So you’ve stepped up from the single-task graphics apps and you want something a wee bit robust. Where do you go if you’re not flush with cash? Here are a few options:
Microsoft Paint – Ah, good old Paint. No, I’m not saying you should all your entire graphics design work on this little program, but it’ll get you through in a (minor) pinch.

• Pros: It’s decent for cropping, file conversion, and very basic layout work.
• Cons: Anti-aliasing isn’t that great. There’s no layering. There are no options for JPG compression percents, transparent GIFs, or other file type attributes. JPGs are rather blurry, PNGs have a large file size, and GIFs usually lose significant quality. It also saves extensions (.JPG, .PNG) in capital letters, so you might want to write them out in lower-case on your filename when you save it. Options are very limited overall.

Microsoft Picture Manager – While more of an image-tweaking program than a graphics editor, Picture Manager has its benefits. It’s best used as a quick fix when making minor adjustments to photos.

• Pros: Nice job of cropping and resizing graphics, auto color correct, lighten/darken, and editing multiple files at a time. Easy to figure out.
• Cons: When resizing, you have to specify pixels instead of percents, and manually calculate the proportions between width and height. It has almost no features for real graphics-editing, but of course it’s not really meant for that…

Picasa – An offering from Google, this is a desktop album app with limited file-editing capabilities. Once it’s downloaded, it grabs your graphics from throughout your computer and also assimilates (Google assimilates? Hmmm…) new additions.

• Pros: Very slick interface. When set as the default graphics editor, an opened picture zooms onto your screen in an impressive growing animation.
• Cons: As a Google acquisition, I thought Picasa would be as easy to use and trouble-free as most other offerings from the big G. Unfortunately, as an online colleague of mine said, they should have taken more time to incubate it. It doesn’t grab new graphics consistently and has a confusing album-browsing interface, with the folders just listed individually instead of hierarchly hierarchy-y in a tree.

What’s your favorite free or cheap graphics program? Let us know in the Comments!

[This is part two in a three-part series. You can read Part I: Specialized Apps, then come back in two days for the final installment.]