“One drawback to using this free software is that any work you do can be used for display by Aviary, although you will be listed as the creator. For example, your art could be used as an image for a third-party news article about Aviary. Even if you subscribe to the pro version and set the image rights to private, Aviary still has the right to use your image. That could be embarrassing for people who produce, well, whatever it is you don’t want people to see.”

If someone sets their work to be private, then Aviary can not use it or display it in any way without the permission of the artist. It’s only works that are public on Aviary’s website that could potentially be used in a screenshot of Aviary’s website by a newspaper writing a story about Aviary – and this is no different from Photoshop.com, which displays public galleries of images.

If you would like to follow up with further questions, please don’t hesitate to email me at Avi@aviary.com

And, the new, lighter-weight Photoshop Elements software is less than $100 and now does just about everything anyone would want to do, outside of running Pixar Animation Studios. (David Larter is correct about full-powered Photoshop being very complex; it’s a two-semister course at many universities. Of course, you can then create entire worlds with it.)

If it is true that Aviary has rights to what users do, that would make this service dangerous for most anyone, but especially businesses. When you use any image in any kind of commercial sense, you’re looking at problems regards rights.

If you’re on a Mac, you have iPhoto for free, of course. If you want more power, Seashore is a photoshop-type professional photo-editing program that is free.