The Completely Free Artist Toolkit For Mac

Here are five great Mac apps for artists that are completely free. No trials or in-app purchases. If you want to edit images, draw vector graphics, edit audio or work with 3D, check out these apps that all have a proven track record and many years of development.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you an artist toolkit for your Mac made entirely of free software.
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There's a lot of free software that comes with your Mac or that you can get from Apple for free. For instance for writers there's Pages. But if you want to find software for editing images, vector graphics and 3D graphics then usually you have to pay someone for it. But there are completely free alternatives. A lot of times when people talk about these they are talking about free trials or light versions of software that you have to pay to get the more advanced features. But I'm going to show you five apps that are completely free. 
First let's talk about graphics. If you want to get great software you usually need to buy something expensive, like PhotoShop, or something more reasonably priced like Pixelmator Pro or the Affinity line of products. But you can also find completely free software. Usually the first thing people think of is GIMP which stands for Gnu Image Manipulation Program. GIMP has been around for a long time and it's available across all different platforms. It tries to be a PhotoShop replacement with tons of features. You get it at GIMP.org. Here's what GIMP looks like when you run it. This is one of the reasons that I personally don't like GIMP. I'm not a graphic artist. So when I see all of these tools and controls I don't even know where to begin to edit images. But I know a lot of artists love it as a free app and also one that is across platform. Let me drag and drop an image file into GIMP here. You could see it appears here and there's a ton of stuff I can do. For instance I can draw on it. You can see there are tons of different options in the Menu. It's pretty full featured and powerful which means it also has a very steep learning curve. GIMP is also great for converting images because you can open up an image in it and then you can export. One of the things I don't like about apps like this is they don't use the native Mac Open and Save dialogues. They use controls like this so they can work the same on different platforms. But you can go in here and choose a variety of different formats. Export files too. So it's a good image converter even if you're not using the tools to alter the image.
Now another image editing app that you can get completely for free is called Seashore. This one has the advantage of actually being in the Mac App Store. Instead of being super complex Seashore is pretty simple. It's great for quickly editing images going beyond what Preview has. It's got layers. It's got your basic tools. You can open images in it. Do basic stuff like draw on the image. You can export and you've got a variety of Cloud types you can export to with different options. It's perfect for if you just need to do some basic editing tasks. You really don't need all of the features in  GIMP and you want something that's light and quick and that you can get in the Mac App Store. 
From there let's go over to audio. Now GarageBand is a great free tool from Apple for creating music and you can actually use it to edit audio files. But it's a really big app for  just quickly trimming audio files, filtering, or just recording something.
So there's Audacity. Audacity is a completely free tool. It's been around for a long time and it's cross platform as well. You can use it to edit audio files. The interface is pretty complex but you don't need to use most of this for basic trimming. I can drag and drop an audio file into it and you can see the waveform here. You can easily make selections. Hit Delete and it will trim things off. Then you can export in a variety of different formats. There's also some great effects, generators, and all sorts of other functionality in here for you to use. You can easily record audio as well. Just quickly recording from your microphone and then you could edit from there. 
Now let's go back into graphics. In addition to bitmap graphics like photos there are, of course, vector graphics. Usually you would use an expensive tool like Adobe Illustrator to edit or create vector graphics. But there's a free one in the Mac App Store called Vectornator. This is the website for it. When you go to get it actually just takes you to the Mac App Store. So in Vectornator it's a pretty simple interface here. You can draw and edit vector graphics. It can open up some standard formats like, for instance, an SVG file. I can actually drag and drop this in here and then I can play with the different elements inside here. It's also supposed to be able to open up Adobe Illustrator files although I haven't had much luck with any illustrator files that I download. Then you can export from Vectornator into a variety of formats including SVG format, pdf if you like, or an image format like jpeg or png. 
So basically a free version of PhotoShop Is GIMP and a free version of Illustrator is Vectornator. But what about 3D.  3D tools are usually very expensive. But there's one that's open source and free and it has been around for a long time as well. It's called Blender. You can get it a blender.org. So here's what Blender looks like. It's a 3D environment. You can import some basic file types like an OBJ file. Bring this file in here and you can see I get a 3D model that was created in another app. Of course you can create your own 3d models here and export them in a variety of formats. There are tons of tutorials online. It's a very full featured mature 3D app. But it can also do some other things. For instance if I create a new document you can see there's a 2D animation mode and also a video editing mode. You can bring in video. Bring in other tracks of video on top of that. Edit them here in the timeline. Seems to be a pretty good full featured video editing app. I tried playing around with it and it seems to have a pretty steep learning curve but it could be a good alternative if you want to move on from iMovie but you don't want to spend the money on something like Final Cut Pro. 
So there are five completely free tools that you can get to edit images, vector graphics, 3D, and audio on your Mac. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 7 Responses to “The Completely Free Artist Toolkit For Mac”

Karen

3 years ago

Downloaded gimp or XGimp but it asked for Linux info which I don’t have. Is there some other way of obtaining gimp?

Gary Rosenzweig

Karen: Sounds like you downloaded the wrong version. Download "GIMP for macOS."

Chuck Klein

I loved it, Gary. Thank you. Along that line, is there a free Drawing app you recommend, maybe lightweight CAD?

Chuck: Sorry, I don't use CAD so I don't know of one.

Fred

Chuck: LibreCAD might work for you. It's at LibreCAD.org and it's free.

Eric

Audacity: people may wish to read over articles like this one https://fosspost.org/audacity-developers-apologize-revise-controversial-privacy-policy/ before getting this app.

3D: Another app worth considering is FreeCAD at https://www.freecadweb.org/index.php I have used it a few times to design parts for a bicycle trailer tow bar.

Comments Closed.

The Completely Free Artist Toolkit For Mac

Comments: 7 Responses to “The Completely Free Artist Toolkit For Mac”

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