Dear Couture... To answer your original question, I don't know what kind of system you are running, but I believe that Adobe Illustrator is still pretty much the state-of -the-art program for creating and/or manipulating still images [as opposed to animations]. I know that this is what my ex uses in her work as a graphic designer for an ad agency, and I have found it useful myself in taking artwork which I had already created [such as the avatar which accompanies my pen name] and adapting or editing it, etc.