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Old 05-02-2006, 11:43 PM
sjaguar13 sjaguar13 is offline
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What kind of designing does your friend want to do? Photoshop is the standard for most rastor images. Rastor images are those that have a set of pixels and the pixels have a color. All web graphics are rastor. If that's the kind of stuff he wants to do, Photoshop is the way to go. If you cannot afford it, Gimp is free and similar enough where picking up Photoshop later isn't too hard.

Unlike rastor, vector images are a set of forulas to redraw the artwork. This is how most images for print need to be done because it allows you to resize the image without any quality loss at all. I prefer Illustrator for these. The problem is vector art is really hard to master without a lot of art skills. It consists of drawing a lot of stuff by free hand. However, this is a great market to get into since not a lot of people can do it well. Also, you can export vector images as rastor, so you can design websites and everything in vector and then export the rastor images to upload. You cannot go from rastor to vector quite as easily. Unfortunately, I haven't found any free vector drawing programs for Windows that were all that great.

If you want to get into some 3D designing or if you want to design websites with some 3D elements, Anim8or is an easy to use 3D program and Blender is a very powerful program. Both of them are free.

Here are some links to the programs:
http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net
http://www.Anima8or.com
http://www.Blender3D.org
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