Best & cheapest image making/editing program

As title says. Going to be useing it to edit pictures of me to make me look good, make banners and help me get my websites to look better.
Im not the best at decideing what program to use because theres so many. Iv used fireworks up until now (having a lot of problems with it because of W7 i think)

Im useing the free paintnet at the moment for my light work till i get something more powerful

http://www.gimp.org/


Well regarded as one of the best free image editors, although I didn't like it personally.

There's also a "mod" type thing which makes it look like Photoshop which can be handy.

Online

Photoshop Online... https://www.photoshop.com/

Pixlr... http://www.pixlr.com/editor/

Offline

SumoPaint... http://www.sumopaint.com/home/

Inkscape... http://www.inkscape.org/

Iv tried gimp, but i prefer paintnet over it

Marc, your sig is too big, you should change it quick before a mod sees and suspends you.

Max sig size is 400x75 with a single line of text.

I agree about the layout being better in Paint.net, Gimp seems weird to me. Paint.net feels more like Photoshop, even if it does have fewer features than Gimp.

And yes, fix your sig

I'd ditto the Paint.Net comments. It has a much nicer interface than GIMP even though GIMP, as bledd. correctly says, is more advanced and featured than Paint.Net.

For my uses, Paint.net will be complete when you can press Ctrl + T and rotate individual items on a layer

Items on a layer? Being able to rotate through different layers on an image would be nice; I guess that's already possible though.

I've been using Paintshop Pro 7 since year 2000, and never looked back. Got it for £32. Then again I'm visually impaired, so I much agree with PSP's interface more than Photoshop's. PSP7 can deal with layers, CMYK colourspace, plug-ins, masks, alpha channels, limited vector handling, bitmapped fills and of course the usual retouch, effects and filters, which is still current with the modern image editors. PSP also has the thumbnailed image browser, with batch image processing/resizing, which I find essential.

In photoshop say you paste someone's head into an image, you press ctrl + t, and you can freely move/resize/rotate the head

-Edit, you can in Paint.net too if you right click!, what a bozo

Paint.net is perfect!

GIMP could be the most advanced graphics editor in the world, means nothing if you can't use it due to the god awful UI. Absolutely hate the GIMP. Most tasks are really unintuitive!

/rant

Carry on, gentlemen

bledd. said:

Paint.net is perfect!

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And FREE!!

Seriously though, for 99% of all the image manipulation stuff I'm likely to be doing Paint.Net does it for me; although I do sometimes use IrfanView for batch processing of images for the school website, but only when I'm bored and can't be bothered to crop each picture.

SiriusB said:

GIMP could be the most advanced graphics editor in the world, means nothing if you can't use it due to the god awful UI. Absolutely hate the GIMP. Most tasks are really unintuitive!

/rant

Carry on, gentlemen

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Amen. You got me onto GIMP when we were at Uni or thenabouts because I wanted to do something like make a selection grid of a set size and then drop it over an image so I could select a certain part of the image. I didn't succeed at this with the GIMP; fantastically featured but looks really ugly. I tried it again a few months back for a work task and again I couldn't work out how to carry out the task.

When I last used it, it had a really nasty tendancy to suddenly do the same task differently and never explained why.

I would rather spend the £800 on PS if I had to use a graphics package a lot!

SiriusB said:

I would rather spend the £800 on PS if I had to use a graphics package a lot!

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If I got a job where I was working with images more often, had more complicated tasks for the pictures or needed to be more professional than current and Paint.Net didn't cut it then yes I'd happily pay out the money for Photoshop.

Yup

Software piracy just isn't cool anymore

Don't copy that floppy etc

Gimp or paint.net, personally I prefer paint.net for general purpose stuff as I find it easier to use and have PSP for more advanced work.

thanks never heard of paint.net will try it.

It has quite a 'Microsoft' feel to it, in a good way

groen said:

thanks never heard of paint.net will try it.

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Crikey blimey! How did you cope without Paint.Net?!

bledd. said:

It has quite a 'Microsoft' feel to it, in a good way

Click to expand...

Well wasn't it a US University project at the University of Washington (where Seattle and Microsoft are located) a few years ago that was supported or mentored by Microsoft? Then when the project people graduated some of them carried on with the Paint.Net development?