The past few years of my designing experience have been accomplished mainly by using a copy of my friend's father's Adobe Photoshop CS 8.0 CD. But my computer had been bugging me lately and i had no choice but to reformat it, at the same time wiping away any trace of the program. Unfortunately for me, i hadn't made a copy of the CD myself and i feel so much regret and remorse over that incident.

Still, i have to look towards the future. I've went to the Adobe website and in no way am i going to pay 600 bucks for one program that i use once every week. At the moment I'm using the trial version of the latest Adobe Photoshop but it's expiring in 22 days and i wouldn't want to wait till then to sulk and feel bad for myself again.
So I'm wondering if anyone has any recommentdations of another free or low-cost (up to $100) graphics program that could equal the Photoshop in features and having a similar layout because i find it hard to adjust to another totally different program from any one I'm used to.
At the moment, after searching around Astahost and Google, i'm looking at GIMP, Paintshop, and Macromedia Fireworks (though I've worked with this before and it really doesn't suit my expectations - will only use for a last resort).

I would appreciate any comments given that could help me out with this enigma i have right now.
Thanks!

PaintShop and Fireworks aren't free, so they don't really fit your requirements. In any case, PaintShop Pro falls very far below Photoshop in terms of quality and features, so I'd recommend that you don't waste your money on it. Fireworks, on the other hand is a fairly good program. Not up to Photoshop's standards when it comes to image editing features, but that's because it's an image editor such as Photoshop is. Fireworks is a vector graphics program, and a fairly good one at that. It's comparable in quality to its Adobe counterpart, Illustrator.

If what you really want is free I'd go with GIMP. It's a versatile little program that's really as good as Photoshop—sometimes it's even better! I use it myself, usually in tandem with another graphics software like Photoshop. Once you learn to use it, especially after browsing through the wide array of tutorials and guides on GIMPguru.org, you'll may find that it's perfect graphics software for you.

If in case you want more choices, then here's a list of some of the more popular graphics software available, both freeware and commercial. Take your pick. =^^=

Raster graphics software

• Adobe Photoshop (commercial) (recommended)
• Paint Shop Pro (commercial)
• Paint.Net (freeware)
• PhotoPlus (freeware)
• GIMP (freeware) (recommended)

Vector graphics software

• Adobe Illustrator (commercial) (recommended)
• CorelDRAW (commercial)
• Macromedia Fireworks (commercial)
• Macromedia Freehand MX (commercial)
• Inkscape (freeware)
• DrawPlus (freeware)

Animation graphis software

• Adobe ImageReady (commercial) (recommended) notes: bundled with Adobe Photoshop
• Animation Shop (commercial)
• GIMP Animation Package (freeware) (recommended) notes: a plugin for GIMP

When you talk about graphics programmes, the best of the best are Photoshop, PaintShop Pro and GIMP. Since GIMP is the only one free here, it is the best solution. I haven't tried it myself, but I can assure that it is good, since it is the only Photoshop equivalent in Linux. I believe that it will be good enough for you. Or at least I hope so

I believe I agree that GIMP as a perfect choice if you're looking for a freeware, non-commercial photo-editing program. It has a plethora of features, basically everything you might ever need. Its user-interface is very decent, I think. It's said to consume little system resources and to cause few, if any, system crashes.

I admit that, for some reason or another, I think its learning-slope is a tad steep, but not too much. You'll certainly know what each tool does, but it might take some time to get the hang ot where everything is... not too much time, though. Just give its Help section a once-over, and use it whenever you're stuck at something. It's not perfect, but it's accessible and understandable.

I hope that might help. Good luck!

I agree on the gimp. It really is an amazing piece of software seeing that it is open source. Free, as in beer, is always nice I've used the gimp a fair bit and like it, personally I prefer photoshop... but if you want to go the free route the gimp is the only real contender. I think you can eventually do almost everything in the gimp that you can in photoshop, it just seems that alot of things are more convoluted in the gimp then in photoshop.

Regardless it is free so give it a try! Hopefully you'll love it. I know I still use it whenever I'm in linux and it serves my purposes easily.

I would go with gimp. If you ask for specific functions, and good usability, and if you ask for freeware, GIMP is your final choice. And if you know photoshop, you will see right when you start gimp, how similar it is to photoshop...

Ahh...thanks for the recommendations guys but most of you probably haven't read the small print, or amybe not so small print. I would really love a FREE image editing software but I will also work with some image editing software that may cost below $100 not like Photoshop's 600 bucks.

So far well, i can tell that GIMP beats all? I guess well, I'll try out GIMP and see if it works out. It seems that no one has mentioned another program besides what I've listed so I'm keeping in mind the fact that the best are only these few.

Thanks again for all your help. I'll start working with GIMP from now on and if i run into any problems or some missing features that GIMP doesn't have compared to Photoshop, I'll ask you guys how to bypass that and still get the same result as Photoshop's "shortcut" filters .

Well, GIMP is good, as in it's free and has a decent set of features, but it definitely can't beat Photoshop. I've used both, and there are some features in Photoshop that we don't even give a second thought to while using them and are just mind-numbingly difficult to achieve in GIMP.

For real professional graphics, I would suggest you put in the effort to try to get hold of a copy of Photoshop from a friend or someone who has purchased it rather than try to learn to use the GIMP.

Dont' get me wrong. I've used GIMP quite a bit and GIMP is really cool, but it just isn't photoshop.

Unfortunately Abhiram, the only other person i know who uses Photoshop readily is my cousin but he owns an Apple Powerbook and his Photoshop is set up only for the Mac system, or is it? I might have to ask my school teacher for a copy of the educational version of Adobe Photoshop or something...I've just tried GIMP and like you said, its nothing like Photoshop.

can't you just get a crack?
I have a licensed version of CS and my luck, it was a present. So, I guess it is a licensed version, but I don't know now. Cause the crack was included to the cd itself. And plus I've read in the instructions that i should use a crack to activate it, there's no activation code.
Though I don't know if it's right to recommend to use a crack...