Graphics

Blender is a powerful rendering and animation tool available on many platforms, including Windows, MacOS, and Linux. For more details see http://www.blender.org/.

Dia is the Linux equivalent of Visio. It supports many types of special diagrams, such as network or UML charts. Export formats include SVG, PNG, and EPS. To support your own custom diagram types, provide the new shapes in a special XML format. For more details see http://projects.gnome.org/dia/.

digiKam is a smart digital photo management tool for the KDE desktop. Importing and organizing your digital images is a matter of a few clicks. Create albums, add tags to spare you from copying images around different subdirectories, and eventually export your images to your own Web site. For more details see http://www.digikam.org/ or read Chapter 20, Managing Your Digital Image Collection with DigiKam.

Eye of Gnome is an image viewer application for the GNOME desktop. For more details, see http://projects.gnome.org/eog/.

f-spot is a flexible digital photograph management tool for the GNOME desktop. It lets you create and manage albums and supports various export options like HTML pages or burning of image archives to CD. You can also use it as an image viewer on the command line. For more details, see http://f-spot.org/Main_Page or read Chapter 21, Managing Your Digital Image Collection with F-Spot.

gThumb is an image viewer, browser, and organizer for the GNOME desktop. It supports the import of your digital images via gphoto2, allows you to carry out basic transformation and modifications, and lets you tag your images to create albums matching certain categories. For more details, see http://gthumb.sourceforge.net/.

Gwenview is a simple image viewer for KDE. It features a folder tree window and a file list window that provides easy navigation of your file hierarchy. For more details, see http://gwenview.sourceforge.net/home/.

Inkscape is a free SVG editor. Users of Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, and Visio can find a similar range of features and a familiar user interface in Inkscape. Among its features, find SVG-to-PNG export, layering, transforms, gradients, and grouping of objects. For more details, see http://www.inkscape.org/.

Kivio is a flow-charting application that integrates into the KOffice suite. Former users of Visio find a familiar look and feel in Kivio. For more details, see http://www.koffice.org/kivio/.

KolourPaint is an easy-to-use paint program for the KDE desktop. You can use it for tasks such as painting or drawing diagrams and editing screen shots, photos, and icons. For more details, see http://kolourpaint.sourceforge.net/.

KPovmodeler is a POV-Ray front-end that integrates with the KDE desktop. KPovmodeler does not require a detailed knowledge of POV-Ray scripting because translates the POV-Ray language in an easy-to-understand tree view. Native POV-Ray scripts can be imported to KPovmodeler as well. For more details, see http://www.kpovmodeler.org.

Krita is KOffice's answer to Adobe Photoshop and The GIMP. It can be used for pixel-based image creation and editing. Its features include many of the advanced image editing capabilities you would normally expect with Adobe Photoshop or The GIMP. For more details, see http://www.koffice.org/krita.

See OpenOffice.org.

POV-Ray (Persistence of Vision Raytracer) creates three-dimensional, photo-realistic images using a rendering technique called ray tracing. Because there is a Windows version of POV-Ray, it does not take much for Windows users to switch to the Linux version of this application. For more details, see http://www.povray.org/.

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is an open source equivalent to Adobe Photoshop. It is a raster graphics editor used to process digital graphics and photographs. For more details, see http://www.gimp.org/ or read Chapter 19, Manipulating Graphics with The GIMP.

VueScan is a scanning software available for several platforms. You can install it parallel to your vendor's scanner software. It supports the scanner's special hardware, like batch scanning, autofocus, infrared channels for dust and scratch suppression, and multiscan to reduce scanner noise in the dark areas of slides. It features simple and accurate color correction. For more details, see http://http://www.hamrick.com/vsm.html.