Adobe's Creative Suite is one of the best software packs out there for professionals, but the suite is prohibitively expensive for most people. If you can't drop the cash, you can still get a similar experience with free or cheap software. Here's how to build your own Creative Suite.

Adobe Animate CC is marketed for professional users, but also offers many help and support tools to get you started. All you have to do is find a topic under Learn or Get Support on the Adobe website to access tutorials, articles and projects to help you learn new tricks. (Note that if causes your Mac to play music, you can press Fn-F8, or switch the priority of function keys in the Keyboard pane of System Preferences.) Name each symbol as 01, 02, 03 etc. Followed by the appropriate letter, for example: 01-H, 02-e, 03-l, and so on.

Updated: Some great new Creative Suite alternatives have been released over the last year, including Pixelmator, Affinity Designer, and DaVinci Resolve, so we've updated this post to include them, among others.

Adobe Creative Suite is more than just Photoshop: it contains other software that helps you build web sites, design logos, edit video, layout books, and more. Recently, Adobe accidentally gave free access to the 2005 version of Creative Suite for free, and it's clear demand for even outdated versions of the software is high. You can't get as great of an experience with free software as you can with Adobe's offerings, but you can at least get close. Whether you're a student looking to test the waters of design before diving into the Creative Suite, or you're just an amateur who doesn't need all the bells and whistles, these free replacements to Adobe's lineup offer enough for most of us.

Download Adobe Creative Suite 2, Including Photoshop and Illustrator, for Free

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Best Replacement for Photoshop: GIMP or Pixelmator

When it comes to replacing Photoshop, nothing is better than GIMP. GIMP has always been a little rough around the edges, but the recent update to version 2.8 really cleans up the interface and makes it a lot more usable. Alongside a huge list of updates, GIMP added a new single-window mode that mimics Photoshop's tabbed view, and makes it considerably easier to use. The fact of the matter is, GIMP has come a long way since it was first released, and it's now a serious replacement for the overpriced Photoshop.

If the slightly different interface in GIMP is throwing you off, it has a Photoshop-based portGimpshop that looks and operates exactly like Photoshop. Once you're up and running, take a look at our guide to getting started with Photoshop (which also applies to GIMP) to learn how to do all types of great things ranging from color correction to basic drawing.

How to Make GIMP Work More Like Photoshop

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Pixelmator 3.0 Is a Seriously Good Replacement for Photoshop

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Best Replacement for InDesign: Scribus

How To Download Adobe Animate

Adobe's desktop publishing software InDesign has been a standard for magazine and newspaper layout for a long time, but the decrease in paper publishing has made it less of a necessary tool. That said, Scribus is free and open source software that can do just about everything InDesign can. Scribus isn't nearly as intuitive (or pretty) as InDesign, but it gets the job done.

Scribus does things a little differently than InDesign, so it's necessary to run through the quick-start guide to get started if you're familiar with how InDesign (or Quark) work. As a program for laying out a few simple pages, a small pamphlet, or even a short book, Scribus works surprisingly well. That said, it doesn't do a great job at handling a lot of images, and it doesn't offer that many options for really tweaking the layout. Still, as a free alternative to Indesign, Scribus should work for most people who aren't pushing out a daily newspaper.

Of course, if you just want to lay out an ebook (which InDesign also does), you have a few other options, including Sigil, and Calibre. Neither is particularly feature-rich, but if you're just looking to lay out and publish a simple ebook (or PDF), both are free options that handle text and simple layout fine.

Also try: Serif PagePlus Starter Edition (Windows), iStudio Publisher (Mac, $17.99), Swiftpublisher (Mac, $19.99)

Best Replacement for Illustrator: Inkscape or Affinity Designer

Illustrator's main claim to fame is vector-based art—the clean, simple art often seen in clipart, web graphics, and a lot of print art. The main appeal with vector graphics is that it's based on mathematical equations instead of an actual image, so it can scale up (or down) to nearly size which makes it perfect for printing. It doesn't seem that complicated, but few programs have been able to really replicate what makes Illustrator great. The closest is Inkscape, an open-source program that does just about everything Illustrator can do without the extra bells and whistles (like live trace).

Inkscape can do standard vector graphics really well, and a quick glance at the Inkscape Tutorials Blog showcases a lot of the power people have pulled out of it. If your main goal is to make clipart style graphics, icons, logos, or even do basic single-page layout, Inkscape handles just about everything Illustrator does.

Mac users should also check out Affinity Designer ($40). At $40 it's obviously a step up from Inkscape, but it's well worth the price. The app was free while it was in beta, and now that it's officially released it's a really solid alternative to Illustrator. It works with Illustrator files, edits Photoshop files, has a ton of masks, supports levels, and can output in every format you'll need to get your work done. Affinity is also working on alternative to InDesign and Photoshop, so it's worth keeping an eye out for those as well. There's a good chance those will be free during a beta period as well.

Also try: OpenOffice Draw (Windows, Mac, and Linux), DrawPlus (Windows), XaraExtreme (Linux), or Torapp (Chrome), iDraw (Mac, $24.99), Sketch (Mac, $49.99)

Best Replacement for Premiere: DaVinci Resolve

DaVinci Resolve (Free) was once known as a complicated (and expensive) color correction tool, but in a recent update they've added editing to the mix. Curiously, it's also now free if you don't need the third party panel support. The lite version has some limitations. For example, you can only output to 3840x2160 (which is more than enough for most of us), only use one GPU for processing, and doesn't feature collaborative editing. That said, you can basically do everything else with it, including editing videos, mastering audio, and a ton more. DaVinci Resolve is already a favorite alternative to software like Final Cut and Premiere, and the free Lite version is surprisingly powerful.

However, if you're on Linux, you have a couple really solid options. Kdenlive, PiTiVi, and OpenShot are about as close as you'll get to commercial editing software for free. They're both a little closer to iMovie than they are to Premier in terms of features, but they work really well

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