Unleash your creativity, keep your pockets full
As computers became more powerful (and more user-friendly), their potential as creative machines has increased leaps and bounds. Stunning graphic designs and easily-understood visuals are literally a handful of clicks and keyboard presses away, especially if you rely on the fifteen pieces of software we list here. Even better: all of our selections cost nothing to download, save for the money you'll spend on your net connection and electricity.
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Again, blender. It has the functionality of maya and after effects built in as features of one program. It really is quite amazing.
My hatred for you can not be expressed
Scribus is a very powerful editing tool that supports text flows, colour profiles for all elements and very advanced PostScript export capabilities among others. It is indeed professional level.
LibreOffice Draw is an integral part of the LibreOffice suite; as such, it CANNOT be downloaded separately. A large toolbox, powerful style habilities and nifty features make it very good for creating any kind of diagram which can then be ported to a LibreOffice Writer document. It was true in OpenOffice 1.1 ten years ago, it's even more true now.
Inkscape has powerful vectorization capabilities: import a raster image and vectorize it automatically, and you can soon stretch it in all directions. Automatic shape simplification will be a usefuil help then, lightening the result a lot (it removes extraneous nodes and manipulates the leftovers to keep the general shape) with barely any effort.
And then, the Blender community decided, a few years back, to ensure the tool is at a professional level by producing short- and medium-duration movies - and they rival some that are sown in cinemas these days. Their recipe is simple: if they want to render something and the tool cannot, they improve the tool. As the Sintel project shows: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRsGyueVLvQ&hd=1