Paint.NET

[Red Devil]

Paint.NET is a highly rated free picture editor that I've been using:

http://www.getpaint.net/index.html

[OvermindDL1]

Yes.  I recommend it as well.  For anything that is not too major it works really well with.
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[BNG Da BZ Fool]

Very nice program and it supports layers too...Tanks Red BNG

PS: There's also a ton of plug ins available to make it way useful! Kudos Red. Update: this application is awesome and I'll never go back to MS Paint again. The coolest feature I've found using it is called, pencil sketch. This artistic effect transforms an image into a line drawn image using white and grey values; it can really pull out details of a poorly scanned (dark) image, and create a line drawing for coloring in details similar to those we all remember in our coloring book days.

Quite some time back I scanned a ton of my nephews Matchbox type toy vehicles, but ended up with a bunch of poorly lit scanned images that were difficult to use for making more custom skins for my BZII models. Now, I can actually process the the images into highly detailed coloring book looking images for better looking model textures.

It even works great on collage images containing multiple images combined on a single image. An example of this might be something like combining the top, side, bottom, front and back views of a model all laid in one UV type file like those seen in the original BZII texture files. Very cool little application. I read that the application was designed as a replacement for MS Paint by some college student and grew in popularity by other peeps contributing towards it's development. BNG

   

[BNG Da BZ Fool]

I was experimenting around with the program and found a useful filter under effects>distortion>seemless texture maker. With it you can convert an image for easy tiling as it modifies the image to make it suitable for map texturing in the BZII map editor. I guess it does this by replicating the image along the center, horizontal, or vertical plane to create pattern like tiling. There are also several other tile effects available by dl'ing this free plugin at this website>   http://paintdotnet.forumer.com/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=21592

PS: Unzip the file to your paint.net effects folder and restart the program to access the new filters.

[Red Devil]

Found out that Paint.NET also supports the dds format (DirectDraw Surface files) used in BF2 and other things, is   

http://paintdotnet.forumer.com/viewtopic.php?t=1637

"NOTE: Version 1.11 of this plugin is built in to Paint.NET v3.10. So if you have that version of Paint.NET installed, you don't need to download this plugin, it's already there! --Rick"

http://www.modwiki.net/wiki/DDS_(file_format)

[OvermindDL1]

No, Paint.NET supports the DDS format, but BZ2's DDS format has a different header.  If the source code is available for that DDS plugin though then it would most likely be a very easy modification to make to get it to read/write BZ2's format of it.
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[Red Devil]

(BF2, not BZ2) 

Just saw this:

"As this is now part of Paint.NET (from 3.10 onwards), there's no installation process. And if you need the source, simply grab a copy of the Paint.NET source code."

Which is here:

http://www.dotpdn.com/downloads/pdnsrc.html    <--- Right click on the download link on that page

Cool or what?