[Hodar]

Used Gimp, it’s not as user-friendly as Photoshop (ok, user-hostile is a better term). But for 99% of what I do, Google’s free photo-editing Picassa is the best deal I have seen. The only thing this free program doesn’t do, is erase images from a picture. I expect a new version will enable that feature too. If you haven’t tried it, give it a whirl.

[papasmurf]

Have you tried yet?

Free and Open Source for Windows, and I'm told it installs on Linux thru

[sionnsar]

Used Gimp, it’s not as user-friendly as Photoshop (ok, user-hostile is a better term).

GIMP has the second-most user-hostile UI I've encountered. In order to use it beyond basic operations, which I had done for years, I had to buy a book on it (by A. Peck - very good book, only once have I had an issue where I really had to hunt). But I use UFRAW for processing RAW (>8-bit) images, and GIMP for all the rest. Windows and Linux both.

[Tribune7]

Thanks. I’ll check out Picassa.