Microsoft Paint

While Microsoft Paint will never be confused with Adobe Photoshop, it is still a functional alternative if you only need to do some simple graphics. It is not only simple but easy to learn, and it supports most major graphic file formats. It also supports scanners and digital cameras, and in a pinch you can use it to capture a photo and perform some basic image manipulation, such as crop, resize and rotate. It can further be useful for capturing and saving screenshots, and you can also use it to add captions and other text to an image. While its brushes are basic and limited, in the hands of competent artist, it can and has created quality of works of art, and it does this free of charge, which is a lot cheaper than Photoshop. It has been included in every installation of Windows, from 1.0 to 10, and though deprecated Microsoft says that it will continue to be available in its store. Still, what Paint cannot do far exceeds what it can. It has no support for either transparency or image layers, making its use very limited for serious creators of graphics. It also has no image filters or any ability to retouch images. It further only works on Windows.