You heard #Adobe. Deep down you knew this was coming. Now all your art are belong to them. Time to move on to better things…
Kreative Suite
* Krita is your new design/painting app
* Kdenlive will give you video-editing powers
* glaxnimate adds 2D vector animations to you videos
* digiKam organises your collection images
https://kde.org/for/creators/
Also:
* Inkscape - create sophisticated vector-graphic designs
* Scribus - layout like a pro
* GIMP - need we say more
* Blender - ditto
@Nachorella @minecraftchest1 I do that a lot in GIMP: right-click a layer, “add layer mask”, and it makes a secondary grayscale layer that works like a second alpha channel, that you can directly draw on, apply filters to, etc. A lot of my stuff has solid-color layers with all the work done in those layer masks.
I might be misunderstanding but that sounds different to a specific alpha channel. Sometimes in game art you’ll store extra information in the alpha channel of a texture. Or even pack four different grayscale images into the rgba channels of a single texture. Is it easy to do stuff like that?
@Nachorella You can right-click a layer and Apply Layer Mask to bake it into the main layer’s alpha channel (or Merge Visible Layers to combine all layers and their masks).
I think you *can* work with individual R/G/B channels in GIMP, or at least add a Channels tab where they’re visible separately and you can add arbitrary channels; but I don’t have experience drawing on the channels independently like that. But my gut says it may be doable.