Community Experts

The GIMP is a free and cool software to do a lot things. But remember: choose a tool and explore it to be an expert.

There are a number of tools that are great for beginner designer. They will make your design career much easier. Here are a few suggestions:
o Canva is a wonderful online graphic design tool for beginner designers. It contains plenty of images and templates that can be used to design social media pages, blogs, business cards and flyers among other things.
o DSLR Camera is another tool that every designer should have. How else are you going to get the pictures that you want to create from scratch? The camera you choose should be suitable for the kind of work you want to do, so take your time when making a selection.
o Color Wizard is another online tool that is great for designers. This site enables you to determine which color palette will work on your site. The site also has color sliders. You can use it to create new colors from scratch. Once you do that, you will be able to get the color tag of your new creations and embed them within your site's HTML. That way, you can impress your potential clients with your creativity.
o Infographics are a great way to disseminate information. You may be required to design a few of them in your career. So make use of Easel.ly to generate the infographics that your clients will love. There are plenty of templates for you to choose from.
o Google Fonts is a good tool from Google. You can use it to find trending fonts that would appeal to your customers. The fonts available are Open Source, which means they can be shared as-is or customized to suit your preferences.
o Pixlr is an image editor that's available online. You can use it to create multiple image effects and borders among other things. Available on Android and iOS.
There are plenty more tools available for designers, but these should start you off.

photoshop is the best tool for all kind photo editing and best way to start graphic designing is do some small tutorials on youtube or another site,while you doing them you will get experinced and i must say adobe is the design expert for me!

Hello, moemoezz! I started with Adobe Fireworks. As I'm web developer Fireworks was clear to me because it is lets say Photoshop version for web. It had everything measured in pixels so I could easily covert PSD files to perfect pixel html.
I won't suggest you to start with Gimp. Photoshop is clearly the leader on market, PSD file format is standard and GIMP and other similar editors don't support it natively.

There are a number of different free and open source packages you could look at.

The GIMP (Graphical Image Manipulation Program) has already been mentioned.
You might also want to look at:
Inkscape for a vector drawing package
Scribus for DTP

If you are working between the digital and paper realm, you'll need to familiarise yourself with colour profiles. I believe Photoshop provides quite a few.

I'd rather advise to start with Photoshop and obviously recommend the latest version. Because you'll have some time to spend as a beginner. I don't want you to waste your time by choosing an easy software which one you'll dump after some days and that will be total waste of time behind it.

So, go for Adobe Photoshop CC. If you found your PC below the requirement, then upgrade it. For a good work spend some money and make your time useful.

Happy Designing!!

While Photoshop does take some getting used to, it is the current standard for image manipulation and designing with multiple layers. If you plan on getting serious about graphic design, you have to learn how to get used to working with layers. Try Paint.NET. It's easy to use, offers a lot of options and tools you can play with, and supports layers to get you started. Best of all, it's free.

Other options you can check out: Ultimate Paint if you want compact software that loads fast, or InkScape if you want to focus on working with vectors.

you should first understand how to choose colors for designs , it is the basic for any work , you can use color.adobe.com

good luck all

It mainly depends on what you will specifically design. There are many tools for sure. and you may need to try to use most if them until you find yourself comfortable.

Be more confident and start with illustrator cc, Become expert in this Application. Then start with Photoshop. It will explore your career and provide a futuristic approach to your career. If you want to try yourself in UI/UX then please Start with Adobe XD. This will leading UI/UX tool in next quarter. For any more quarry you can contact me.