BioRender might be a good option (https://biorender.io/)

It's an online app that contains a library of pre-made cells, proteins, membrane shapes, organs, lab equipment, etc. that you can drag-and-drop so you don't have to spend time drawing each element of the figure yourself. Saves a LOT of time (and the pictures are professional-looking!)

There are plenty. To start with adobe photoshop is one, but it is paid. Look for gimp. It is a free one and is available for all platforms. Each field of study has its own field specific softwares. The quality of the images would again depend upon the file format you would save them in. Generally tiff is acceptable for all publication quality figures.

I have used this particular software for my article illustration, http://www.smartdraw.com/. There is a trial version that could be used for few days and an earlier version might help.

There is plenty of open source software (OSS). No need to pay to get a good piece of software. There is a program called Dia that is OSS and you can download/install it on any platform (Windows/Mac/Linux). It can export to bitmap, eps, and other formats. Fairly easy to use. There are other OSS programs from OSS world depending on what specific you want to do (UML, flow charts, process,...). Gimp is an OSS program that is an excellent alternative to PhotoShop. Its also free and there is plenty of instructions online how to use it.

There are also online apps such as Cacoo, Gliffy, and similar. They usually allow creation of a limited number of figures and then they ask you to pay the registration fee.

I recommend dislin, developed by Max Planck Institute for Solar System research.

You can download it from this page:

http://www.mps.mpg.de/dislin/

Nevertheless, gnuplot is the natural way to obtain figures to be inserted in LaTeX manuscripts.

http://www.gnuplot.info

Both software packages are free.

I wish to try dislin for my lectures on Immunology.......hope I will be able to work on it

If you want free and GPL software, there are a lot of programs. For manipulating bitmap figures, GIMP is GPL, free and adequate. For vectors, Inkscape is very easy to use; very similar to Corel Draw. For diagrams, graphics based in data, R is very powerful, but you have to learn command line (it is easier than all we think after the first try).

Hi,

I like Prism Graphpad a lot (http://www.graphpad.com/scientific-software/prism/#1). You can not only draw graphs, but also do statistics, automatically calculate statistics (and put stars on your graph). And you can perform an easy conformity check, where you do similar coloring and axis formatting for all graphs, to make them all look the same. You can download a version and try it out for 30 days.

@ Thary: I agree. Prizm is the fastest way to bang out uniform formatting for multiple graph types. Also covers basic and semi-advanced stats.

The negative part of prism is, in my case, there is license only for Windows or Mac. no license for Linux. Second, the cost (US$450 for Academic User or 595 for Corporate User), only to cover graphics. I think it is better to learn how to do these graphics (and at the same time learning a lot in statistics) than obtain with two clicks an image, sometimes with no understanding how this result is obtained... plus 500$

Try "R" http://cran.r-project.org/. It is a statistics language and it is very flexible and powerful handling graphics. In the beginning it could be hard to learn. But when you get used to work in ... it is amazing. The software is free and it has a lot of specialized packages oriented to design graphics and to analyze data.

I would suggest Latexdraw a free drawing package that is easily integrated with Latex documents

http://latexdraw.sourceforge.net/

Thanks everybody for the discussion about a lot of software. But, Could anyone of you please tell me the price of these software.

R http://cran.r-project.org/ is free (for all fo the free meanings in english language)

Dear Ceferino López Sández

Thank you very much

You can use a tool  called TikZ/PGF. However its little bit difficult to master. It uses latex to draw diagrams.

If you still want to program your diagrams then Processing is another tool that makes this easier . There are a lot of excellent tutorials on this language, some of them specifically aimed towards people with no prior programming experience.

reference: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/1095/software-to-draw-illustrative-figures-in-papers?newreg=206f660f7b9b43dbb82d9a0167cd5aae

http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/16750/software-for-drawing-bayesian-networks-graphical-models/16869#16869

 http://www.4shared.com/zip/fLRBMEDwce/GraphPad_Prism_5.htm

Can anyone tell me how to use R ?

You can also use Dia (http://dia-installer.de/). Thanks

 smartdraw (https://www.smartdraw.com/) also an option

@ Sakthivel MS. I tried to download smart draw, but only free trial version (7days) avilable. I love it. how can i get full access software. Please

Purchasing is the option.

You may try inkscape

@Anup Kumar Singh, There is a complete program for the same in Edx - www. edx.org and search for R programming. Its free and self paced.

You can use Inkspace .

Use of inkscape software will be helpful in this regard.

It is free vector graphics software available for multiple platform where you can edit any kind of vector graphics content

BioRender might be a good option (https://biorender.io/)

It's an online app that contains a library of pre-made cells, proteins, membrane shapes, organs, lab equipment, etc. that you can drag-and-drop so you don't have to spend time drawing each element of the figure yourself. Saves a LOT of time (and the pictures are professional-looking!)

Thank you Savanna Jackson.

I think R (for statistical plots) + Biorender + OpenOffice-Draw (for image edition) is a pretty nice combo to handle drawings and plots for manuscripts.