All graphics software these days comes with a CDR filled with clip art and photographs. All of the decent photographs are licensed and can have restricted use. The clip art comes free but all of it is tasteless tat and mostly unusable if you want to produce elegant artwork of good quality.
Awhile back Corel adorned the packaging of CorelDraw with a vector graphic of Hedi Lamarr. An impressive digital tour de forgce I guess and God knows how long it took the designer to construct it. Somehow though it was a cold unemotional image which didn't allow you to acquire a perception of her character. Professional photographers produce better images of celebrities but then perhaps digital images were never meant for serious recording and will be confined to packaging and advertising.
Commercial art studios once employed talented artists and designers to produce hand-drawn artwork but all this seems to have gone to be replaced by digital imaging. I am saddened by the demise of hand crafted processes in commercial publishing and remember with some nostalgia a time when major publishing houses like Penguin used talented artists to produce engravings and woodcuts to illustrate their book jackets.
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