I am trying to find a way to manipulate photos in a certain way. Imagine the shape on the left is a sign which has been photoed from an angle. I want to distort the photo so the sign appears more readable. Essentially either by stretching the right side wider or squashing the left narrower.
The obvious answer is Photoshop but I don't have it so I am looking for alternatives. My favourite software is Microsoft Picture it and Corel Draw. I have however so far been unable to find a way to do this in either application though I suspect it is possible in Corel Draw. I have also looked at online editing tools and I downloaded the free version of Morpheus Photo Warper. None of these proved to be any good.
Sure I could ask someone to do it for me but I want to be able to do it myself when ever required. However I am not prepared to buy software just to do this one task.

What you need is a "skew" transformation. Try the open source program GIMP. That should be able to do it...

http://www.gimp.org/

Wow, that's pretty good thanks. Within 5 minutes I had it up and running and doing what I wanted. I found the option as "Perspective transformation". I tried skew in other programs but that doesn't do what I want.

AH - well, glad to help! Yes, GIMP is very handy... It's cross platform too.

And it's free! (as in no cost as well as in freedom)

I was going to suggest the very same software. Running quite happily on my linux system here
It is a learning curve when you are used to photoshop, but I find it can do so many things, it's great!

As a matter of interest does GIMP allow you to manipulate user defined areas? Like make a nose bigger for example. Morpheus allows you to add dots which are then used to pull any region of a photo around. The free version of Morpheus isn't good enough though.

Yes, it does allow that Tony. I was actually making something in GIMP about 5 minutes ago

Is it the cage transformation tool? These things have there own language so it's not always obvious what does what. I need to do some manual reading I guess to get up to speed.

Maybe this will help you a little
http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/

Thanks. The problem I have with these kind of tutorials is that because the terms used are not obvious ones you have to do an awful lot of reading to find the tiny bit you want. So, can anyone point me in the right direction for stretching user defined polyagonal areas please.