I love to play with image editing software, and I used to be an active user of Photoshop when I was more motivated to design my site. I haven't used it in a while and since I don't want to deal with price or licensing issues, I'm always open to better alternatives... particularly FREE ones :) CNET TV did a video promoting three good alternatives.

Photoshop is great but way too much editing power for the average user and way too expensive. Try one of these three free alternatives.

In short, try paint.net, fotoflexer.com, and GIMP! I've played with fotoflexer as well as picnik a little before (fotoflexer seems to be incorporated in photobucket now too!), but I've always wanted to try GIMP :)

posted by che @ 10:32 AM