Originally Posted by eramnes

Have you looked at the GIMP? It is a free as in speech and beer photo editing program. I won't call it equal to Photoshop, but it does have a lot of the features that Photoshop would, but doesn't cost anything. As long as you don't do any CMYK editing it should be fine. I'd check into that.

My dad uses PSP9 to do all his editing for his photos. It seems to work well for him...I haven't heard of him coming across anything that it couldn't do, although I have heard it is similar to Elements.

The learning curve for the GIMP is usually a little steep. If you've ever used Photoshop before, there is an interface skin you can get for it that makes it look a little more like Photoshop, but I've never tried it as I tend to suck at image editing. You can get that skin here.

Let me know if any of this helped.