There are many other places for images, but those three are what I found lets me find high quality images that offer truly free licenses, and with a huge selections. Many other place to find good images, but either with poor selections, or good selections, but free mixed with pay and high quality mixed with poor. These three are my goto (as someone without graphic talent) when pressed for time.

Manipulations photos with text -- no drawing!!

I have Office 2010: I don't think I'll need to get down in the weeds. I'll research and play around with the suggestions you linked, ita ! And thank you.

You can do things like that online today--I can only report, not recommend, because I've never tried, but read here: [link]. But Photoshop Express is probably damned good, by heritage: [link]

You can also try Picasa: [link], from Google, or Paint.net: [link], Photo Pos Pro: [link], PhotoPlus: [link]

Typo, I appreciate the link. I've had to use legal usage stock images for my site, so I'm aware of the legalities, but I haven't heard of those sites.

You guys have been so helpful! I really appreciate it!

New skill -- good thing I like tech and love knowledge...

Buffistas -- I adore you. What would I do without you? Besides muddle about for a zillion years.

Mille grazie.

The sites linked are really graphic dense. Stock.xchng and morguefile are about 99.99% photos. Open Clip art are is, as far as I know, 100% drawings. With Stock.xchgn and morguefile you do have to read the licenses, cause every now and then a creator will stick in a custom license rather than the standard license that is default for the site. Open Clip Art makes submitters agree that what is submitted is submitted into the public domain. Also Stock.xchg and morque file have been bought by commercial sites, you have to beware during searches than don't get bumped over to the commercial sites where everything is pay without noticing. I find these minor nusiances not deal breakers cause you can avoid the problems easily enough if you are careful, and get really great selections of legal, free images on generous terms including including ability to use for commercial purposes.

I think I have Office 2010 too. Between Powerpoint and Word, I can play around tomorrow and see what you can do just with that!

And, god, if people could prove they had rights to pictures they used outside the office (I consider internal use only often a free for all) that would be great--too many people seem to think Flickr is thei pool of free pretty stuff for their website or other publication that gets out there to people. I got a couple pictures out there that, damn, $20, $50 would not have been huge--I just want it to be official, not underhanded.

Hmmm. I never ever thought about PP and Word. I'm pretty savvy with those.

But yes, please -- UNLESS you are feeling like shit, and then all bets are off. I want you to take care of yourself.

I'll be experimenting too.

Open office 4.0 can be downloaded for free. I'm pretty sure Draw can do stuff that powerpoint cannot.

And (Not so much for strix as for ita !) to give you an idea of why these sites rock, I just went onto morguefile searched for: Ships (625 results) shoes 646 results sealing wax, cabages 16 results Kings 27 results Pigs 184 For sealing wax had to go to Stock.xchng to find 15 photos that were actually sealing wax (as opposed to leg wax). All legal. You would have to go elsewhere for pigs with wings. Still, given a pretty arbitrary Lewis Carroll based list I was able to get a large selection of examples of all but one. And all I found would be legal for commercial use without attribution -so you could make an ad without having to spoil the look with credits.

You can do a fair amount with PowerPoint. I've found Open Office Draw very useful with laying out photos to print at specific sizes and doing things like adding text. Google draw isn't too shabby either.

GIMP is definitely worth getting and playing around with to learn it, but it's not something for work that needs to get done right away. I've tried other free paint-type programs but I always come back to GIMP.

I've found Morguefile really useful too.