As I was working on the blog layout, I knew I needed to manipulate a couple graphics. I’m absolutely horrible at graphics work, as evidenced by my header. I’ve always liked playing around with Photoshop and really enjoyed some of the plugins they had for it when I used it a few years ago. Well, that was many versions ago so I don’t even have Photoshop installed on my computer any more. That doesn’t mean that I don’t still like to play around with editing photos, or creating simple graphics.
As you know, I’m way too cheap to spend the hundreds of dollars that Photoshop costs so I decided to use a free application.
The two programs that I have messed around with are Gimp and Paint.net. I’m not sure why, but after using both, I settled on Paint.net. This is an application that was built at Washington State University as a senior project (with a little support from Microsoft). It is open source and is freely available to everyone. It isn’t sold or marketed by Microsoft either. Since it is open source, it has seen many improvements over time. I was impressed with the latest version (3.07). It has many of the features that Photoshop has (layers etc) and is generally pretty easy to figure out how to use. It also has a lot of free plugins out there that can help you with the more complicated graphics manipulations.
Paint.net:
You can download the program here: http://www.getpaint.net/index2.html
Lots of plugins are available here: http://paintdotnet.12.forumer.com/viewforum.php?f=16
Gimp:
You can download the program here: http://www.gimp.org/windows/
It’s really a matter of personal choice on which you want to use but the good news is that both are free. I know that some people will swear by Gimp (and probably swear at me for recommending anything else) and some people really like Paint.net. Either one is a great option for helping you do graphics and photo work.