help you to work with these two programs. _ Adobe Photoshop (www.adobe.com/products): Adobe calls Photoshop the "camera of the mind." This is unquestionably the most popular image-editing program on the market and a widely used standard among graphics professionals. With Photoshop, you can create original artwork, correct color in photographs, retouch photographs, scan images, and do much more. Photoshop has a wealth of powerful painting and selection tools in addition to special effects and filters to create images that go beyond what you can capture on film or create with other illustration programs. And Photoshop includes everything you need for creating and editing Web graphics. _ Adobe Photoshop Elements (www.adobe.com/products): If youre not designing images for print use, and you dont need all the bells and whistles offered in the full-blown version of Photoshop, Photoshop Elements is a remarkably powerful program - for about a sixth of the cost of Photoshop. Elements is especially well suited for Web graphics output and is easier to learn than Photoshop. _ Adobe Illustrator (www.adobe.com/products): Illustrator is one of the industry standards for creating vector-based graphics, ideally suited for illustrations. Adobe integrates all its design programs so you can drag and drop illustrations that you create in Illustrator right into other Adobe programs, such as Photoshop or InDesign. Illustrator also comes with an export feature that enables you to export your illustrations in GIF or JPEG format with a browser-friendly palette of colors so that your illustrations look great on the Web. 130 Part II: Looking Like a Million (Even on a Budget) _ CorelDRAW Essentials (www.corel.com): Another competitor in the graphics market, CorelDRAW offers features and capabilities similar to those of Adobe Photoshop for a fraction of the price. The Essentials package comes with CorelDRAW and Corel PHOTO-PAINT and includes a generous clip art and royalty-free photography collection. For less than the cost of Photoshop, you can get the complete CorelDRAW Graphics Suite. _ Paint Shop Pro (www.corel.com): Also by Corel, Paint Shop Pro is a fullfeatured painting and image-manipulation program available only for Windows. Paint Shop Pro is similar to Photoshop, but on a more limited scale because it doesnt offer the same range of effects, tools, and filters. However, it costs less than Photoshop and may be a good starter program for novice image-makers. _ Macromedia Freehand (www.macromedia.com/software/freehand): Macromedia Freehand is an illustration program used widely both on the Web and in print. Freehand has many excellent Web features, including support for Web file formats such as GIF, PNG, and JPEG, as well as vector formats such as Flash (.SWF) and Shockwave FreeHand (.FHC). Thirty-day trial versions are available for free on the Macromedia Web site. _ MicroFrontier Color It! (www.microfrontier.com): This low-cost, easyto- use graphics program is available only for the Macintosh and is a great tool for beginners, as well as those on a tight budget. Although its much more limited than many of the other programs in this list, it provides enough features to create basic banners and buttons for a small business Web site. A demo version is available for free from the MicroFrontier Web site. Understanding the Basics of Web Graphics Because having a basic understanding of graphics formats and how they work on the Web is so important, the following sections give you an overview