (Sunflow) is an open source rendering system for photo-realistic image synthesis. It is built around a flexible ray tracing core and an extensible object-oriented design.It was created as a framework for experimenting with global illumination algorithms and new surface shading models.

Art of Illusion

Art of Illusion is a program for creating high quality, photorealistic (or non-photorealistic) still images and animations (either in .mov format or as a sequence of still frames which can be joined together using other software to make movie files). It is powerful enough to be used for serious, high end animation work.

Images are produced by rendering scene files. These scene files must contain some 3-D objects, at least one light (or some form of global illumination) so that the objects can be seen,and at least one camera, the view from which provides the image. Complex scenes may contain many hundreds of objects and several lights. Files built for animation may have several cameras between which the view is cut to make for an interesting animation sequence.

Art of Illusion is written entirely in Java.

Raster Graphics Editor

Gimp

GIMP stands for the GNU Image Manipulation Program, a freely distributed program for photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.It has a large feature set. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc. GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions.

The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.

Cinepaint

CinePaint is a collection of free open source software tools for painting, manipulation and image processing. It offers much of the functionality provided by Adobe Photoshop. It is a fork of GIMP.

CinePaint is used for motion picture frame-by-frame retouching, dirt removal, wire rig removal, render repair, background plates, and 3d model textures. It has been used to make many feature films, including The Last Samurai, Harry Potter, and Scooby-Doo, Spider-Man, and Showtime. It is also being used by professional photographers who need extensive color fidelity.

CinePaint is different from many other painting tools in that it handles high fidelity image formats such as Kodak Cineon, SMPTE DPX, and ILM-NVIDIA OpenEXR. To do that properly requires a 32-bit per channel color engine core so that data isn’t crushed into 8-bit color channels. The CinePaint core is 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit as needed.

GIMPshop

GIMPshop is a fork of the free/open source graphics program GIMP, which changes the layout of the user interface to mimic Adobe Photoshop. GIMPshop was therefore designed to ease the transition for Photoshop users.

GIMPShop was orginally developed for Mac OS X, but has been ported to Windows, Linux, and Solaris.

Scott Moschella developed GIMPship ” … to make the Gimp accessible to the many Adobe Photoshop users out there. I hope I’ve done that. And maybe along the way, I can convert a Photoshop pirate into a Gimp user.”

Vector Graphics Editor

Inkscape

Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, and Xara X. The interface is designed to be comfortable and efficient for skilled users, while remaining conformant to GNOME standards so that users familiar with other GNOME applications can learn its interface rapidly. It uses the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format, which is an open, industry-standard XML-based format for vector graphics developed by the W3C organisation. The popularity of this format is growing fast.

Xaraxtreme

Xara Xtreme is an Open Source powerful, general purpose graphics program for Unix platforms including Linux, FreeBSD and (in development) OS X. It is a port of Xara’s flagship software package, renowed for being the fastest vector package available, combined with an efficient working environment.

Among vector editors, Xara Xtreme is regarded as being intuitive, with similarities to CorelDRAW and Inkscape in terms of interface.

Animation

Pencil

Pencil is an animation/drawing software.

It lets you create traditional hand-drawn animation (cartoon) using both bitmap and vector graphics.

Pencil is not intended to imitate web-oriented vector-based animation software such as Flash.

A Pencil document is organised in layers. There are currently four types of layers: bitmap image, vector image, sound and camera.

Ktoon

KToon is a 2D Animation Toolkit designed by animators (Toonka Films) for animators, oriented to the cartoon production in a professional level.

KToon is designed to function in a similar way to popular proprietary animation packages, such as Macromedia Flash. It currently lacks a scripting language like Macromedia’s ActionScript, but it can export movies as AVI files and Flash animations.

Synfig

Synfig is a vector based 2D animation package. It is designed to be capable of producing feature-film quality animation.

The software eliminates the need for tweening, preventing the need to hand-draw each frame.

Synfig can be used for all aspects of the production of animations except story-boarding and editing. It has a powerful high-dynamic-range compositing system which allows users to add all sorts of special effects and shading directly in the software while maintaining spacial and temporal resolution independence.

Photo Management

blueMarine

blueMarine is an open source project for digital photo manipulation. The basic idea of blueMarine is to implement a generic and open platform, plug-in expandable, to support the whole workflow of a digital photographer, starting from the photo acquisition up to the archival and printing.

The blueMarine user interface is similar to that of Apple Aperture and Adobe Lightroom.

blueMarine can import photos from an external storage or camera and let the user organize them. The user can assign tags (both preset and user-definable) and perform queries using different criteria. Photos can be organized by Galleries and Trips. blueMarine also provides support for geotagging and can display maps with geotagged photos in an embedded viewer.

F-Spot

F-Spot is a full-featured personal photo management application for the GNOME desktop.

F-Spot simplifies digital photography by providing intuitive tools to help you share, touch-up, find and organize your images. At the time same, it also includes some advanced features such as tagging images.

It is designed to cope with large collections of photos.

Camera

Digikam

digiKam is a popular digital photo management application for the K Desktop Environment (KDE). This software makes importing and organizing digital photos seamless. Photos can be organized in albums chronologically, by directory layout or by custom collections.

An easy to use interface is provided to connect to your digital camera, preview the images and download and/or delete them.

Cheese

Cheese is a cheesy program to take pictures and videos from your web cam. It also provides some graphical effects in order to please the users play instinct.

Cheese uses GStreamer to apply fancy graphical effects to photos and videos.

Cheese is an official part of GNOME.

To get your camera working with cheese, it needs to work with the Gstreamer Framework and Video4Linux2 (V4L2) or Video4Linux (V4L).

Rawstudio

Rawstudio is an open source raw-image converter.

Rawstudio can read and convert RAW-photos from many different cameras, including Nikon and Canon. Rawstudio uses dcraw.

It has a graphical user interface, so you can simply open a RAW file and experiment with the controls to see how they effect the image. Rawstudio has a very simple architecture which is optimized for ease of use and therefore should be intuitive to most photographers.

Drawing

Skencil

Skencil is an interactive vector drawing appliction. Therefore a Skencil drawing is made up of shapes like rectangles, ellipses and curves that can be filled and stroked. Each object is represented by the mathematical description of its shape, e.g. for a circle they are the coordinates of the center point and the length of the radius.

Skencil is a flexible and powerful tool for illustrations, diagrams and other purposes.

A somewhat unique (for a drawing program) feature of Skencil is that it is implemented almost completely in a very high-level, interpreted language, Python. Python is powerful, object-oriented and yet easy to use.

Kivio

Kivio is the KOffice flowchart and diagram creation tool. It allows you to create accurate scale diagrams by arranging pre-drawn shapes and stencils on a page. The stencils might represent stages of a process, office furniture or components on an electronic circuit. Kivio comes with a large collection of different stencils which are grouped into collections, known as stencil sets, by subject area including flowcharting, electronics and computer networks. Objects are scriptable, and a backend plugin system offers the ability to make objects do just about anything.

ArgoUML

ArgoUML is a powerful yet easy-to-use interactive Java based graphical software design environment that supports the design, development and documentation of object-oriented software applications.

The users of ArgoUML are software designers & architects, software developers, business analysts, systems analysts and other professionals involved in the analysis, design and development of software applications.

CAD

Qcad

QCad is an application for 2D computer aided drafting. QCad enables users to create technical drawings such as plans for buildings, interiors, mechanical parts or schemas and diagrams.

It uses DXF as its standard file format. While other CAD packages are often complicated to use, QCad tries to be different.

BRL-CAD

The BRL-CAD package is a powerful Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) solid modeling system with over 20 years development and production use by the U.S. military.

BRL-CAD includes an interactive 3D solid geometry editor, a network-distributed symmetric multiprocessing high-performance ray-tracer, network-distributed framebuffer support, image and signal-processing tools, ray-tracing support for rendering and geometric analysis, path-tracing and photon mapping support for realistic image synthesis, animation capabilities, ray-tracing and numerical processing libraries, a system performance analysis benchmark suite, an embedded scripting interface, and a robust high-performance geometric representation and analysis library.

Utilities

Agave

Agave is a very simple application for the GNOME desktop that allows you to generate a variety of colorschemes from a single starting color.

Choose a starting color by clicking on the color button or selecting a color from the palette, and then select a scheme type from the combo box. The generated scheme is then displayed in the main window.

Agave was previously known as GNOME Colorscheme.

ImageMagick

ImageMagick is a software suite to create, edit, and compose bitmap images. All manipulations can be achieved through shell commands as well as through a graphical interface.

The software can read, convert and write images in a huge variety of formats (over 100) including DPX, EXR, GIF, JPEG, JPEG-2000, PDF, PhotoCD, PNG, Postscript, SVG, and TIFF.

Use ImageMagick to translate, flip, mirror, rotate, scale, shear and transform images, adjust image colors, apply various special effects, or draw text, lines, polygons, ellipses and Bézier curves.