A lady on here named Lynne used to put up cakes she made upon a free software program where she could try out different color combos etc..Any clue what software could do that? I have a 3 tier cake and I have 4 colors to use. I want to try it out in different ways to see how it looks best without bringing out the sketch pad and colored pencils...

The colors are blush, gold, black, and silver. Here is the cake by Cheryl Kleinman Cakes...

Inkscape is a free version of Photoshop - but youi'll still need to know what you are doing......

defiantely QUICKER to pull out the pencils !!  :P

I'll give it a look-see....I wish I was better a computers

Yeah...that software would take a year to learn Pam! I don't have the patience for that....it was worth a try though. Thanks!

This is a fairly simple design.  You could easily do this in Word and customize your colors.

Inkscape is NOT a "free version of Photoshop." It's not a free version of ANYTHING but itself. Neither is it even the same sort of graphics program (i.e., a bitmap editor) as Photoshop.

Inkscape is an open source program for processing SVG files, a vector graphics format. As such, it's far closer to Adobe Illustrator, or to a CAD program, than it is to Photoshop.

If you're looking for an open source program that does, more-or-less, what Photoshop does, then you're looking for GIMP (which is also NOT a free version of Photoshop, or of anything else but itself). And it has a much easier learning curve than Inkscape (I've used both programs, as I've had one or two occasions where I needed to edit an SVG graphics file, and I use GIMP regularly, as I'm far too cheap to shell out what Adobe wants for Photoshop or Illustrator).

In GIMP, you could easily change the colors of the cake, by either or both of two methods:

Either way, get the image into GIMP, and bump up the magnification so it's easy to work with. Then, either:

A: Select and adjust

1. Use the lasso tool to select the portion of the cake for which you're changing the color

2. Open any of the color adjustment dialogs (e.g., hue/saturation), and play with the sliders.

B: Repaint

1. Optionally, select the portion you want to repaint

2. Select the paintbrush tool, and play around with the paint modes. In the "color" paint mode, for example, the brush will change the existing color to the selected one, while leaving black, white, and overall lightness and darkness untouched.

I admit, I'm fairly experienced with GIMP, but still, I'm surprised at how quickly I was able to completely change the color scheme of your sample cake.

AAnother option is Adobe Photoshop Elements, which provides most of the entry-level functionality of the full version of Photoshop for $60. As James mentioned above, vector graphics software like Inkscape is an entirely different type of program.

More info: http://graphicssoft.about.com/cs/findsoftware/a/twotypes.htm

downloaded GIMP...but can't get it to open. I just have a bunch of files in a folder under Program Files. Any advice?

ANot without looking at your system, I'm afraid. I've only installed it three times, and only once was on a WinDoze box.

AOne thought just occurred to me: with GIMP, because it's open source and multi-platform, you have the option of downloading source, or downloading ready-to-run executables, for Linux, Mac X11, Mac Native, or WinDoze. You might have downloaded the wrong one.

Tomorrow, if it's as slow a day as I think it's going to be, I'll have plenty of time to look at what's installed on my WinDoze box there, and compare notes with you.

I would appreciate it! In the meantime I am going to get some tracing paper and colored pencils. Here is the site I used.. http://www.gimp.org/downloads/

GIMP is good but you may want to try these.

For Mac (paid), about $29.99 US (photoshop is approx $30 a month depending on where you live) it is a very comprehensive tool and has almost all the features of photoshop even some of the commands are the same.

For windows (free) try ".net paint" again very good tool that gets a lot of updates.

If you're after some sketching type of tools the ipad has some good free ones, just search the app store.

Both the above tools have a small learning curve if you've used any type of photo editors before.

My apologies this what I was supposed to post for the mac software

For Mac (paid) "pixelmator" on off cost about $29.99 US, it is a very comprehensive tool and has almost all the features of photoshop even some of the commands are the same.

Photoshop can be quite expensive and may be too much for what you are doing.

AThat's exactly what is happening... you should download the .exe or .msi

Ok, "BatterUp." Here is what I have on my WinDoze box, from when I installed GIMP 2.6 back in 2009. Keep in mind that the structure of the WinDoze version might have changed, but here's what it was in 2009:

In Program Files, I have a GIMP-2.0 directory, which in turn contains bin, etc, lib, setup, and share directories. In Program Files\GIMP-2.0\bin, I have gimp-2.6.exe, a few more executables, and dozens of DLLs. Double-clicking gimp-2.6.exe launches GIMP, exactly the same as if I'd launched it from the desktop icon or the start menu item.

I see that the download page is sensitive to what operating system you're browsing it from. What did you click on, what did you do with what you got, and what did you end up with in your Program Files directory?