Do you enjoy playing with colors? How about editing photos? Creating amazing posters for school projects? Graphics Toolbox, from Great Software Tools, may be just for you. This incredibly powerful program lets you create just about anything you want, from single images for computer game sprites (my son’s favorite application) to scrapbook pages using pictures on your computer.
A friend of mine recently posted on Facebook that she had chosen her bridesmaids’ dresses. When asked what color, she commented with a series of three digit numbers separated by hyphens. Another friend then requested color names, since we aren’t all graphic designers with color chips on the brain. Since using Graphics Toolbox, I was actually able to understand what that meant! I think the color capabilities of this program are my favorite part. Once you bring a picture into the drawing space, you can extract colors from the picture itself and use that color in your project. Below is an 8x8 scrapbook page I created using pictures of my niece born just a month ago. The background color and the lettering color is taken from the pink stripe in her blanket. I was able to add “soft sweater” texture to the background. The color of the border around her picture is taken from the turquoise stripe in her blanket.
Each picture was either cropped or resized to fit the page, all within the program.
I love to scrapbook, but I have resisted the digital scrapbooking trend since I love to work with the paper and photos. My friends tell me it is less expensive and sooo easy. I must admit, I loved being able to create my own color, rather than searching through my stacks of paper, trying to find the right match. I could see this being less expensive if I did all this on my computer and only printed the sheets. We’ll see.
Graphics Toolbox isn’t intuitive like many photo editing programs. It uses vectors, actually filling in the pixels, rather than layering like many other programs. This takes getting used to, but the creators provide many excellent tutorials, available on the website, to walk you through the basic operations and many projects, from posters and thank you notes to blog headers and scrapbook pages.
A thirty-day free trial is available on the website, with the full version available for $150.00.
