For the creatives out there (the Kritatives?), this is possibly on of the best kept secrets on the internet. This is a wonderfully in-depth digital painting and graphics editing tool that’s a great for both those trying their hand at digital art and full-on professionals.

It uses a layer-based system, and despite its complexity it has a very accessible UI and puts much less load on your system than, say Photoshop.

From the broad strokes to the fine details like colour management

Still going strong after all these years, it has firmly entrenched itself as the most viable alternative to Adobe Photoshop that you’ll ever need. Its UI doesn’t hide its debts to Photoshop, and each of its rich features, such as layers, curvature pens, masking controls, you-name-it, is more or less where you’d find it in Photoshop.

It was tastefully updated with a new dark theme and added customization with icon sizes that makes it easier to tailor to HiDPI screens. Crucially, it now takes advantage of modern tech like multi-threading, high bit-depth support and GPU-side processing for those with graphical firepower.

It’s one of those programs that really demonstrates how much a dedicated development community can improve a platform given time.

This video tool supports non-destructive audio and video editing, meaning you can compile effects without any quality loss. You can also use this platform to do color keying and grading operations, as well as more basic clip splicing and trimming. 

Perhaps the coolest thing about this is its ability to work with more or less any format of video, audio, or photo media.

It is a great video editor that can be used for simple cutting, filtering, and encoding tasks. You can edit multiple formats like AVI, DVD compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF, using a variety of codecs.

It supports automation of tasks using projects, job queue, and powerful scripting capabilities.

This is a professional vector graphics editor. It has got flexible drawing tools that cater to a lot of different kinds of users. It has also got a broad file format compatibility so that you can save it in any format of your choice.

You can use this software to create or edit vector graphics such as illustrations, diagrams, line arts, charts, logos, and other complex paintings.