The best shareware program for developing original graphics and manipulating already existing ones is Paint Shop Pro . Paint Shop Pro can resize images, save images in almost any format, and it can be used to add special effects to t ext art and scanned images such as photographs. A 6.0 version has been released, so look for price increases on this popular image editor.
Layers allows the artist to manipulate specific elements on an image after they have been applied.
It also includes Animation Shop 2.0, a utility that creates animated GIFs from a series of files. Additional information in what Paint Shop Pro can be found on my lesson dealing with this topic. Paint Shop Pro is great at converting image types. Microsoft's Paint program only develops BMP files. Netscape and IE can handle.