Photoshop CS6

November 19, 2014 by Andy Voelker
Categories: Design & VisualizationMultimedia

ADOBE PHOTOSHOP LOGO

Availability: CS6 is being replaced by Adobe Creative Cloud
Part of: Adobe Creative Suite
Comparable: GIMP

Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Systems for Windows and OS X.

Photoshop has become the de facto industry standard in raster graphics editing, such that the terms “photoshopping” and “photoshop contest” were born. It can edit and compose raster images in multiple layers and supports masks, alpha compositing and several color models including RGB, CMYK, Lab color space (with capital L), spot color and duotone. Photoshop has vast support for graphic file formats but also uses its own PSD and PSB file formats which support all the aforementioned features. In addition to raster graphics, it has limited abilities to edit or render text, vector graphics (especially through clipping path), 3D graphics and video. Photoshop’s featureset can be expanded by Photoshop plug-ins, programs developed and distributed independently of Photoshop that can run inside it and offer new or enhanced features.

Adobe Photoshop CS6 is being replaced by Adobe Photoshop CC.

Tags: creative suiteimageraster

BlueGriffon

November 19, 2014 by Andy Voelker
Categories: Design & Visualization

bluegriffon-logo

Availability: Free Download
Comparable:  Dreamweaver

BlueGriffon takes a straightforward WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) approach to web editing, but also manages to include plenty of more powerful features.  It is based on the rendering engine of Mozilla Firefox.

You could just use it to type text, insert images, tables, audio files, videos and so on. But there’s also an SVG editor, form design tools, some CSS support, an accessibility checker, DOM Explorer, and more.

BlueGriffon is free but does utilize commercial plugins, so you may find that some features link you to a web store to purchase these plugins.

Tags: htmlweb development

Dia

October 30, 2014 by Andy Voelker
Categories: Productivity & Utility

dialogoAvailability: Free download
Comparable: Visio

Dia is free and open source general-purpose diagramming software, roughly inspired by Microsoft Visio. Dia uses a controlled single document interface (SDI) similar to GIMP and Inkscape.

Dia has a modular design with several shape packages available for different needs: flowchart, network diagrams, circuit diagrams, and more. It does not restrict symbols and connectors from various categories from being placed together.

Dia has special objects to help draw entity-relationship models (obsoleted tedia2sql or newer parsediasql can be used to create the SQL DDL), Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and simple electrical circuits. It is also possible to add support for new shapes by writing simple XML files, using a subset of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) to draw the shape.

Dia loads and saves diagrams in a custom XML format which is, by default, gzipped to save space. It can print large diagrams spanning multiple pages and can also be scripted using the Python programming language.

Dia is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux and is available to download at no cost here.

Tags: flowchartuml