Why spend big bucks on graphics software when you can get many, if not most, of the same features from freeware? Here are three mui-expensive graphics apps and their free counterparts:
Although Mac doesn’t have any default sketching app, there are tons of 3rd party tools that look and function like MS Paint. We’ve absolutely no idea why Microsoft doesn’t take this as an opportunity to create a perfect Paint application for Mac, but other developers have.
- Adobe Illustrator Available for Windows only, Creative Docs .NET (yeah, weird name) is a vector-based graphic design tool for creating illustrations, manuals, flow charts, icons, and the like. It offers advanced features like Bezier curves, styles, convert-to-curves, and curved-path text.
- Adobe Photoshop You've actually got two choices here: GIMP, which is available for all platforms, and Paint.NET, which is Windows-only. Both programs offer powerful, Photoshop-caliber image-editing tools, everything from layers to special effects.
- Corel Draw Want to sketch, draw, paint, etc? In addition to an assortment of 'digital brushes' including chalks, charcoals, and pencils, Artweaver offers the usual array of image-editing tools: crop, gradient-fill, transparency, layers, and so on. It also supports (and, in fact, recommends) tablet PCs for a more realistic drawing/painting feel.
Paintbrush is a Cocoa-based painting and illustrating program for the Mac, very similar to the Paint application on Windows. Paintbrush is easy to install and can support BMP, PNG, JPEG, and GIF files.
Mac Version Of Ms Paint
The Paintbrush interface is very simple, with a floating menu with basic tools selectable for drawing on the left, and a menu bar at the top. If you've worked with Paint, Paintbrush looks and behaves the same. It takes only a few seconds to select a tool and draw with it. Paintbrush is all freehand art, although there are the traditional handles for things like circles and rectangles. While not as powerful as third-party illustration tools, Paintbrush can do many basic illustrations. It is also good at importing screenshots and highlighting areas or manipulating the image.
Paintbrush is easy to work with, and if you work on multiple platforms it is handy to have a familiar tool on both Windows and Mac. Having said that, Paintbrush is a basic illustration tool, and as long as that's the way you want to use it, it's great at that task.