Graphic Design Free and/or Open Source tools & information

2D Tools

GIMP offers similar range of paint and image editing tools to Adobe Photoshop.

Irfan view fast lightweight image viewer with basic tools such as crop and resize, also offers batch tools to allow you to process a directory of images at once.

Inkscape An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Adobe Illustrator

FotoSketcher v2.00. Turn your photos into beautiful paintings, sketches or drawings in seconds.

www.autostitch.net (for Panorama shot stitching – quick, good and free)

Luminance HDR Luminance HDR is an open source graphical user interface application that aims to provide a workflow for HDR imaging.

www.picasa.com (to sort your pictures and edit them – free of charge)

Screenpresso overrides the Print Screen key and makes it easy to take the best screen captures in a few seconds.

Autotracer Convert raster images like JPEGs, GIFs and PNGs to scalable vector graphics (EPS, SVG, and PDF) with this free online vectorizer.

3D Tools

Blender - open source 3d software

Wings3D – polygon modeller

ShapeShop is a new 3D modeling and design tool with a fun, easy-to-learn interface. Sketch-based shape creation and editing tools make it simple to quickly translate your ideas into a 3D shape, and drag-and-drop decal compositing makes texturing simple. Best of all, ShapeShop is free!

insight3d lets you create 3D models from photographs.

You can use Leocad for import obj files format inside Zbrush from exported files in ldr format of LegoDigitalDesigner

vidro – global illumination renderer

Image libraries

Open Clipart Library (Public Domain Vector Clip Art)- http://www.openclipart.org/

Wikimedia Commons (many Public Domain and free for commercial use pics) – http://commons.wikimedia.org/

Flickr – http://www.flickrcom/ – (many Creative Commons pics free for commercial use)

Fractal

http://www.apophysis.org/downloads.html fractal art generation with many possibilities.

ChaosPro

http://www.chaospro.de/download.php?PHPSESSID=9abf4a7c8d052e0cbc996fb73494d468

Chaoscope

http://www.btinternet.com/~ndesprez/download.htm

PNG Compression tools & tests

Utilities

ADrive – free 50GB storage

Amazon S3 – Designed to provide 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability of objects over a given year.

AWS Free Usage Tier*

As part of the AWS Free Usage Tier, you can get started with Amazon S3 for free. Upon sign-up, new AWS customers receive 5 GB of Amazon S3 storage, 20,000 Get Requests, 2,000 Put Requests, 15GB of data transfer in, and 15GB of data transfer out each month for one year.

Sizer 3.33 Sizer is a freeware utility that allows you to resize any window to an exact, predefined size

Video

5 Amazing Tools To Create Tutorials

CaptionTube With CaptionTube you can create captions for your YouTube videos. It’s easy to use and it’s free.

Animoto Animoto automatically produces beautifully orchestrated, completely unique video pieces from your photos, video clips and music

Photobucket Set up a Photobucket account and start remixing video instantly!

JayCut Online video editing, unlimited upload. Create your own movies, for free!

Movie Masher allows you to sequence and trim clips, add effects, transitions, titles, and music, using a familiar timeline editor.

Project ROME is an all-in-one content creation and publishing application that lets virtually anyone at work or home inject the power of graphics, photos, text, video, audio and animation into everyday projects.

Other

ClearLock lock your desktop with a transparent layer

ClearLock provides a convenient way to lock your desktop with a transparent layer, allowing you to see what’s happening on your desktop and at the same time prevent access to the computer without the proper password. ClearLock comes as standalone executable, just run it, set your password and click the ClearLock icon whenever you want to lock your screen. To reset your password, simply delete the .ini file that was created in the same folder. ClearLock is designed to prevent others (e.g. your kids) from casually messing with your desktop, while keeping your desktop visible at the same time (unlike the Windows CTRL+L function), the program is NOT intended to be used as a security system

Spacescape is a tool for creating space skyboxes with stars and nebulas.

Download the latest version from sourceforge.net (Windows XP/Vista/7)