Photo Editing

While studying at USC (www.usc.edu), I discovered Adobe's Photoshop 3.0. It came during my 4th year of architecture school. I was experimenting with CAD and rendering. At the time AutoCad was its eleventh version and the rendering was very primitive. My instructor suggested using Photoshop to enhance the images of my glorified boxes. You could add trees, cars, people or add the appearance of glass (without having to render glass which at the time took multiple hours).

Photoshop improved year over year and left my price range to stay current with the updates.

One freebie I found is Gnu Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). http://www.gimp.org/ After using GIMP at work for nearly a year, I find it suitable for most of my work with images.

Another freebie is Picasa2 by Google. http://picasa.google.com/ Picasa2 cannot draw or paint, but it can organize and add effects.