Good discussion on the ACE Network Ning, started by Lynne Gibb the e-mentor for Eastern Metro Region.
Like Lynne, I used to be a big PaintShop Pro fan, as i had a free licensed version from one of the computer magazines. Now I use XNview for browsing through my image collection, and also for those times you have to quickly re-size, adjust colours or optimise an image for the web. [Here’s my video screencast about it.]
Screenshot captor is my choice for screengrabs (similar to Carole’s Snipping Tool.) I’ve loaded it in my dropbox apps folder and set it to auto-start on all the windows machines.
I’ve used The Gimp, when i was on a mac & couldn’t access xnview or macromedia fireworks. Takes some getting used to, but it will do most of the things you need. Free and open source, you can run this as a portable app too.
Screencast-o-matic is the tool i use when i want to make a video screencast. It runs in Java, which can be trouble-some, but the web-based app now has a desktop version. [Here’s my list of video screencasts.]
Other apps & sites i’ve used and enjoyed include:
- flickr & instagram,
- befunky has now become a fully-fledged photo editor in your web browser – it’s really good,
- compfight (search for creative commons photos),
- flickrCC (Peter Shanks’ search for creative commons photos),
- inkscape is an app for working vector images (like adobe illustrator) – free and open source,
- Copyright friendly wiki has a bunch of links for searching creative commons images,
- Scribbler is based on the open source sketcher / harmony app – makes your simple lines look artistic.
- My favourite place to find alphabet letters is flickr via “Spell with flickr”