The Gimp and other editors

The Gimp 2.6 has been released and it is really polished. They even changed the general layout of windows. Check it out!
Another free editor for windows is Paint.NET It does not have all the scripting and filter function of The Gimp, but definitely can do a lot, and worth checking out.

Don't forget about IrfanView. Although it is primarily a viewer it does have some cool editing features. It also has very robust meta data features.

Oh, and then there is XNVIEW, free also, and great for batch resizing.

I personally have found my investment in Adobe's products very worthy, but these programs are truly useful and can really help if money is tight.

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