Libre Arts - Home

Editorial

Looking back at 2021, looking forward at 2022

Sun Jan 9, 2022 by Alexandre Prokoudine

A journey across the multiverse of free/libre tools for creative professionals

Looking back at 2021, looking forward at 2022

Weekly Recaps

A mostly weekly look at what's new in the world of Libre Arts.

Weekly-ish recap — 26 January 2021

Surge XT and ZynAddSubFX softsynths get much anticipated updates

Scribus / Inkscape / digiKam / FreeCAD / Kdenlive / Olive / Surge / Audacity / Zrythm / Ardour

Weekly-ish recap — 7 December 2021

Blender 3.0 is out, Bespoke Synth, VCV Rack 2 and Cardinal are gaining momentum

Blender / O3DE / OTIO / Bespoke Synth / VCV Rack / Cardinal / MuseScore

Weekly-ish recap — 30 November 2021

VCV Rack 2 modular synth is out after 2 years in passionate development

GIMP / Krita / darktable / Blender / BlenderBIM / Topologic / LibrePCB / VCV Rack / Audacity

Podcast

Conversations with developers and users of free software for creative professionals.

Podcast ep. 003 - Paul Davis on fixing big Linux audio issues

This is a the second part of the interview with Paul Davis. It's time to talk about some big stuff that is relevant to virtually every user of Linux audio applications for music-making.

Previously...

Podcast ep. 002 - Paul Davis on the deep rewrite of Ardour

This is the first part of a long interview with Paul Davis, founder and lead developer of Ardour, free/libre digital audio workstation.

Podcast ep. 001 - Interview with Krita developers

Krita team on funding the development and bringing in new contributors

Tutorials

How to use free/libre software for good honest work

$How to use math input in GIMP$

How to use math input in GIMP

How to do simple calculations in the spinbox widgets where you input numeric values

GIMP / image editors

Mastering Inkscape in 2018

What’s best among books, courses, and tutorials on the free/libre vector graphics editor

Inkscape / books / tutorials

How to view reference images in GIMP

A fellow darktable contributor asked about the washed-out effect he discovered in one of my pictures. Here is how I do it.

GIMP

Showcases

Great works of art made with free/libre software

Halloween art 2021

Spooky and fun!

Krita / Blender

Revolutionizing garment-making in Italy with Valentina

Here is a tailor shop in Sicily actively using Valentina for pattern design

Valentina / Inkscape

The art of Evelyne Schulz

Growing with Linux and GIMP to become a pro

GIMP / Blender

Reviews

Hands-on reviews of free/libre software

Introducing BeeRef

All-new free/libre reference image viewer

BeeRef

Optimize PNG and JPEG images on Linux with Curtail

If you don't particularly enjoy using a terminal program to run optipng et al., I'm happy to introduce you to this little gem.

Curtail

Scribus 1.5.6 and beyond

New unstable version of Scribus is available with several interesting improvements such as PDF-based printing, PDF 1.6 compatibility with OpenType fonts embedding, and more changes.

Scribus / desktop publishing