Imaging
Creating drawings and editing photos are the core of this section. Add in image resizers and a professional level 3D creation suite and this should be a full list.
GIMP
The Free & Open Source Image Editor
GIMP is a cross-platform image editor available for GNU/Linux, macOS, Windows and more operating systems. It is free software, you can change its source code and distribute your changes.
Whether you are a graphic designer, photographer, illustrator, or scientist, GIMP provides you with sophisticated tools to get your job done. You can further enhance your productivity with GIMP thanks to many customization options and 3rd party plugins.
Free version available:
https://www.gimp.org/
XnView
XnView MP/Classic is a free Image Viewer to easily open and edit your photo file. The Image Viewer supports all major image formats (JPEG, TIFF, PNG, GIF, WEBP, PSD, JPEG2000, OpenEXR, camera RAW, HEIC, PDF, DNG, CR2). As Image Viewer you have features like color adjusting, image resizer, cropping, screen capture, metadata editing (IPTC, XMP) and much more. With its easy-to-use explorer-like interface, XnView MP allow you to quickly view your images and photos, but also to make image management. You have features like batch rename, batch converter, duplicate image finder, image compare, but you can also create contact sheets, slideshow.
Free and paid versions available:
Pixie
Pixie is a utility made especially for webmasters and designers. It is a color picker with few extra goodies.
Run it, simply point to a color and it will tell you the hex, RGB, HTML, CMYK and HSV values of that color. You can then use these values to reproduce the selected color in your favorite programs. Pixie will also show the current coordinates of your mouse pointer.
It is the only tool for you to work with colors.
Free version available:
http://www.nattyware.com/pixie.php
NOTE: Other applications are available on this site...
PIXresizer
PIXresizer is a photo resizing program to easily create web and e-mail friendly versions of your images with reduced file sizes.
Paint.NET
Paint.NET is image and photo editing software for PCs that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.
It started development as an undergraduate college senior design project mentored by Microsoft, and is now maintained and developed by Rick Brewster. Originally intended as a free replacement for the Microsoft Paint software that comes with Windows, it has grown into a powerful yet simple image and photo editor tool. It has been compared to other digital photo editing software packages such as Adobe® Photoshop®, Corel® Paint Shop Pro®, Microsoft Photo Editor, and The GIMP.
Free version available:
Inkscape
Whether you are an illustrator, designer, web designer or just someone who needs to create some vector imagery, Inkscape is for you!
- Flexible drawing tools
- Broad file format compatibility
- Powerful text tool
- Bezier and spiro curves
Free version available:
IrfanView graphic viewer
IrfanView graphic viewer
- Fast and compact ( just 5 MB )
- Freeware for non-commercial use
- Supports Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, and 10
- 32 and 64 bit version
- Multi language support
- Unicode support
- Designed to be simple but powerful
Free version available:
Easy Thumbnails
Easy Thumbnails is a popular free Windows utility for creating accurate thumbnail images and scaled-down/up copies from a wide range of popular picture formats.
An elegant interface makes it a snap to find your images and select them for processing individually, in groups, or in whole folders, using a simple file selector and built-in image viewer. You can use slider controls to rotate images and adjust their contrast, brightness, sharpness and quality, and check out the results with the built-in viewer.
Free version available:
https://www.fookes.com/easy-thumbnails
NOTE: Other, paid products on their site are available.
3DCrafter
3DCrafter is a real-time 3D modeling and animation tool that incorporates an intuitive drag-and-drop approach to 3D modeling.
Complex models can be constructed from simple 3D primitives, or created using 3DCrafter’s Shape Building Tools. Modeling tools are provided to deform, sculpt, and paint 3D shapes.
Creating an animated scene is as simple as positioning the shapes within your scene for each point in time in your animation. 3DCrafter will ensure that the resulting animation runs smoothly. Your animation can be stepped through a frame at a time, viewed in real-time, or recorded to a Video (AVI) file so that you can distribute your creation.
Tool roll-up groups allow you to customize the 3DCrafter interface so that only those items you use most frequently are visible. And if you need access to a less frequently used feature, the tool roll-up is always one click away.
The standard version of 3DCrafter is a fully functional product provided as freeware. Upgrades are available for those who require additional features either for game development or for rendering photo-realistic images.
Free and paid versions available:
Follow the links to the product page for info...
Blender
Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation. Advanced users employ Blender’s API for Python scripting to customize the application and write specialized tools; often these are included in Blender’s future releases. Blender is well suited to individuals and small studios who benefit from its unified pipeline and responsive development process. Examples from many Blender-based projects are available in the showcase.
Blender is cross-platform and runs equally well on Linux, Windows, and Macintosh computers. Its interface uses OpenGL to provide a consistent experience. To confirm specific compatibility, the list of supported platforms indicates those regularly tested by the development team.
Free version available:
Dia Diagram Editor
Dia Diagram Editor is free Open Source drawing software for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Dia supports more than 30 different diagram types like flowcharts, network diagrams, database models. More than a thousand readymade objects help to draw professional diagrams. Dia can read and write a number of different raster and vector image formats. Software developers and database specialists can use Dia as a CASE tool to generate code skeletons from their drawings. Dia can be scripted and extended using Python.
Free version available:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/dia-installer/