Visual content	Issues for visual content	Image production	Image acquisition	Image manipulation	Image creation

If you want to scan, crop, rotate, scale, sharpen, enhance, or touch up anything, you need an image editing program. They're also useful for making images from scratch, like pictures of text, drawings, graphics, or whatever else you can think of. Scanners usually come bundled with basic image editing software, which may be adequate for your requirements.

The industry-standard application is Adobe Photoshop, but Macromedia Fireworks is also a useful program, which has the ability of not only saving individual graphics for web, but also slicing graphics for web use and saving as HTML. (Photoshop uses it's bundled application 'Imageready' to do this).

Some popular image editing programs

Adobe Photoshop is professional image editing software. It's the industry standard, it's excellent, and it's expensive ­ but check out educational pricing or see if your institution has a campus-wide distribution license, which makes it much more affordable.

Photoshop Elements is the 'lite' version of Photoshop - it lacks some of the advanced Photoshop tools and functions such as Actions, Vector paths and Channel editing, but is adequate for all basic functions and is substantially less expensive.

Macromedia Fireworks is less expensive than Photoshop, or you can get it bundled in Macromedia's Web Design Studio (with Dreamweaver, Freehand and Flash). It has adequate image editing capability, as well as good drawing tools, and the ability to slice images and export directly to HTML. Again, check out educational pricing or campus-wide distribution license.

Software archives such as Tucows (http://www.tucows.com/mmedia/imgedit95.html ), has 'freeware' programs such as The GIMP, (GNU Image Manipulation Program) available for Windows. GIFconverter for the Mac is good for image editing, but has no drawing tools. (Look for Freeware - Demos are usually time-limited, while Shareware requires some license payment to the distributor).

The software (Paint, Imaging) that comes bundled with Windows is extremely limited in functionality and is not recommended for creating or editing images for the web.

Scanners usually have some basic image editing software bundled with the scanner driver ­ this may be adequate for your requirements.