Great Low-Cost GraphicsTools

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.