Ripping Questions

[Ultimecia]

I noticed in the general posts of this thread you guys talk about many useful sprite ripping techniques, but few about the cleaning and assembling part. And even more aggravating: people using the MS-Paint as a excuse to make a poor job in the other topics.
Some time ago I decided to search for free image editing programs for my friends, and I decided to dig up this information and share with you guys. This programs usually got only three main goals: be user-friendly, to be a light/small program and to have it's share of more features than MS-Paint.

GIMP is maybe the most famous of the bush: originally for Linux, got many fans around the world. It's fairly simple to learn how to use. There is a patch to make it looks more like Photoshop (no 'loose' windows anymore). You can also download the portable version with only most important features and don't needs installation. You can easily copy this later to your flashdrive and use it in any computer you like.

Next one is Brush Stokes. The site says you can make animated gifs with it, and it's fairly small. It don't have the use of layers, but if you don't care about it and just want a slightly better program than MS-Paint, this one can be a candidate.

mtPaint got a somewhat crude interface, but many interesting features for sprites. Pixel grid for guidance at high levels of zoom, 12 image clipboard, up to 1000 undo steps, can create animated gifs and handles transparency . The online documentation is helpful too.

Then we get Paint.Net. It got a pretty intuitive hud featuring tabbed document interface with small thumbnail for each tab. It got everything than it's paid counterparts got: filters, layers, unlimited undos, Bezier curves, gradient tools, editing selections, magic wand, clone stamp... GIMP and this one are the most complete of all.

And for the last...At first glance, when you see Kolour Paint is like looking at MS-Paint. But it got up to 500 levels of Undo/Redo, transparency and some simple filters. The only drawback is it's not avaliable for Win/Mac, only Linux :/

I hope you guys find my tips useful and forgive my poor English ;p