Great free programs
GIMP
Free, professional and excellent
The GNU Image Manipulation Program, or GIMP, is a raster graphics editor. It can be used to process digital graphics and photos, create graphics, resiz and crop photos, alter colours, combine multiple images, remove unwanted image features, and to convert between different image formats.
GIMP can even be used to create animated GIF images.
If Adobe Photoshop is too tough on the budget, have a look at GIMP. It's to Adobe Photoshop what OpenOffice.org is to Microsoft Office. It's a very powerful photo editing and graphics program which will meet the needs of everybody but graphics professionals – and even a few of them.
I obtained Adobe Photoshop cheaply through serendipitous upgrades and bundles. If I'd had to pay full price for Photoshop I'd have been happy to stick with GIMP.
Quote from GIMP's online documentation
GIMP is a multi-platform photo manipulation tool. GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. The GIMP is suitable for a variety of image manipulation tasks, including photo retouching, image composition, and image construction.
It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.
GIMP screenshot
This is seriously good software and absolutely free.
Get the Windows version here: http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/stable.html and if you find it useful, please consider making a donation to the team who make it possible.
You can find the online documentation here: http://docs.gimp.org/en/introduction.html and you can read more about the program here: http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/.
An overview of GIMP features
The following list is a short overview of some of the features and capabilities which GIMP offers you:
- A full suite of painting tools including brushes, a pencil, an airbrush, cloning, etc.
- Tile-based memory management, so image size is limited only by available disk space
- Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high-quality anti-aliasing
- Full Alpha channel support for working with transparency
- Layers and channels
- A procedural database for calling internal GIMP functions from external programs, such as Script-Fu
- Advanced scripting capabilities
- Multiple undo/redo (limited only by disk space)
- Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip
- File formats supported include GIF, JPEG, PNG, XPM, TIFF, TGA, MPEG, PS, PDF, PCX, BMP and many others
- Selection tools including rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy, bezier and intelligent.
- Plug-ins that allow for the easy addition of new file formats and new effect filters.
Laura on the GIMP workspace
GIMP in a nutshell
The following list is a short overview of some of the features and capabilities which GIMP offers you:
-
A full suite of painting tools including brushes, a pencil, an airbrush, cloning, etc.
-
Tile-based memory management, so image size is limited only by available disk space
-
Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high-quality anti-aliasing
-
Full Alpha channel support for working with transparency
-
Layers and channels
-
A procedural database for calling internal GIMP functions from external programs, such as Script-Fu
-
Advanced scripting capabilities
-
Multiple undo/redo (limited only by disk space)
-
Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip
-
File formats supported include GIF, JPEG, PNG, XPM, TIFF, TGA, MPEG, PS, PDF, PCX, BMP and many others
-
Selection tools including rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy, bezier and intelligent
-
Plug-ins that allow for the easy addition of new file formats and new effect filters
