Pixel, comes free with a Canva Pro account (which you should all have as UCSB students; here are directions for setting up your Canva Pro account)
Canva recently purchased the Affinity software, so they now offer something very similar to Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign as a downloadable desktop program with their Canva Pro account. It’s a great deal.
GIMP for PC and GIMP for Mac OSX free, open-source, desktop photo editing program; download GIMP and put it in your Applications folder. You might have to go into your Security settings to open GIMP
Midjourney: considered the best AI image generator
OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 via ChatGPT: https://platform.openai.com/docs/overview. You need to create an account. The free ChatGPT plan includes two free images per day, and ChatGPT Plus costs $20 per month and includes DALL-E 3.
Leonardo.Ai: pretty good image quality; easy to use; 25 free tokens each day
Ideogram: evidently does a good job of rendering text; limited free plan; can be long wait times
