What’s the first name that you think of when it comes to photo editing software? I’ll bet dollars to donuts that the answer was “PhotoShop.”

Next question: What’s the piece of software with the highest learning curve? Answer again: “PhotoShop.” Odds are, it’d win a third round if I asked about which software was the most expensive.

Sure. PhotoShop is great. But, man! Is it hard to learn. And, unless you’re a graphics professional who’s going to be using it all the time, its hefty pricetag is one that’s difficult to justify.

There are lots of online photo editors out there. Lots of them try to mimic PhotoShop, but with pretty mediocre results. So, when we looked into Aviary, we were expecting more of the same. That was our first mistake, because what we found was an application that not only did a great job of matching PhotoShop’s strengths, it did lots of things that, to our minds, surpassed what Adobe’s photo powerhouse can do. And it does them easily.

For free.

Aviary isn’t just one application. It’s a suite of tools that can be used in conjunction with one another not just to touch up photos and reduce red-eye, but to create mind-blowing graphics that’d raise the eyebrows of Salvador Dali.

The six tools that comprise Aviary are: Phoenix, the image-editing tool that most-closely resembles PhotoShop, but that is far, far easier to use; Toucan, a color editor that will teach you to create color palettes for websites on which you’re working, themes for presentations, or anything for which you want a clean, cohesive color scheme; Raven, a vector editor that will creates fully-scalable art, and is perfect for logo design; Peacock, Aviary’s “visual laboratory”, which uses myriad effects to create graphics that’ll knock your socks off; Falcon (and its Firefox extension, Talon), which allows you to screen-grab images from the Web and edit them in your browser; and Aviary’s latest installment, Myna, an audio editor, which can be used to create sound effects or embed music in your graphic creations (or used on their own).

Pretty impressive, huh? We thought so, too!

Incredibly, you can use all of these tools for the low, low price of … nothing. Yep. It’s free. Not only that, but there is nothing whatsoever to download. The applications launch right from your web browser, so none of your computer’s memory will be eaten up by using Aviary.

Fly on over to Aviary: a killer app without the killer pricetag.