More about freeware programs...

I was checking for something new on Majorgeeks last evening, and found one for manipulating pictures, called FotoSketcher but after playing with it for a while, I decided that it isn't quite as good as Paint.NET for the actual picture manipulations but it does have a very nice feature called "Add a Frame" which will add a very nice and quite realistic frame around an image of your choice. So it might still be worth having in your collection.

You can choose to add the frame without first altering the image, by looking at the bottom of the drop-down menu in 'Drawing style' which is the first item on the list of 'Drawing parameters' accessed by clicking on the icon for the artist's pallet on the taskbar. Use the up and down arrows at the right-hand end of the line titled 'Drawing Style' to navigate through the list of options, and for the frame-only choice, look at the bottom of that list.

Paint.NET doesn't have a framing option, and while there is one in PhotoStudio from Arcsoft, it doesn't have as many options, and the ones it does have aren't as easily used as these in FotoSketcher. The Arcsoft program is not a freebie, but it is a very good program for editing your images. I've been using it for several years. But if you don't want to spend the money for it, by far the best other one I know is Irfan Skiljan's Irfanview - this is one of the best and most popular image editing programs on the web, and it's a freebie with all sorts of additional plug-ins, although the main program comes with a selection of the more popular ones. Irfan lives in Bosnia, and he appreciates a little donation if you use his great program. I should add here that it also does batch editing such as resizing and renaming batches of images, and it works perfectly. There are literally millions of us using Irfan's program and loving it. You should try it.