We had the most fun with FireAlpaca when we opened a new, blank image and started drawing. FireAlpaca worked well with our Wacom tablet, too.

But the pen, pencil, airbrush, eraser, selection, Magic Wand, eyedropper, hand, bucket, and other tools had familiar controls and functions. FireAlpaca's tools work well, and we like the Brush Control, Color Picker, and other tools displayed in the tools menu to the left of the main view, though some of our favorites seem to be missing, such as the smudge tool. The ability to open and save PSD files adds significantly to FireAlpaca's capabilities. We could save our image as a JPEG, PNG, Bitmap, FireAlpaca document, and Photoshop document (PSD). We performed a range of operations on it, including cutting and pasting, drawing and shading, color changes, and merging layers. We fired up FireAlpaca and opened a stock image from our Pictures library. It's well suited for freehand drawing, though, especially with a digital pen, thanks to some interesting features. It's not a match for Photoshop but doesn't really try to be, nor is it optimized for digital snapshots. It includes the essentials, such as layers, multiple image capability, and flexible tools, and is nicely organized.

FireAlpaca is a free image editing and drawing tool that can hold its own against premium packages.

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