Back after a long period of time away from the internet. This won't be much of a comeback though, as I'm getting married (!) the day after tomorrow and then I'm going here for a week: Santorini on 43places.
But I digress. I just want to recommenced Paint.NET. In a sentence, it's the open source Photoshop. It's a free for download open source photo editing software.
Of course it's not a real competitor for Photoshop - certainly not for professionals - but all the basic stuff is there - the lasso tool, gradients, layers and a lot of special effects. It's perfect for the casual user like myself.
It's open source and it's written in .net 2.0. Which means even I can tweak it and contribute to its development.
I heard about it from Jeff Atwood's post "Programming Tip: Learn a Graphics Editor" over at Coding Horror. After you've read it and agreed with every word, there's also a followup post for you to read: "Basic Design Principles for Software Developers"
See you after I get hitched! --urig