Let’s quickly go through what you can do with the Gimp. The painting function has the essential clone, airbrush or pencil tools and a powerful gradient and blend tool. You can also create and save your own brushes and patterns for later use. The program lets you manipulate your photos, adding layers, doing Bezier and polygonal selections or setting text. Load and save animations in a frame-as-layer format and batch process all your photos for quick editing. The multi-windowed interface can be moved around to fit your needs and resized according to your desktop space.

What’s more, the Gimp can be expanded with over 100 different plug-ins and extensions available on the Gimp’s website. These apply in majority for layer effects such as render, distort or blur and make a great addition to the ones already present in the program.

While the Gimp is user friendly, the installation process can be a bit hairy. Because the application works under the GTK Runtime Environment, you will have to install this kit to successfully launch the program. The process is fairly lengthy and some error messages tend to pop up, however if you persist, you will be able to install the Gimp properly on your PC

Despite this fairly hazardous installation process, the Gimp is a program we recommend. Whether you’re out of dough or are looking for a free alternative to Photoshop, the Gimp is excellent image manipulation software with all the tools you’d expect.

Download The GIMP 2.6.12 in Softonic

The new Adobe Illustrator CS6 uses the same interface style as the rest of applications in the Adobe suite: a clean, almost minimalist window with reduced toolbars, nested windows and support for tabbed documents – which makes it easier for you to work on several projects simultaneously. Then most notable improvements is that it produces ever crisper graphics, especially for web and mobile devices, more fluid vector painting and the possibility to work on 100 artboards at once. One particularly useful new addition is the ability to convert layers to PDF pages using multiple artboards.

Adobe Illustrator is the perfect tool for all kinds of design. Whether you’re a professional web designer or you just want to create a poster and some invites for a friend’s party, your creativity will be boosted with Adobe Illustrator's impressive set of drawing tools, brushes, color processing tools and gradient effects – not to mention the wide array of filters and special effects with which you can add the final touch to your drawing.

As with any other vector drawing tool, Adobe Illustrator feels really complex for first-time users: toolbars full of strange icons, many new functions and features to learn... Luckily the program includes a bunch of templates to get you started, as well as a thorough help section where you'll find the answer to all your doubts and problems.

Adobe Illustrator is seamlessly integrated with the rest of Creative Suite 6. You can easily import and export projects and content from the latest versions of Photoshop and Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver is particularly well supported this time as Illustrator now allows dynamic authoring and testing support for content management systems like WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal.

Adobe Illustrator is the reference when it comes to vector designing and drawing. It features an impressive set of tools, filters and effects and is perfectly integrated with other Adobe apps.

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Adobe Photoshop 7.0.1 Update addresses some specific issues including fixes for scale errors, improved compatibility with QuarkXPress, acceleration of the opening of multiple windows and it now stores JPEG metadata correctly.

If you use Photoshop 7.0.1, Adobe Photoshop 7.0.1 is an essential bug fix download.

Download Adobe Photoshop Update 7.0.1 in Softonic

MacPaint X therefore contains many of the elements that made MacPaint popular i.e. ease of use and a simple palette based interface. Note that unfortunately, development of MacPaint X has discontinued and it will never come out of Beta. It also does not work on OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard or higher.

Main features of MacPaint X

MacPaint X offers all the tools you need to design your first raster graphics. It includes all the basic tools such as brush, eraser, line marker and a magnifying glass plus a rotation button to flip your images.

MacPaint X also includes a handy Undo button so that any mistakes can be immediately corrected. MacPaint X automatically saves your projects as you paint to ensure you don't lose your masterpieces.

Well organized interface

MacPaint X consists of three main floating windows:

- The first provides a customizable view of your creation
- The second provides quick access to editing tools (the palette)
- The third is used to undo actions, load or save a project

Compatible with many formats, MacPaint X is the ideal software for beginners in image editing. It's the closest thing to MS Paint since Paintbrush.

Download MacPaint X 0.3 Beta in Softonic

It offers many different shapes to work with and thanks to complex Bezier paths you can easily create your own. Importing any image or text is also fairly straightforward and quite useful to draw up more complex figures.

However, iDraw has been known to flip import images. Nothing too troublesome there though, all you'll need to do is rotate the image to its normal position.

We recommend using iDraw if you need to create drawings or animations. It's particularly useful for beginners wanting to get to grips with all the drawing tools.

Download iDraw 1.3.2 in Softonic

SeaShore is an open source image editor based on GIMP. It features gradients, textures and anti-aliasing for both text and brush strokes. It also supports multiple layers, alpha channel editing and uses the same native file format as GIMP. And due to Cocoa, it sports a much slicker OS X friendly user interface that definitely looks better than GIMP.

The beauty of SeaShore is that it's a lot simpler than GIMP and feels a bit closer to Photoshop in the way the menus are laid out. The downside of this, however, is that it's not as powerful as GIMP and lacks certain advanced editing features. In fact, even basic features such as Color Balance and Levels are missing from SeaShore. Stability can also occasionally be an issue but it usually manages to carry out most functions without any problems.

A slick OS X Cocoa style interface and a simpler GIMP style functionality will make SeaShore popular with anyone who has struggled with GIMP.

Download SeaShore 0.1.9 in Softonic

SketchBook Pro uses professional-grade tools that enable you to produce some highly impressive results. The streamlined interface allows for what is known as "gesture-based marking menus" which mean that different tools are available to you at the click of a mouse. However, note that to get the most out of SketchBook Pro, you'll need a pen and tablet device.

There are many preset tools, including pencils markers, airbrushes, erasers, flood fill tools, blur, and sharpeners plus different drawing modes that enable you to quickly create circles, lines and rectangles. There's also a quick cropping tool to trim your images.

Even though it uses the same pain engine, SketchBook Pro offers much more power and tools than SketchBook Express, including gesture support. However, many tablet users have reported that it can be just as awkward as the Express version at working with tablets properly.

Overall though, if you're looking for an professional sketching tool on Mac, SketchBook Pro is an impressive alternative.

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This means you shouldn't expect Pinta to be some kind of open source Photoshop clone. It does include some interesting features like support for layers, unlimited undo and redo, and a bunch of special filters and effects to spice up your images – but its nothing like a serious photo editor. It does, however, include a nice selection of drawing tools that can make Pinta a good choice as photo editor.

According to Pinta's developer, the program is still at an early stage of development – which may be the reason why some of its tools are not available yet. In any case, Pinta does look promising, so we'll keep an eye on this handy little editor as it grows.

Pinta is a simple drawing utility and image editor with a clean interface and an interesting set of tools.

Download Pinta 1.0 in Softonic

Adobe Lightroom for Mac allows both professional and advanced photographers to import, store, organize, edit and export thousands of pictures from one uncluttered interface. You can create sets and collections to store your pictures and add tags to every individual photo. The timeline view at the bottom is a great way to quickly browse through pictures.

Editing tools are located on the right of the Adobe Lightroom for Mac interface. The Library section works wonders to adjust things like white balance, exposure or vibrancy quickly. For advanced editing you'll have to go to the Develop section though. This is where you'll be able to correct details, camera calibration, split toning and more. AAdobe Lightroom for Mac lets you create virtual copies so you can edit elements without affecting the original.

Adobe's photo management tool also includes a section to create your own slideshow, including transitions and overlays. Although it creates nice slideshows it feels a bit counter-intuitive. We also liked how in-depth the print settings were, letting you adjust things like margins or print resolution very precisely. The last section allows you to optimize your photos for the web and create a flash gallery and a postcard viewer among others. It includes integration with sites such as Faceback and Flickr although not Picasa and iPhoto.

Thanks to an excellent structure, advanced editing tools and features to print, publish to web and create a slideshow, Adobe Lightroom for Mac is one of the best photo management programs out there.

Download Adobe Lightroom for Mac 4.0 in Softonic

While not at the same level as semi-professional software like Photoshop, PhotoStyler is a great way of adding some cool effects to your photos. Sepia, aged, shadows, 3D-look and city lights are just some of the effects available to take your images from average to pretty cool in a matter of minutes.

The beauty of PhotoStyler is that you don’t actually need any special knowledge to apply the effects. Just drag your photo into the PhotoStyler interface and choose the effect you want. You photo will appear in a new editing window - you’ll see the result in real time and, if you want, you can tweak the settings in the right hand side of the window.

Apart from PhotoStyler's “artistic” pre-sets, you’ll be able to use some basic photo editing tools by clicking on the plus symbol at the bottom of the window. You’ll also be able to save preset effect configurations for future use. Images can be saved as .PNG or .JPG and, crucially, can also be exported in batch mode.