Are you an artist, graphic designer or something like that? Well, then you maybe know, if you use Linux, that there’s no really professional program in this category of software… sadly.
Sure, there’s the Gimp but can it be compared with photoshop? Its layout is ostic, it does not work well, it’s simply difficult to manager, no learning curve will make you more confortable with the big 3 windows flying one over the other on the screen… and it hasn’t got all of the power in full and free transforming like photoshop, nor many of the others automated tools…at least you can use Photoshop Plugins in The Gimp, even under Linux..
The Gimp is the only one really know graphic program for Linux but it’s not the only one. I’m not going to talk about Tux Paint or other similar toys. There’s Mac Cinepaint and this is a pretty nice program but still almost unusable like Gimp for its horrible layout (It is a gimp fork after all). What I can’t understand is why Gimp yet hasn’t got any CMYK support (Which will arrive with project GEGL) while a lot of others little free projects around has it already…
If you don’t have to photo edit but even paint than with linux it is worst than going in a tropical forest by night: no choice at all, no software, no painting ability for any free software. This sucks. What can you do? Say goodbye to Linux? Not really.
I’m going to introduce you Deep Paint for Right Hemisphere and ArtRage from Ambient Design! Both are freeware programs for Windows but they work perfectly under Linux with Wine, no Bug. You just download the installer, run something like:
wine nameoftheinstaller.exe
And they install and work perfectly.
Deep Paint for windows
Deep Paint is completely freeware even if it is not opensource, and it is one of the best painting programs around, so the situation is raised for Linux users of something like a kilometer over the sky by this program alone… use it, give it try, it is incredibly professional and performant.
ArtRage for Windows, there’s also a Mac Version and it works great!
As for ArtRage there’s a freeware version with very few painting tools available and a commercial version that only costs 25$. I can ensure you, this software rocks, it is worth the expense, I bought it and use it and it i almost like painting for really! And it works perfectly with wine too. The latest ArtRage version (Commercial) needs a library to work, download it from here and copy it in your home/yourusername/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32 and ArtRage will work perfectly!
Now as for the pensource community there are great news in the horizon… the very near horizon it seems. There’s this awesome software, almost unknown, KOffice. Since OpenOffice is the most famous, KOffice is always hidden in its shadow bu even if it was a really useless software till last year (At least for me) it is becoming ever and ever more complex and functional. Its evolution is beying flash quick and that’s not a surprise since the entire KDE Desktop Environment is evolving at full speed with the version number 4!
In KOffice there’s Krita, formerly known as a painting program. It has never been it. It just looked like a very poor version of Photoshop with a better layout and look than The Gimp but not even half the power of it (And Gimp hasn’t even half the power of Photoshop I’m sad to say…)! Even though, there’s one thing that I noticed from the first times I tryed out Krita: it has support for CMYK! How is it possible? You wouldn’t expect this from a very poor software like this! And The Gimp yet hasn’t got it! Incredible indeed but that’s not the good new…
Since version 2.6 of KOffice Krita is becoming ever more usable. Its layout is very similar to photoshop, putting it kilometer ahead The Gimp an it has a growing number of new functions and now I visit this blog and look at that… Krita is really becoming a complex painting program! It will be the first one with a real painting simulation for Linux and not only: two Italian programmers are working on it and it’s thanks to them if Krita 2 in the alpha stage has already reached this level of painting!!
Amazing boys! I expect very big things from this new Krita! Keep working that way! Looks like the color swatches are even more complex and realistic than the Greatest painting program around, Corel Painter! Well that’s a dream coming true… while we wait for a wonderful new Krita, try out Deep Paint and Art Rage: they’re worth the try!
Since I do believe so much that the Linux community needs a good painting program and I’m not a coder, I created .wdi packages of Deep Paint and Art Rage for Winedoors (See my article), hopefully they’ll be available in the next winedoors repositoryes update. I have access to svn and have already uploaded my packages. With this DeepPaint and ArtRage will be installable in Linux with a single click of your mouse 😀 ! Nice, hum 😉 ? Hope this is going to help someone!
“no learning curve will make you more confortable with the big 3 windows flying one over the other on the screen…”
You know that multiple desktops and your window manager’s “always on top” function makes this a non-issue, right?
That painting simulation in krita looks really great.
uhm, not exactly. I’ve been using The Gimp for almost a year now and I was used to Paint Shop Pro.. I tryed every sort of stratagem to use Gimp better but it is impossible to sa that the layout is comfortable as that of PSP or PhotoShop… it simply is hard to use. Even with those options activated, the 2 tools and layers floating windows are too large. Sure, with a 24” Imac and a monstruous screen resolution this becomes less evident but the layout from gimp must not be encouraged. It should definitely be changed. And by the way, I’m working on a way to make it a better experience, using Compiz Fusion. Just have to find the right combination of options and then I’ll post it here 🙂
You did not mention how SLOW krita is…even lagging behind when drawing a simple pencil or brush stroke!
he, guess you use it in Gnome, right? It is a program for KDE and if you run it in KDE it is fast enough. I’m a Gnome user and I find Krita in Gnome slow of course, it is not designed to work in this environment but in my KDE desktop it runs quite fast, I didn’t notice any difference with the Gimp. I have several DE sessions on my machine, you know, I like a lot experimenting.
But about Krita I did say that it is an immature painting program after all… for the moment. The worst of all things about Krita, aniway, remains its lack of Plugins. You can’t use gimp plugins, Photoshop plugins, nothing. In The Gimp, even under Linux, you can use Photoshop plugins too and they work great, even if one of the things I prefer more of the gimp are script foo… and python scripts. Krita has support ofr plugins created in those ways but there aren’t any around at the moment… as I said, Krita is still almost unknown even if it is probabl going to surprise us all with KDE4 and version 2!
I’ve learned that qt4 libraryes are something really fast! maybe the next apps created with those libs will become the new standard in speed and reyability in the Linux community, specially if you consider how fast can you create an outstanding application using qt4 toolkits… I hope Krita is going to become somehow soon the Free Painter challenger for Linux 😀
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Perhaps you could post the versions of files and installers you are using. I can say that neither work flawlessly under wine, at least for the versions i am using neither work under the default install.
ArtRage now has a msi installer so you would need to use msiexec /i nameofinstaller.msi . And as pointed out art rage needs some additional lib to run. The deep paint splash screen causes problems with wine 0.943. This issue maybe fixed with 0.944 but i have not verified that yet.
Wine 0.9.41, from Wine hq repos for Feisty, ArtRage 2 Free works perfectly out of the box, Deep Paint works perfectly out of the box, Art Rage 2 Full, as I mentioned, needs gdiplus (not that big issue) and it will become automated in the install process the moment I complete its Wine-Doors app installer. For DeepPaint and ArtRage 2 Free, if you really are having issues, try using Wine-Doors to install them.
If you still can’t install them, I dunno what to suggest you, they work perfectly in any othe PC I tested, same can be said for the entire Wine-doors developers’s systems. 🙁
congrats for the blog simple AWESOME!!, keep it up!! though I m not a professional graphic designer, once I was in the old days when the first laser printer full color appeared, and at that time the king was Corel draw. (Ok blashback machine to 1997 : P ).. At some degree you are right but I mostly I disagree completly with you, there are lots of programs for graphics Xara extreme, (my favourite), inkscape, and well the so mention on these Gimp. The proof is that I made a gift for a friend of my, that has a 6 old year daughter, first she got into TuxPaint learned really fast, and now she is learning inkscape, hmmm the learning curve is just another way to say …”Hey I ‘m so acostume to this stuff, I ‘m a lazy slacker, don’t want to hear a word about anything else”….
(which BTW, It is the first top reason why a windows user will reject and pook Linux).
This is a myth, and the proof is that 6 old girl. Myths should die blah blah FSF (the usual RMS sermon)
bye
take care
jay
Hello Joako, thanks for the comment and for the compliments! 😀
About the issues and clues you say here, I just wanted to tell you that this post was about PAINTING programs, not about Vectorial Based programs. In that direction the Linux world is now top-class, thanks to Inkscape and Xara, they surely do not fear Illustrator by Adobe but… as for Painting Programs, there is none. None at all. Gimp is not a painting program. This is a real issue, we have to fight it out. As for Painting program I mean Corel Painter, for example, or as I said, Autodesk Sketchwork or Artrage! I mean, Painting programs are those able to simulate real painting brushes, oils, pastels, watercolors and the similar as if you where painting on a real paper with real instruments. Photoshop, for example, is absolutely not a Painting Program, it is a picture manipulation one. Like The GImp. Gimp is pretty OK for a picture manipulating program, evn if it is still to much behind Photoshop (But the cost of the second kinda makes the difference, rally… one can try and get stuck with Gimp just because PS mans that you HAVE to piracy it if you want to use it, unless you are a professional, and since I hate pirates, I invite everyone to use The Gimp of course).
So, the point of the article was just that there IS NOT a single painting program for Linux. There is Gogh, a project in a very initial stage, which aims to become a painting program, but yet it still can’t simulate a single instrument or material, such as watercolors, for example… Well, that’s it 😀
Bye!
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Obviously you are a regular photoshop user and find the gimp’s layout difficult to get used to. But that doesnt make it difficult to manage for everyone. I have been using Gimp regularly and cant find my way around with photoshop. For those preferring the photoshop layout, there is gimpshop which you may want to try. I just feel this post is unfair about gimp with nothing concrete to back your opinion that gimp is less powerful than photoshop (apart from CMYK support, but seriously, how many of us need it in daily life?)
Sorry Raja (seen Arjuna? 😉 ) but honestly I think that it is a fact. Gimp has an horrible layout first of all. C’mon, it’s really hard to use it. Why can’t it be all resumed into a single window? And why are all the buttons so large, even with the smaller theme enabled… If I want one of the Gimp’s windows to show me all the info they have, then I have to enlarge them a lot. Each window become extremely large on my MacBook 13″ (with geubuntu)… and almost unusable.
Of course I WAS a regular photoshop user before entering the Free Software world, who wasn’t? ;P
In reality, I started with Paint Shop Pro. I’m always having hard times with Gimp’s layout, it is 99% of the Gimp’s lacks in my opinion. If the layout could become much more usable, than Gimp would have solved 99% of its problems, really. I’ve been using only Gimp and Krita and Pixel for 3 years now and still I cannot get used to Gimp. As I said, no possible learning curve IMHO. Sure, if you start with The Gimp, maybe… but even that way I believe you would find yourself much more confortable with a layout a-la-photoshop like krita’s or Pixel’s…
As for the functionalities, what can I say? PS comes packed with a lot of great filters for example, Layout options and properties that Gimp hasn’t. Some days ago I had to create a glowing aura around a picture. With PS? Layout –> something like layout effects (don’t remember anymore) and then add glow: you can completely set it as you like and see the result previewed on the REAL picture.
In Gimp? No option. If you want the backgroud to stay transparent, you can’t use, say, alien glow: it makes your background Black or of another filled color. Too bad, I can’t use this. To do it I have to :
1) select the picture,
2) expand the selection of some pixels
3) create a new layer
4) fill the selection with the color I like for the glowing effect
5) select none
6) bring the layer in background
7) apply to this layer a gaussian blure.
Are you joking? Seven versus one step? And for which result? For something that is going right on the junk if I decide to change a little the form of the image to have the glow effect, because the glow itself is not an effect, it is an artifact I created. So if I modify the form of the glowing image, than I have to delete the glowing layer and repeat all 7 passages. Crazy.
Also, do not forget that all of these filters do not show a real preview on the picture. If you are lucky, those filters has a tiny ugly window with a little preview… impossible to understand. So I have to apply each time the filter to see its real effect and decide if I keep it or throw it.
These are only two problems. Wanna know others? Got an whole list, man. For example? Creating a new layer from a pasted picture. Why the heck has layers got to have a size on their own?! Dammit, I guess that’s only for the final dimensions in MB of the file… very bad. If I paste a new picture in my picture, then the pasted selection is fluctuating of course. If I say: “new layer” from the available options, it becomes a new layer with a different size compared to that of the original image… So I have to create a new big layer before I past the picture and THEN I can paste it and flat it down… crazy.
When I free resize a picture I expect it to be real time resized under the movements of my mouse. Despite the fact that the whole physics or resizing the picture are IMHO wrong and hard to use, I don’t know why and what was exactly in the mind of the developers when they decided that the original picture (the not resized one) had to remain on the screen while you drag and resize the modified version of it. I know, it is complicated to understand for a reader, imagine for a writer, me, since I’m also Italian. Hope you got it man. The free resize option in these conditions is almost unusable. How am I supposed to see how the resized picture looks like in the contest of the whole composition if the not resized picture keeps staying there during the entire resizing process? It is just impossible. Another trick here: while you start resizing the picture, you can hide its layer. this way the unmodified version disappears and you can see only the version you are modifying. But, hey, you have to think about it, you have to create a trick! It is not automatic!
Also, PS has some cool osnap functions completely absent in Gimp and company. Only PS has those functions and I really miss them… I mean that when you are dragging a picture near another, for example, the mouse helps you in placing the picture exactly where you’d like it to be. So you cannot make mistakes, for example, creating a grid of pictures. Well, with Gimp this is almost impossible. I didn’t find any workaround. It is just a major missing feature.
then I could tell you about how crazy it is that with Gimp I have to use a different tool even to grab and move my picture, I could list you an infinite number of missing features but the answer is only one:
Can you do with Gimp all the things you can do with PS? Absolutely, NOT in the same time. With a lot of workarounds? Maybe but you loose a LOT of time. Really a LOT of time, man. Then another evaluation is needed! Since PS costs something like 1500$ and Gimp is Free Software, can you suffer the pain of hell and keep using Gimp instead of PS? That is, as a whole, what’s the best choice? Of course, IMHO, Gimp. C’mon, it’s a crazy little toy and it misses an enormous number of features for absolutely no reason at all (what would it cost to the devel team to create an usable user interface dammit?) but it is free.
Since we are not pirates and personally I don’t want to be it at all, then Gimp is the FORCED choice for us. But should PS become free, for absurd, then I wouldn’t even consider Gimp for a second. that’s sure.
hope I gave you interesting and fair argumentations 😀
hey, it pratically is an article 😉
let’s make it become an article then 😀
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I’m not actually a Linux user yet, but I do intend to switch very soon, and as an artist, this is an issue I’ve found on my searches too.
I’ve used GIMP as well, and have the same problems with the UI – I have to disagree with Raja that it’s mainly a problem for habitual Photoshop users. I haven’t used Photoshop since I was at college (over ten years ago). The thing is, most image editors and painting programs have a similar kind of interface, and GIMP’s is just too different to everything else to easily get into. I definitely concur that the multi-window setup is a large part of that, but I also found that many features didn’t work as I expected to, or were hard to find because they were buried in menus I just wouldn’t have thought to look in.
I really hope an actual free program along the lines of Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro becomes available at some point in the not too distant future.
In the meantime, I think I’ll have to stick with my current Windows mainstay, which is Artweaver (available from http://www.artweaver.de). Alas, it’s not actually ‘free’ software, which I guess is a concession I’ll have to make for the time being, but it is the best freeware painting program I’ve ever used.
Despite only being a beta (on version 0.5.7 at the time of writing), it’s got an enormous range of functions, including many user-created plug-ins and filters, and the ability to easily create your own brushes. It really gives Photoshop a run for its money in terms of value.
Above all, it’s extremely easy to get into. My girlfriend’s not a big user of such programs, but the first time she fired up Artweaver, she found she instantly knew where to go for all the tools she needed.
It’s not available for Linux, unfortunately, but apparently (and hopefully :P) does still work well via Wine.
Hope that’s of some help for anyone still searching…
Too bad… I own Painter IX.5 and I also have Artrage 2.5 (commerical version) and Deep Paint… They are no where near the capability of Painter….
Great posts like this are worth an update.
I would suggest to you to add MyPaint and GIMP GPS, or Gimp For Painters, all three of them open source and quite good. Give them a try!
I’ve also read something about using OpenCanvas with Wine, but it isn’t open source nor free (latest version) so for the moment I’ll let it aside.
My first image creation program is Gimp and I never had problems with its interface. Actually I like it. I make the canvass window full screen and access the tools via shortcuts. I access the menu with by right clicking and temporarily show then hide the other windows with tab. Then I had a quick try with Photoshop and it drives me angry. I hate the tool bars floating around my canvass I also had to remember new shortcuts and the brush though quite sophisticated is complicated and alien for me. I say such difficulties are caused by familiarity of certain interface and not with the interface itself as you claimed.
I thought programs like Wetdream, MyPaint, Drawpile and FlowPaint are painting programs available for Linux.
I’m happy for you, but this only means you are not a professional in image manipulation / graphical design. When u just make graphics for the sake of creating them, because u like it or for small works, Gimp might even be ok, if you consider that u’re going to loose an enormous amount of time by just trying to achieve a result that in photoshop would be a one click editable and unduable option. Really. Gimp is not even quarter as functional as PS, that’s true and it’s just a matter of facts. It’s useless to try and defend it at all costs. This only makes developers think that they did it, no need to get better. In any case yes, u may get used to interfaces but the lack of possibilities in Gimp is really huge.
As for your suggested painting programs:
Wetdream is just an experiment to add painting abilities to Gimp. It was discontinued in 2001 (why don’t u inform about this easy to know things?), so it is absolutely NOTHING now.
MyPaint is a painting program I and OpenGEU sponsor, we host it on Intilinux, imagine if I don’t know about it 😉 Simply, at the time this article was created, MyPaint was just a sketch and nothing more. We hosted it, opened forums, helped designing the website, etc. Now it’s much better but still not an alternative to any even very basic painting program. Let’s say one of the more basic tools: Artweaver or Artrage. These programs are eons forward compared to MyPaint sadly. Though it’s a promising tool 🙂
Drwapile: didn’t know about that tool but, man, seriously, it only has the painting brush and an eraser.. c’mon. MyPaint it’s even better for many things.
Flowpaint, hum, interesting and promising, didn’t know about this either. But, believe me, try artweaver or artrage man… any of those very very easy and basic tools are years far away from these tools we are talking about.
Now, the point is simple. I was talking about profesional tools, u are talking about kid toys. Go have a look at Corel Painter, we have nothing even 1/100 that good in the Linux world, being Krita the top notch tool in painting and Gimp in image manipulation. That’s it and, really, it’s not an opinion.
I’m not a professional painter so excuse me for talking about “kid toys” here.
I hope Krita and MyPaint and others continue developing at good speed. Let’s see how far they come, in comparison to the propietary ones.
Regards!
Sorry to you, I didn’t want to sound hostile in any way… but, really, let’s hope they become better and better… that0s why I’m trying to help for as much as I can too. And yes, using those tools even if they are “toys” is a good way of helping too! Developing pictures with them, showing them off, so that people can pay attention to those small projects too… hoping this will help improving them.
Oh my, just found about quaquarels! Have a look at it, this really looks promising!!! 😀
Totally agree with you. In my case, as an amateur/beginner (in painting) I think I have the opportunity to start from scratch just using free software: I won’t miss better features, it’s a bit like if my skills developed the same way the software does 😉
It seems that sometimes the professional standard doesn’t apply to amateurs, who can actually use a software still in early development. I would have a better ride with a Ferrari, but honestly, a litle city car is just OK for me right now…
…or not: of course it’s good to know if an app has reached a minimum level that will let me improve my skills at all. That’s why I find posts like this so useful, and why I’d love to see them updated (almost wiki-like) to actual development levels.
Where did you find about quaquarels? Google doesn’t show any intelligible results.
That’s because I’m an idiot and I wrote then wrong name 😛 😀
http://sourceforge.net/projects/qaquarelle/
The real name was quaquarelle 😉
It already looks promising.. but I can only seem to find the sources tar on the site. I’ll maybe transform it in deb binary for ubuntu, we’ll see.
So I really agree with u. I started when I was a little child with Paint Shop Pro and at the end, I came to a dead end and had to bitterly switch to PS. I loved my PSP and always tried to argue with my friends that you can do with PSP anything u do in PhotoShop with some efforts… when I switched to photoshop I couldn’t use it. After a month of intense use of that program I evolved tons and tons of times… and now I know that PSP is but a toy compared to PS… that’s bad cause PS costs big green $$ compared to how cheap is PSP :
And just think that I’m more than sure, having used all of those tools intensively, that PSP is way more evolved than Gimp. Imagine what the level of the poor gimp is for a pro 🙁
As I said int he article (maybe), vectorial graphics tools are great in Linux. We have Inkscape and more than anything Xara! Illustrator’s great but I believe Xara is not less powerful. In the painting and photo editing side of arts… Linux is realy really poor. Let’s say opensource in general.
So, you do very well starting to work in young promising free softwares. No need to buy Corel Painter XI at all, why buy an expensive program when you are just getting started? Of course u do well. If in the future you’ll have to evolve and migrate to another software… that’ll simply happen 🙂
“In the painting and photo editing side of arts… Linux is really really poor. Let’s say opensource in general.”
Not to mention in CAD… It’s obvious that the only problem by migrating to linux-open source comes from the lack of professional level apps.
Totally agree, I was chatting about it right now with MadnessMike. In general there’s no professional level tool in the opensource world, except for Xara LX (vectorial drawing) and Blender (3D modelling) for as far as I know.
Sadly, Gimp, Krita, all the painting tools, openoffice… they are all amateur tools, nothing for the professional, nothing really powerful. In CAD there’s nothing AT ALL. NOt for the pro, not for the beginner. Nothing at all. QCad is not even worth mentioning. Medusa, BricsCad and other “professional” CAD sofwtare for Linux.. they all suck and are really really capable of nothing if compared to Autocad… not to mention Archicad. There’s nothing at all of comparable to the allmighty Archicad.
I think it’s a physical limitation of the opensouce world sadly. So many people working for “experimenting” on their little toys, no one ever works for real, no one wishes to dedicate the whole time of his work life to coding opensource software and that’s natural. People has real work too. So, no boss, no deadlines, no commercial researches, nothing professional FROM THE BEGINNING of the work. Even from the very start of the idea of creating a software there’s nothing professional, u see. That’s the real problem. Probably we have to admit that the whole opensource working model is a fail. Until we find a way to get real money from opensource software, it will never become professional, easy to understand for me now, after so much time developing and working INTO the opensource scene. 🙁
“That’s because I’m an idiot and I wrote then wrong name 😛 😀
http://sourceforge.net/projects/qaquarelle/”
LOL, I tried every version but that one: qaquarel, qaquarelli, quaquarels… Thanks, I’ll try it 😉
I think you’re (sadly) right. But still I hope open source will be someday an economically sustainable activity, improving professionality and quality. Until that moment, I would be happy just having good commercial programs native for Linux. But now that you mention Archicad, I fear we’ll have to wait eons to have a BIM under Linux. Sigh… Architecture ties me to Windows.. or Mac. But hey, keep on trying.
I don’t get the PS-like GUI making a program “so much ahead” of gimp. That’s just due to 1 – prior habituation with PS, rather than Gimp; 2 – just not taking time to customize gimp’s gui according to one’s preferences. That’s what I think, at least. I have no quarrels with gimp, except that I’d like to be possible to rearrange the tools horizontally when I’m working with the monitor vertically, which does not seem to be possible. I tried PS only once, and I simply couldn’t make a line. It was probably some layer or brush mode I oversaw, probably. I’m not saying it’s terrible and gimp’s is awesome. It’s just not that different. More or less like using thunderbird versus MS mail client. But people insist in making all the fuss about, somewhat as if PS designers had found the biologically correct way to design an interface to such program, whereas gimps, not only wasn’t customizable, but had the dumbest designers making all the “wrong” decisions.
One thing PS has that is superior is the free transformation, though. And text management, I guess.
It could actually be good if much of the gui were not “hardwired” in the program, but built from config files, more or less like a bunch of stuff in opera, where you can have a browser that looks totally unlike opera – and I’m not talking just about skins, or add-ons, but simple text config files that allow you to edit menus and many sorts of things. Then one could have a perfect PS’s gui rip-off with gimp, or have anyway he wants better.
Man, as I said in all the other comments, the UI is the smallest part of Gimp being wrong. Please read the comments. For a pro, in any case, anyone would agree Gimp is nothing but an unusable toy.
Hi there.
Great installation help…thanks, fixed my problem.
Anyone reading this guys stuff should bookmark it.
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You’re taking (very) personal opinions here, I myself feel very comfortable with Gimp 2 (small) windows flying around, I’ve worked with both Photoshop and Gimp and I’d not dare to point minuses at Gimp because they’re less than expected for a open program, and yes it can be very professional as well.
Guys I have installed the Deep Paint one. And I love it! The Deep Paint 2.0 is freeware you can download at http://download.chip.eu/en/Deep-Paint-2.0_132831.html/. The brushes are totally realistic like the real thing. You can use Adobe Plugins however you can’t use abr actions or abr brushes but you can download a abrviewer and convert them to Png for use with it.
Brushes can be made with any inverted jpeg, png, bitmap.
You can’t do gifs on it but you can use Photoscape a photo editing software for that.
You also keep all your plugins in a seperate folder and drag that folder to the tools folder and drag it out again when not in use to keep it from dragging.