Best Free Programs for Graphic Design

There are some free graphic programs which provide high quality graphics. Features range from simple editing tools (rotation, special effects, text insertion) to 3D design and animation. They can help you make your own book cover for free.

When designing a book cover, you must keep in mind the following:

1) Your book cover will appear as a thumbnail, so make sure the title is clearly visible.
2) Don't get carried away with too much detail. Busy cover images get lost in a thumbnail.
3) Advertising studies have revealed that people are most attracted to faces.
4) Avoid white - at least around the edges. You book cover will appear against a white background.
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Picmonkey - A free photo editor and collage maker that works in your browser. You can get a good idea of what Picmonkey can offer on Pinterest. Features: text, overlays, photo touch up, collage (simply upload images), and editing tools.

Paint.net – A free image and photo editing software for Windows based PC's. It has full support for layers and special effects, the tools are top notch and highly recommended by many users. There is a strong online community for support and frequent updates to the software. Comparable to Adobe Photoshop.

Gimp - A free editing and retouching software program that can be used with Mac, Linux and Windows (anything after XP). Gimp has many of the features of Photoshop: layers, clone tools (to copy pixels), blur and sharpen tools, color gradients, image enhancement, and so on.

Inkscape - A professional vector graphics editor for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It's free and open source. Features include: layers, drawing, text tools, shape tools, moving, and many more. The website has an image gallery and tutorials.

DAZ Studio - A program for making 3D images and animation. Particularly useful for sci-fi and graphic novel illustrations.