The program I do all my art edits with, and all the finishing work on my picture edits has released a totally free, limited version of the professional program
http://www.pixarra.com/downloads/tbrusha_open_studio.exe
The Press release I just received reads: “January 02, 2009 — Pixarra today introduced TwistedBrush Open Studio, a free digital paint and photo editing Windows software package built from the powerful and easy to use TwistedBrush Pro Studio platform. TwistedBrush Open Studio is released as free software that will not expire and is not crippled. Based off of TwistedBrush Pro Studio, most all the features of the Pro Studio version are included in Open Studio with the exception of features that allow for modification of brushes. Some of the features included are layers, masks, tablet support, scanner support, over 100 filters, Lua scripting support, a full range im image formats are supported, drawing guides, image warping tools, text support, gradients, tracing paper, reference images, recording to video files and many other standard image editing features.
TwistedBrush Open Studio includes a small handful of brushes that can be found in TwistedBrush Pro Studio. Additional collections of brushes can be purchased from the Pixarra website and installed into TwistedBrush Open Studio. Collections available at the time of release includes Art Tool brushes, Blender brushes, Blob Modeling brushes, Cloner brushes, Essentials brushes, Masking brushes, Mandala brushes and Utility brushes. Ranging in price from $4.95 for collections that are a single ArtSet of 60 brushes to $29.95 for the Art Tools brush collection that consists of 26 ArtSets that include over 500 natural media brushes. Additional collections of brushes will made available in the future.
Pixarra was founded with the idea of giving high quality software tools to the artist that are easy and fun to use. Over the years artist software has become more and more complex and has lost much of the creative freedom of laying color down on the paper or canvas. It is our goal to offer tools that give artists the ability to capture ideas quickly without spending hours or days studying a reference manual. Stated another way our motto is “Simplicity Without Sacrifice”
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I’ve used this program since September 2007 and it is the most enjoyable editing program I’ve ever used, give the Free Unlimited version a try
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