A great idea - but let me add some programs to the list!
For drawing/design:
Krita - an awesome, quickly developing program with great brush engines. Supports layer styles, transformation masks, CMYK, animation (onion style), texture editing, colorization masks (i.e. easy filling in colors on your lineart), etc.. (Price: free!)
MyPaint - a lighweight program with amazing brushes and great way to lineart your sketch if you don’t have a tablet or have an unsteady hand (you place manipulation points along your sketch and the program draws the line for you - you can even move the points around, vector-style). (Price: free!)
AzPainter 2 / AzPainter B / AzDrawing - super lightweight programs, useful if your PC/laptop is old. Dig the Internet for some great brushes! (Price: free!)
GIMP - once the flagship FOSS (free & open source) image manipulation program, now lags a bit behind Krita and lacks many function Krita has. The interface might be a bit too clunky for a newbie and reading the tutorials is pretty much required to figure out the most useful stuff the program is capable of, but still, it’s worth checking out. (Price: free!)
G'MIC - an awesome plugins collection. Can be used as plugin for Krita or GIMP, or as a stand-alone. Check out Youtube for some tutorials. (Price: free!)
For photoediting:
Darktable & RawTherapee - great Lightroom alternatives. You’ll probably need some tutorials to get a hang of them, but once you do, they’re quite powerful.
(Price: free!)
Pixeluvo - a simple, easy to use program. It’s being developed by only one person and unfortunately it hasn’t been updated in awhile, but it has all of the necessary stuff you need for basic editing (you can even open RAWs). Unfortunately, it does not support *.psd files. A paid program, but it often goes on sale on Steam. (Price: 34$, but check out sales on steam!)
Polarr - very easy to use, you can achieve great result in seconds. Has a free version. Has a free version with basic functions. Unfortunately, the pro version became subscription-based recently; I bought it back when you needed to pay just once to unlock the pro features forever and it was well worth the price. Still worth considering if you edit a lot of photos.
For video editing:
(Caution: I use Linux. While many of the programs listed below have a Windows version, I can’t vouch for them working well, with the exception of Blender).
Kdenlive - slightly clunky interface aside, it’s stable enough (if you don’t use any fancy codecs) and can achieve great results. (Price: free!)
Olive - still in Alpha, but looks very promising and is pretty stable already. (Price: free!)
Flowblade - nice, clean interface and it lets you use G'MIC filters to achieve awesome effects! (Just don’t go too crazy, or it’ll freeze XD). (Price: free!)
OpenShot, Shotcut - they are not particularly my cuppa, but I know people that enjoy using them. (Price: free!)
Blender - yes, it’s a 3D program, but it also has a video editor, SFX compositor and even a way to animate in 2D built in. I needed a tutorial to set it up, but I find it quite stable and powerful. (Price: free!)
Natron - a great compositor (https://youtu.be/V2MvbfuITT8). (Price: free!)
Oh, and if you want to free yourselves from your capitalist overlords ™ check out Linux (I recomment Linux Mint - the default interface is meh, but it’s the most newbie-friendly distro and you can chance the default look in seconds). as well. It has improved so much in the recent 5 years. You can even install Windows games on Steam via Proton!
Feel free to ask me anything if you meed some tips.
jacobvanloon
janainaart
titsay
izzy806
origamiaround
theartofmadeline
snowghoul
