Gimp

Gimp is great if you cannot afford on do not want to pay a lot of money for professional software (i.e. Photoshop). According to some it *is* a professional level software, according to other not yet; however it has more than enough features for amateur photo manipulation and other image related tasks (e.g. icon editing, image conversion, resizing etc). The first version was realeased in 1996 by two computer science students (Kimball and Mattis, currently Google engineers).

It is quite complicated to use and probably extreme complicated to master, however it is intuitive enough for simple tasks. Since version 2.6 they invested in an effort to make the interface easier to use (see Wikipedia article). An user manual and documentation page is also available.

If you want a different language than your operating system, here is the howto. In my Vista laptop I wanted the english version, so I did the following: I created a .bat file in C:/users/program files/GIMP2.0/bin (you need admin privileges to write it there) with the following content:

set lang=en
start gimp-2.6.exe

Then I changed the startmenu entry to point to the bat file instead of the exe file (other settings: execute minimized, use icon of the .exe file).

Name: Gimp

Homepage: http://www.gimp.org/

Version: 2.6.7 (August 14, 2009)

License: free, open-source software

Platform: cross-platform