If you don't follow Lifehacker, you're really missing out. One of their recent articles dealt with free and cheap alternatives to Adobe's creativity products. Where I work, I'm lucky enough to have access to Adobe Acrobat Pro, and I have a copy of Elements 10 for personal use. However, I haven't had access to Photoshop in years. I've never had the chance to play with InDesign and some of the others.
As attorneys, especially those with tight IT budgets, we can't always afford the cutting edge toys. It's important to give the open source stuff a try. In fact, you just might like it.
From that list, I've used GIMP as the Photoshop alternative for a long time now. There is no question that it takes a little getting used to, but for a free tool, it is fantastic. Moreover, there is plenty of help available on the internet.
The other tool on the list I use regularly is Inkscape. I love Inkscape. I used it in designing the graphics for my most recent Android game. I've used it for graphics on flyers and promotional materials. It is simply an awesome vector graphics engine. It also has lots of documentation and tutorials available on the web. I also found it to be more intuitive than GIMP was when I first started to use it.
I would definitely recommend reading the Lifehacker article and checking out some of these tools before shelling out the cash for Adobe.
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