Hand Picked Free Software

I think this is by far the best free PDF reader software currently available. This has all of the features of most PDF Readers, plus some! I know that Adobe produce their own free PDF, but unfortunately it's now a very large program. This has had the knock on effect - it takes ages for the program to start, and you also have to buy the commercial version to get many of the features PDF-XChange Viewer provides for free!.

With PDF-Xchange Viewer you can view, print, search, zoom, copy/export text & images. You can type notes and annotations on your PDF's in any font or colour, and fill-in and save forms. You can embed sticky notes, or rubber stamp documents aswell as bookmark articles or pages, all within a nice tabbed interface.

I use this instead of the highly popular FoxIt Reader which is a very small and fast PDF reader (which also comes in a portable version should you require this), but for features alone the free PDF-XChange Viewer from Tracker Software cannot be beaten!

Alternative to: Adobe Acrobat Reader, FoxIt Reader, PDF Reader

Digital painting couldn't be easier with this great natural media paint program. Just select your brush or pencil type, includes oils, water colour, coloured pencil and charcoal to name a few, choose the paper and off you go! Great for any artist, with very realistic digital rendering of the mediums you are using. If you've ever fancied a go with acrylics or oil painting, but without the mess involved, here's your chance!

If you are serious artist, then with a little patients, and learning, you can get some serious results out of this software.

It has so many uses - I've used it to 'colour' a sketch that I had hand drawn and scanned for example! I have a friend who has used a similar technique for colouring and shading hand drawn cartoon strips. Works great with a graphics tablet. The only downside is that it saves as BMP format only. To get round this, open the finished image in another program (such as paint.NET - also listed in graphics & image programs) and save it again in the format you want (jpg, png or gif for example).

Another similar program that has a simple and beautiful interface, (but less features) is ArtRage Starter Edition. The starter edition is limited on features compared to the commercial version, but still fun all the same! This one is great for children aswell ... my young daughters love it! Just select the 'Starter Edition' to download.