This article is intended to list Free Applications and Tools for Image Manipulation.

These Applications can be used to
1. Create Cool Graphic Effects
2. Editing Pictures
3. Create and Manipulate Animated Graphics
The Softwares in this list are the good alternatives to commercial softwares like Adobe Photoshop ,Adobe Illustrator, because they are free. Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator are professional softwares but they are not that easy to implement, and its moreover costly for a normal web user.

List of Free Applications

1.mtPaint is a painting program which Mark Tyler developed from scratch so he could easily create pixel art and manipulate digital photos. 
It uses the GTK+ toolkit (version 1 or 2) and runs on PC's via the GNU/Linux or Windows operating systems. Due to its efficient design, it can run on older PC hardwares (e.g. a 200MHz CPU and 16MB of free RAM).
mtPaint is free software, which means you are able to freely use, modify and distribute it according to the GNU General Public License.

2.Pencil is an animation/drawing software for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. It lets you create traditional hand-drawn animation (cartoon) using both bitmap and vector graphics. Pencil is free and open source.
3.PhotoPosLite 
Photo Pos Lite Minimum Requirements:
Pentium(R) 350Mhz/equivalent processor or faster, 256 MB of RAM, 300 MB of free disk space, 16-bit color display adapter, 800x600 resolution, Windows 98/Me/XP


4.HeliosPaint 
HeliosPaint is a free and easy paint program for editing photos, drawings and icons. It runs on Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS, Linux and Unix and is written in Sun Microsystem's Java programming language.
HeliosPaint version 1.4.1 and below are free to use. If the program is redistributed it must be done freely without any charge. It comes "as is" with absolutely no warranty of any kind. HeliosPaint program code is copyright D.J.B. Osborne 2009.

5. RealWorld Paint.COM has much hidden power under the hood and harbors features unexpected in a freeware image editor. Many of its drawing tools and image filters are able to do gamma-aware blending and color gradient interpolation, producing correct colors by default.
A powerful scripting system allows users to greatly extend and customize the functionality of RW Paint.COM using JavaScript. For example the "Create screenshot" command (used to generate the screenshot above) is a scripted function.

There are many more resources available, but we felt that these are the top.