Top Natron Alternatives

Digital composting is one of the conventional parts of current image editing saga. Due to this, many digital composters are being introduced in the market very often.

Among many such paid platforms for digital composting, a free open source program named Natron is one of the many choices for free Digital Composting. It gets this name from Lake Natron, Tanzania, that gives natural visual effects by calcifying dead animals.

It was formed by Alexandre Gauthier and Frederic Devernay and sponsored by Inria (French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation). With time, the product got too much popularity and a vast userbase.

After its initial release in October 2014, it could execute 100+ graphs. It got recognition from top universities like Paris 8 University, along with other open-source computer graphics tools.

How Natron differs from Paid and other Free Digital Composters?

Unlike many other paid sources of digital composting, Natron had the pressure to perform vehemently. Even with merely two core developers, Natron included one of the best user interfaces along with many useful features.

Natron comes with features like rotoscoping, trackers, GPU & network rendering, curve & dope-sheet editor, and an in-depth keying tool.

It was developed mainly using Python and C++ languages. The part of the codes developed is still owned by Inria. However, the program got halted due to some unknown issues among the teams.

Regardless, Natron comes with a decent render engine. There are some persistence issues with Natron like memory allocation, internal engine logic, etc.

Natron offers advanced editing modes and tools like stereoscopic 3D, Bezier Curves, parameter animations, etc. It even supports plugins like Shader Toy, G’MIC offline, and many other public plugins.

It offers a real-time playback and a multi-view UI. The most decent job by Natron developers was giving such an exhaustive interface cost-free, almost comparable to top programs like Blender and Krita.

Conclusion

Although the program was working very well, it finally slowed down with the last release in August 2019. It is only hoped that Inria and the core developers try something to revive this program as one of the top open-source computer graphics programs.