Image editors

Almost every game needs graphics, and not everyone can afford Photoshop or Corel. Let's make a list of free image editing tools.

I'll kick things off with a less known one, Artweaver. It is basically a freeware clone of Photoshop 6. It's shortcuts aren't particularly well thought out, and I don't think it's well suited for pixelart, but apart from that it's quite good.

http://www.sumo.fi/products/sumopaint/

Sumo Paint. It's like photoshop. But done with flash. So essentiall its photoshop in a web browser. Pretty damn cool if you ask me.

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program). It takes a little getting used to for people who are used to programs like Photoshop, but it's open source and free. I've been impressed with the program. It's kinda overkill for basic sprite art, but for more complex stuff it's great. Here's the link:

http://www.gimp.org

Here's another great little program that I found for those of us who are interested in making tiled maps. It's by a Brazilian developer who codes in Java. Anyway, it's about half a meg in size, easy to use, allows you to make custom tile sets and use as many as you want, supports pretty much unlimited map layers, etc. And it's free. It's called Tiled. FYI to use it you have to download the current incarnation of Java. Here's the link:

http://mapeditor.org/

And here's a link to Java:

http://java.com/en/

Or webbased:

http://www.lifeclever.com/10-free-web-b ... photoshop/

For whatever reason no one mentioned Paint.NET, which is a shame, it's a fairly capable editor.

I also stumbled into Pixia at some point, but I haven't actually tried it yet, so can't really tell if it's any good.

Inkscape

Best free vector-based editor.

http://inkscape.org

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program). It takes a little getting used to for people who are used to programs like Photoshop, but it's open source and free. I've been impressed with the program. It's kinda overkill for basic sprite art, but for more complex stuff it's great. Here's the link:

http://www.gimp.org

I would reccomend gimp, great peice of software.