Great Low-Cost GraphicsTools

Tap into your inner Van Gogh with these 13 great utilities. We recommend everything from free photo editors to drawing tools to screen grabbers.

Introduction
You can't put a price on creativity. But with the best image-editing and graphics-design tools retailing for $500 or more, it's easy to feel as though you can't afford to be creative. Pay attention to the download scene, however, and the picture looks a lot brighter.
We checked out a sampling of tools that ranged from graphical one-trick ponies to full-featured application suites that compare favorably with big-ticket graphics superstars. The best news: Most of these programs have a free trial period, nothing listed here costs more than $80 to register, and a bunch of them are just plain free.


Free and Easy
It's amazing what you can still get for nothing. Our freebie picks range from a small but useful tool for identifying the color of any pixel on your screen to an image-editing application that is like margarine to Adobe Photoshop's butter. We've also collected some time-saving screen-capture tools for grabbing screen shots and recording moving images.
There's also a lot to love about "lite" versions of industry-leading graphics packages intended for the home market. Take Corel Painter Essentials 3, a scaled-down version of its professional-quality parent application, Corel Painter IX.5. Billed as a "home art studio," the program lets you create original artworks by wielding tools that replicate the look of fine-art techniques, such as painting with oils or drawing with pastels. You can start with a blank canvas, or use the program to embellish an existing image, such as a photograph. Take a snapshot of your house, say, and you can transform it into what looks like a painting by Van Gogh.
Maybe you're more interested in straightforward photo editing, the kind that corrects bad exposures and eliminates unsightly blemishes. Or perhaps you'd just like help managing, storing, and sharing the thousands of digital images that pile up on every digital photographer's storage drives. For you, we've spotlighted a handful of helpful resources, including ACDSee's workhorse Photo Manager 9.
You'll also find a handful of screen-capture utilities listed below. If you're grabbing screens the old fashioned way, with the print-screen key, you should definitely download one of these newer tools and try it out. You'll wonder how you ever got by without it.
Photo Editors and Managers
ACDSee Photo Editor 4
This capable $70 photo editor can do everything from simple fixes (red-eye removal, poor exposure) to special effects (old-fashioned vignettes; brush, paint, and text effects; stamp tool; flaw removal) to elaborate projects that seemed geared to the mother-daughter demographic (stylized greeting cards, scrapbook pages, party invites, CD covers, even a T-shirt transfer). This program contains more effects than does Photo Manager 9 (immediately below), and the projects are unique to it. Also, ACDSee includes step-by-step tutorials right in the software.

ACDSee Photo Manager 9
For $40, Photo Manager 9 combines many of the best traits of various consumer-grade digital photo programs in one fast, good-looking package. It includes endless ways to organize your images, plus surprisingly good image-editing and special-effects tools, password-protected storage, slick tutorials, and lots more. Choose this program over Photo Editor 4 if you prefer breadth and security in your photo management options to artsy photo effects and craftsy projects.
Serif PhotoPlus 6
PhotoPlus 6 is a free program that holds its own in comparison to older versions of the venerable, category-leading Adobe Photoshop. Its appeal is probably strongest to novices and would-be graphics artists interested in learning to use photo-altering features that range from basic painting, drawing, and text manipulation to erasing, filling, and cloning regions. There's even a Layer Manager that lets you work with multiple layers and masks, and a lasso-like Freehand tool.
Need to pare down a huge photo for e-mailing to friends? Photo Resizer Pro includes the basics plus some fancy extras, like color balancing.Photo Resizer Pro
This $18 program makes it easy to resize individual images or whole batches of shots for displaying on the Web or e-mailing to friends. The program also lets you convert images to various popular file formats. New in this version is the capability to crop, rotate, or adjust the color balance of an original or resized image.
Paint and Creation Tools
Corel Painter Essentials 3
This digital painting program packs much of the artistic punch that you'd get with Corel's $220 Painter IX.5--but for just $80. You'll have fun using different types of virtual implements, media, and paper to create original digital artwork. Basically, the package amounts to a useful and varied sampling of the much wider array of tools available in Painter IX.5. Painter Essentials 3 also lets you turn ordinary digital photographs into suitable-for-framing "paintings." Video tutorials ease the learning curve.

Microangelo Toolset 6
The latest version of this $50 bundle of tools for creating, editing, and modifying icons and cursors adds support for Windows Vista's high-resolution icons and image compression. Use it to search for icon and cursor sets, to modify or replace existing icon libraries, or to create new libraries from scratch. (It's easier than you might think.) You can animate them, too.
Color Detector 1.01
Take the guesswork out of duplicating colors that you find on the Web. Run this small, free, stand-alone color picker program, click anywhere on the screen, and Color Detector will return the RGB values and HTML hex code of the pixel you clicked on. Just like that, the perfect color you found now belongs to you.
Display and Print Utilities
Webshots
This sprawling, interactive photo-sharing site can replace your desktop wallpaper. After installing the free Webshots Desktop software, you can create and update a custom wallpaper mix of gorgeous stock photos (download up to five per day free at the Webshots site), personal photos of your own, and favorites from the Webshots community. Also, upload your own images to the site, where visitors who stop by can view and comment on them.
ProPoster
Want to make posters, signs, or banners without resorting to special plotters or scary math? If you can manage scissors and tape, the $20 ProPoster software may be for you. Just grab an image, Word, or Excel file, and ProPoster will divide its contents into pieces of equal size that you can then patch together.
Picaboo
Picaboo lets you create and upload a design (with pictures) for a photo album, which the company then produces and ships to you. A 20-page softcover book starts at just $10. A larger, 8.5-by-11-inch book with a linen cover runs $30. Write captions or create a full-fledged storybook or photo journal. The free Picaboo software can double as your photo organizer and photo-sharing tool.
Screen Grabbers
SnagIt
This powerful $40 screen-capture utility has lots of tricks up its sleeve. Image-editing features let you add arrows, call-outs, text, and other effects to your screen captures, making SnagIt a good choice for preparing PowerPoint presentations. SnagIt will auto-scroll down a long screen to capture everything on it, even hyperlinks. You can use the program to capture video with audio or to capture just the text on a page. The software can convert file formats, too, and it can create thumbnails in batches. Customize capture profiles to streamline repetitive capturing tasks.
ScreenHunter 5.0
When it comes to capturing screen shots, this free tool is more powerful and less demanding than pressing your Print Screen key, pasting a screen shot into Microsoft's Paint tool, and saving the result as a bitmap. You can choose how much of the screen you wish to capture--a region you select, the window, or the full screen--and you can save your screen shot as a bitmap, JPEG, or GIF file. Register a $20 copy of ScreenHunter Plus for more capture options. For the beefiest feature set, though, get the $30 ScreenHunter 5 Pro, which compares favorably to SnagIt.
AutoScreenRecorder 2.0
This program lets you record and play back events, ranging from a series of mouse clicks to a streaming online movie, as an AVI video file. You can capture the full screen, the active window, or a region you specify. But you won't get audio with your visuals. For $50, AutoScreenRecorder 2.1 Pro adds sound recording, better video quality, and the ability to generate Flash movie files and add annotations to your video captures.
Leigh Anne Jones is a San Francisco Bay Area-based freelance technology writer.



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