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Software just doesn’t come cheap these days. Photographers who want to utilize the power of the popular photo-editing software, Photoshop, must fork over $700 to buy a copy. Aspiring artists who want to create 3D graphics need to pay $3,500 for the extremely expensive 3ds Max. But fear not; there’s hope. Software may not come cheap, but it does (sometime) come free.

Here’s a few software apps that won’t cost you a penny but are just as (and sometimes more) powerful than their paid counterparts. If you haven’t heard of some of these before, here’s your chance to give them a try.

Audacity

This open-source audio editor lets you easily record and mix audio files. Audacity supports a wide range of formats, effects, and options, making it my program of choice when I want to make ringtones or play with sound files.

Blender

Blender is a powerful 3D graphics and animation editor. Blender’s known for making some awesome stuff. If you don’t believe me, check out their gallery. Blender’s also been used to make a few beautifully rendered 3D movies, including Elephant’s Dream, Plumiferos, and Peach. Blender is extensible via Python scripting, and the software comes backed with a highly devoted developer community. I personally haven’t used it myself (yet), but I hear it’s somewhat notorious for its heavy usage of shortcuts. While the learning curve may be high, it’s been proven that with some practice and know-how, Blender can allow you to create some amazing 3D graphics.

CamStudio

Here’s a nice little utility that you may or may not need. Ever wanted to record something on your desktop? Suppose you wanted to create a video tutorial for a software app. CamStudio lets you easily do just that. It captures all audio/video activity occurring on your computer and then saves it as an AVI or SWF file (your choice).

GIMP

If you haven’t heard of GIMP, you may have been living under a rock. GIMP is a highly popular photo manipulation utility that rivals Adobe’s Photoshop. GIMP can pretty much do anything that Photoshop can, but for those who are comfortable with Photoshop might not find GIMP as user-friendly. Nonetheless, GIMP is the image editing tool of choice for the Linux community (and for those who’d rather not purchase or pirate Photoshop).

InkScape

While GIMP and Paint.NET are some of the best free bitmap editors available, Inkscape is one of the best vector editors available. Bitmap (or raster) images are the most common types of images seen these days, but bitmap has its limits—namely its poor scalability. Vector graphics solve this problem, as vector graphics are geometric-based and are therefore easily resizable. Flash is known for its ability to create vector graphics, and SVG is a popular vector format, standardized by the W3C. With InkScape, you can make awesome vector graphics and either save them as SVG or export them in PNG (a bitmap format). While not as feature-rich and diverse in vector file formats as its commercial counterpart, Adobe Illustrator, it makes for a great free alternative and an easy way to make vectorized graphics and images.

Paint.NET

GIMP has been around for a while, and it has matured into software that rivals Photoshop in features and functionality. However, it’s interface left something to be desired for many Windows users. So, Paint.NET was born. What began as an undergraduate senior design project turned into a free image editing app for Windows that isn’t as feature-ful as Photoshop or GIMP, but it arguably has the best user interface of them all. Written in C# and backed by Microsoft, Paint.NET has everything going for it. Just about the only things I’ve seen it lacking are a few advanced imaging techniques and batch processing, but Paint.NET is in such heavy development that those features may soon be added. I’m currently torn between which free image editor to use. Between the powerhouse that is GIMP and the easy-to-use interface that is Paint.NET, it’s a tough tossup!

VirtualDubMod

VirtualDubMod is a video capturing utility as well as a decent video editor. It has its roots in VirtualDub, but several spin-offs and mods to the original VirtualDub led to the creation of VirtualDubMod, which is somewhat of a combination of them all. It’s not the powerhouse that Adobe Premiere Pro is, but it’s $800 cheaper and gets the job done for all your basic needs. Actually, VirtualDubMod was the software I used to speed up The WarioWare Antics video (and Audacity was used as well, just to do a little audio tweaking).