Creative Resources
The resources on this page are listed either by first-hand experience by JC staff or by their software's positive public reputation. We make no endorsements or guarantees that anything listed on this page will completely satisfy you in reaching your goals. Please research the software of your interest further at your discretion.
Criteria for listed software:
- Completely free. No paywalls/subscriptions/upgrade to full features.
- Desktop/computer-based. Not app/mobile-based.
- Not in-browser or online-based.
- No account required to use the full software.
VOICE ACTING/AUDIO RECORDING
Audacity: A popular, robust audio-editor with tools for both music production and audio-editing. Non-destructive editing recently added.
Reaper: A full DAW (digital audio workstation) that can handle opening & editing audio, images, and video all together on multiple tracks. The full-software trial works indefinitely.
VIDEO PRODUCTION
Shotcut Video Editor: A full, multi-track video editor with filters and keyframes.
OpenShot Video Editor: A full, robust, multi-track video editor with advanced animation and keyframing features.
Kdenlive: A kde-built full video editor with multi-tracks, audio tools, filters, transitions, etc.
MULTI-PURPOSE IMAGE EDITING
GIMP: An advanced, fully-featured all-in-one software, good for editing photos, painting, and making web graphics. Often touted as the "open source Photoshop alternative."
Photo Pos Pro: A very robust competitor to GIMP, focusing on image-editing, photography, and creating printables like greeting cards and collages. Has layers, masks, filters/effects, a full brushes dynamics panel of rather advanced tools PhotoShop users may appreciate.
Paint.NET: A smaller, less robust alternative image-editing tool to GIMP, still having layers and more basic editing tools. Often used by those who don't need something as complicated as GIMP.
PixBuilder: A more traditionally-designed & far more basic tool focusing on photo-editing, with layers, masks, effects, basic brushes, and traditional photo-editing tools.
PAINTING/ILLUSTRATION
MyPaint: A robust, painting-focused program artists & illustrators love, with tablet support, dozens of customizable, "artful" realistic brushes, layers, etc.
Krita: Touted as a "professional", free painting tool, Krita also has layers, brushes that imitate real painting strokes and styles, a brush "stabilizer" for shaky hands, and tablet support. Krita also has 2D animation tools for creating animations.
ArtWeaver Free: Another painting/illustration-focused software with painting-realistic brushes, layers, and an "events" panel that lets you replay your painting progress.
SmoothDraw: A simpler, easier-to-learn painting software with layers, many brushes, and some retouch tools.
ANIMATION
Blender: A popular, 'standard' 3D animation software used by many, from those just learning, to industry profesionals.
Source Filmaker: A simpler, popular alternative to Blender, using the Source Game Engine for creating and modifying 3D animation models. Touted at times to be older, to use lower-res models, but better for those learning.
OpenToonz: Trusted by Studio Ghibli, a 2D animation suite rich in features for scanning and animating 2D works.
FILE SHARING / CLOUD STORAGE
Google Drive: A top popular cloud storage service, 10 gigs free, with sharing options.
DropBox: An alternative to Google Drive, only giving 2 gigs of free space, but can increase upon succesful inviting & accepting of others to use DropBox.
OTHER
MP3Tag: An audio meta data editor. Very useful to add the proper identifiable data to your files.
Sigil: A program to make e-books.
Calibre: An e-book suite for organizing, publishing, and converting your e-books into other formats.
LibreOffice: A full office suite alternative to Microsoft Office.
Format Factory: A program that will convert video into audio, with varying video and audio quality presets.
Scribus: A full desktop-publishing page application with spot and CMYK coloring.
Notepad++: An "upgraded Notepad" code editor with syntax highlighting, code snip importation, and other useful tools. Very lightweight.
Sublime Text: A robust coding/programming editor with many useful tools, syntax highlighting, etc. Will remind the user to buy a license every few saves, but full program works without one.
VLC Media Player: One of the most popular audio and video players around.
Mozilla Thunderbird: A free alternative to Microsoft Outlook, with features letting you connect to all your email inboxes using POP3, IMAP, etc.
Discord: A robust, popular text chat, video chat, screen sharing messenger software with features for servers, groups, private chats, and friends.
Adobe Acrobat Reader: The standard PDF viewer tool around.
7-Zip: An alternative zip archive tool for creating, adding files to, modifying, and extracting zip files and many other archive formats.
FileZilla: A popular FTP, FTPS, SFTP software for all your file transfer and backend file permissions editing, uploading, etc needs.
Suggest software to add to resources
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