Software costs money.  Actually that’s not true – there’s plenty of free software out there for artists, and the ones detailed below are just as good as the expensive versions.

Browsers

Web browsers are usually free (or their costs are “hidden” within the cost for the operating system, as is the case with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer) so this is an easy place to start.

There are two main browsers that will work on Windows PCs, Apple-Macs and Linux PCs:

• Mozilla’s Firefox
• Opera Software’s Opera

I prefer Firefox, but Opera is just as good. You can also find some browsers which work on some, but not all, operating systems.  These include Apple’s Safari (Apple & Windows only) and Google’s Chrome (Windows only).

But free software doesn’t only stretch to web browsers…

Graphics Software

Adobe Photoshop is great, but it comes with a huge pricetag of around $699/£557 for the initial software and then additional costs of around $199/£160 per upgrade to keep up with the latest version.

If you’d rather spend that money on other things (art materials, rent, food, beer…) then there is an alternative, the strangely named GIMP.

GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.

GIMP runs on Windows PCs, Apple-Macs and Linux PCs and is completely free (as are all the upgrades). In addition it can read and write most Photoshop native PSD format files

There’s also an official site called the GIMP Plugin Registry where you can download hundreds of plugins to extend GIMP’s functionality.

There is one major area where GIMP falls behind Photoshop:  CMYK color space – the GIMP only handles RGB. Actually there is a plugin that offers basic CMYK support, but it’s certainly nowhere near the full support that Photoshop offers.

This is fine if you’re creating images for the web or for printing on your own printer, but if you want to send images to a professional printhouse then it’s a problem.

Other people have different issues and opinions.  If you want to see a range of opinions and more detailed comparisons (interspersed with the occasional silly flamewar) then just Google “GIMP vs Photoshop”.

There are other free graphics packages aimed at vector graphics and page layout – if there’s sufficient interest I’ll do a write-up of them in a future post.

Office Software

Word Processors and Spreadsheets are a necessity, whether you’re writing letters to galleries, typing up your artist’s statement/bio, or laying out budgets for grant applications.

If your use of Word Processors and Spreadsheets doesn’t involve many specialist features then it might be worth not installing any specialist software and instead using Google’s GoogleDocs – a free web-hosted application that allows you to create and edit your documents from anywhere in the world on any computer.

You can upload your existing documents to GoogleDocs – it will import and convert files created in Microsoft Word, StarOffice, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Microsoft Excel, as well as PDFs, RTF files, and plain text files.

If you use some of the more advanced features on Word Processors or Spreadsheets then you probably need Sun’s free OpenOffice.org suite of software.

OpenOffice.org is a more traditional suite of office software, comparable to Microsoft Office, that includes Writer (a word processor, like Microsoft Word), Calc (a spreadsheet like Excel), and Impress (PowerPoint-like presentation software).  It also comes with Draw and Base – Draw is a basic drawing package, a little amateur for artists, and Base is a database package.

As with GoogleDocs, you can open all your Microsoft Word and Excel documents in OpenOffice.org, and you can choose to save documents in Word/Excel formats if you need to send them as .doc or .xls files to galleries or funding agencies.

OpenOffice.org is available for Windows, Apple OSX, and Linux platforms – and it’s all completely free.

Going the whole way – Linux for Artists

A few years ago I decided to ditch Windows and switch to Linux. It felt like a huge decision, but it was actually very easy.

Linux is an operating system – like Windows or Apple’s OSX. The difference is that it’s completely free of charge. And, in my opinion, it’s better than the others.

There are plenty of different types of Linux (each with their own advocates).  I’m going to recommend a flavour that I use, and one that’s becoming very popular for its ease of use.

Ubuntu and Kubuntu are two different flavours of the same Linux operating system.  The only real difference is the actual desktop – Ubuntu uses something called Gnome and Kubuntu uses something called KDE.  My preference is Kubuntu, but that’s just a personal preference.

There’s also a version called Ubuntu Studio which is specially pre-loaded with everything an artist could want:

Our aim is to assemble suites of applications aimed at creative people. Suites including the best open-source applications available.

For instance, Ardour 2 – A multitrack recorder/editor geared toward people familiar with Pro-Tools.

Graphic design and modeling applications including The GIMP, Inkscape and Blender. Along with plugins like dcraw to help with RAW camera files and wacom-tools for people with Wacom drawing tablets.

PiTiVi, Kino, Cinepaint are included for video creation. We hope to provide a creative environment to people as well as give a spotlight to some amazing open-source applications.

Let the creativity fly…

You can get all these software packages on Ubuntu or Kubuntu as well – Ubuntu Studio just has them all pre-installed for you, which might be handy if you’re just starting with Linux.

Twitter is the rising star of social media at the moment, and is a surprisingly good tool for artists.

From US President Barack Obama’s use of Twitter throughout his election campaign to the UK comedian Stephen Fry’s high-profile use of Twitter, it’s clear that it’s gaining a lot of ground and breaking into mainstream use.

As such, as well as using it myself (you can follow me & my art projects on Twitter!) I’m going to be embeding Twitter’s functionality into the open-source Artists Website Software that I’m currently developing – not only easily allowing an artist’s Twitter feed to be displayed on the website, but also mechanisms to easily post items to Twitter feeds.

If you’re new to Twitter then Squidoo has a very good Artist’s Guide to Twitter that explains everything from an easy to follow explanation of what Twitter is and how to use it, to arts marketing strategies using Twitter.

I’ve been looking for articles specifically about Artists using Twitter and have found a few good pages:

• 5 More Twitter-Specific Marketing Tips for Artists who Tweet
• Arts Organizations and Artists 2.0: Social Media for Arts People
• Twitter Search: How to Directly Market Your Art (or Anything Else) on Twitter
• Twitter – How to Use it?
• Twitter for Artists

I’d be very interested to hear how other artists have used this new tool.

I thought it was about time to give you all an update on the free open-source Artists Website Software I’m currently working on.

I’ve got a very basic skeleton completed so far, but the alpha version is still some way off.  I could have written it much quicker if I’d taken a more traditional procedural route, but my focus has been on writing a good core set of PHP classes with a dual emphasis on easy maintenance/extensibility and security.

The security aspects have been taking up most of my time recently. Chris Shiflet’s book Essential PHP Security (Amazon UK / Amazon US) has been of great help here.  I think it is vital to make sure that any website is as secure as possible – and anything I can do to make the software immune (as far as possible) to  SQL Injection, Cross Site Scripting, and Session Hijacking can only stand it in good stead.

Writing the PHP so that it will run on a standard shared web host is challenging – rather than using PEAR extensions I have set the criteria of only using a very standard PHP installation.  This means I miss out on using PDO and other time-saving extensions.  I am toying with the idea of using a few non-default extensions such as ImageMagick, but I’ll make sure that these are optional rather than required.

In my last post I talked about the Artists Website Software I was planning.

It’s been a busy few months (both with my day-job and with moving house) but I have made some progress, and I hope to have an alpha version available in the new year.  At that point I’ll probably upload everything to SourceForge to take advantage of their tools for Open Source projects (hosting, CVS and bug tracking).

I’ve been coding the project using object-orientated PHP5.  As well as being easier to maintain, this also makes the code easier to extend.  It does mean that it won’t work on an old PHP4 installation – but from what I can see most hosting companies offer PHP5 as standard now, so hopefully that won’t be a problem.

I’m avoiding using various (potentially time-saving) PHP PEAR Extensions even though I have them installed on my server – mainly because I want this software to be usable on a standard PHP5 installation which doesn’t have PEAR.  Similarly, this means I have to eschew MySQL Stored Procedures in favour of SELECT queries, as many webhosts don’t allow their users access to Stored Procedures.

As soon as the alpha version is ready I’ll be looking for people who have some spare server space where they can install and test it.  At this stage the preferred testers would be people with a strong technical (PHP/MySQL) background as the alpha testing will very much centre around the security and optimisation of the PHP code.

My website has grown organically over 12 years, but the code is looking very messy and unmanageable, so I’m thinking of recoding it from scratch (while adding a lot of improvements).

I decided that I may as well make any such “artist’s website application” available as a free open-source application for anyone else who wants to download it for their own use.  It’ll be PHP5 (object-orientated) with a MySQL back-end.

The main core of the script would be the galleries (gallery add-on modules for other applications like blogs always seem to leave a lot to be desired for a serious artist) with a strong emphasis on search engine optimisation.

There’ll be a “leave comments” function for each image in the galleries, integration with PayPal and/or Google Checkout for online sales, automatic thumbnail creation, and RSS feeds of new work in the galleries. There will be a facility to add a few static pages (artist’s statement, front page, contact form etc).

There’ll be an exhibitions/events listing function – with incoming and outgoing iCal feeds for calendars and geo-tagging of galleries/venues (so I can integrate it with Yahoo/Google Maps).

Rather than trying to write a blog application, I’m going to concentrate on writing “bridges” that allow the galleries to integrate with existing blog software (Wordpress etc).This is because there’s no way I could write blog software that’s anywhere as near as good as WordPress.

The same applies to discussion forums – I’ll just write bridges for SMF and phpBB. I am thinking of writing my own email newsletter application, though (because I’ve never found one that I’ve been 100% happy with).

I’m also going to investigate some ways to allow it to integrate with social networks, Flickr, etc.

So, my question to you is this:

What features and functionality would you suggest I include?  What’s important for you in an ideal artist’s website?