Image and drawing programs
Most people don’t need a very sophisticated image editing or drawing program to meet their needs.
It’s simply insane that many people shell out the money for crappy products like Adobe PhotoShop, Adobe Illustrator, or Microsoft Visio for the work they need to do.
Simple image (digital photograph) editing can be done with a number of free software packages. For many Google Picasa or Microsoft Live Photo Gallery will do everything that’s needed and allow for easy posting of images to a web site for others to view.
For people who want a little more power, and not to be so tightly wed what Google or Microsoft think you should do with your digital assets there are other good choices.
Paint dot Net for Windows is a good basic image editing program. It will satisfy most of your digital image editing needs. It does only run on Windows, so if you’re looking for something for your Mac (because you don’t like iPhoto) or something for Linux…
GIMP is a highly portable image editing program. It isn’t basic, it’s sophisticated and can require a moderate learning curve (think Adobe PhotoShop). There are versions of it available for most any Linux distribution, Windows, and OS-X. It’s totally free, and the choice of many casual and professional users.
If your needs are more along the lines of diagramming, you could simply use the Draw component in OpenOffice. Draw is plenty capable to do meet most of your diagramming needs. However, if you want something with more capabilities…
Dia is intended to create structured drawings. It has many of the capabilities of Visio and simple CAD type programs. It’s absolutely free, and available for most Linux distributions, Windows, and OS-X.
Obviously there are cases where you will need to pay a licensing fee for software; but if you’re a home user I’m sure you have much better places to put your hard earned cash.
Also, if you do feel you must buy PhotoShop, make sure you allocate the time and money to take a course at your local community college — it’s not likely you’re going to become very proficient using it on your own.
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