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Any good free programs to create dvd cover artwork

That One Guy

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WingMantis said:
I wasn't thinking about it when I posted before, but there are better free programs for designing covers.

If you are creating art itself then an image editor is what you want. For creating layout and text there are better programs.

Scribus is a free desktop publishing program (similar to Adobe inDesign)

inkscape is also free, and can be used for simple layouts

I am happy to +1 the suggestions for both Scribus and Inkscape. Scribus is a very versatile desktop publishing program that can easily help you create print-ready documents.

Inkscape is a surprisingly good vector-based image creation/editing tool - I stress vector-based because that is what trips people up when trying to use it for creating images. Vector-based programs do not have specific canvas sizes in them, which places certain constraints on what can be done with them unless you are very proficient - but the flipside is that they will never bite you with an image that looks fine on screen but dreadful when printed out due to being at an insufficient resolution.

Paint.NET and GIMP are, by comparison, raster-based - which is to say, they work with a defined-size canvas and resolution which has to be taken into account when creating your document at the start so that you don't end up with an unusably low-resolution file. One of the advantages of raster-based image editors is that it is usually much simpler to deal with text in them.

One thing to consider about whatever tool you choose to use, and I really can't stress this enough - make sure you pick a tool that supports layers. I've seen some amazing digital artwork created painstakingly by people who didn't know about layers, but you'll make your life so much easier by using them. Plus raster editors that support plugins will have all sorts of useful effects like fades and gradients that are much more easily applied using layers.
 
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