UKH

I'm after a bit of software to mark up some photos of a cliff face. I want to indicate various geological and geo-morph features, so need to be able to free hand sketch on an image using the mouse. 

Would be useful if it has capacity to set up a drawing frame (architect style) with the image embedded, and key down one side.  

Needs to be windows based, and preferable free!

Tried the free version of Smartdraw but doesnt seem to allow freehand sketching.

What do people in the know use?

In reply to Phil79:

GIMP?  (Seriously, google it.  er..  carefully.)

It's a v powerful but not particularly user friendly photoshop type thing.  I have no idea if it's what you're after, but it's completely free and open source so won't cost you anything to try it out.

In reply to Phil79:

You can download Photoshop CS2 free. It's obviously not the latest version, but it'll do almost anything you need to do with an image. Search on the web... I got it from Techspot, but there may be other places as well.

In reply to Phil79:

If you’re and iPhone or iPad user, the standard photo edit tool will allow you to sketch straight onto photo. Part of iOS 11 I think.

In reply to Phil79: Adobe illustrator from a man who does it for a job.  But more often hand draw and scan

 

In reply to Phil79:

Paint.net (free) does everything I need it to - less sophisticated than GIMP, but much easier to use.

In reply to Phil79:

Freehand drawing with a mouse is quite hard. For best results you might want to consider a graphics tablet. They're relatively inexpensive unless you go for something high-end.

Decide whether you want to annoate at the level of rasters (pixels) or vectors (lines and shapes). Vectors resize better and can be edited independently of the underlying image. Raster annotations usually can't. Adobe Photoshop is best for raster images made up of pixels,  and Illustator is vector-based. They'll both let you import an image and annotate it, though, but neither of them are free.

Inkscape is a decent free, vector-based pacakge but it can be fiddly to use.

Also, consider what kind of output you want to produce. Is this for publishing? Web or print?

 

In reply to deepsoup:

Yeah had a look at GIMP. Looks good but probably a bit too complicated for my needs.

Plus I'd probably get a written warning if I downloaded something called GIMP and tried to install it! 

In reply to wbo:

Yeah, after spending too much time fiddling around, I might go with the hand draw option.

In reply to Phil79:

I make my geological maps and figures in CorelDraw, there are free trial versions available so depending on your time frame that could be worth a look. Others use illustrator but I never quite got into it.

Alternatively, MS PowerPoint is actually quite powerful for drawing. If you are only annotating photographs then this is a perfectly viable option and I imagine you already have it installed. In fact I don't think there is anything I couldn't do in CD that couldn't also be done in PP.