You can try GIMP or Irfanview GT I hear they are really good and free.
I use several image editing programs to be honest, primarily I use Photoshop CS3, Paint Shop Pro 9 (I hate corel and won't go to it) and Fireworks CS3.
Photoshop because its the most advanced and allows me to do more with the image and has awesome plug ins for manipulating my images and stuff.
Paint Shop Pro because its easy and simple to understand I mostly use it for cropping and quick image manipulation (I learned everything on it before ever owning Photoshop so it comes easy to me).
Fireworks is my program for resizing images and in my opinion the best program available for the task especially for for thumbnailing large images. To me it does a better job than any of the others and gives a much smoother less pixelated image.
Then I have probably 10 to 20 other programs I use for different things or to get the effects I desire, listing them is kinda pointless though as they are just kinda a mood thing and their use is rare, if I can do it in one the above programs easily I'll just do it there rather than open a new program to do it. Almost every image I do runs through all three of the above programs before I am done with it.
These banners were created using Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Fireworks and Ulead GIF Animator but none of those programs are free nor cheap in my opinion. Many of them do have a demo version available but that only last about 30 days. Everything could have been done using Photoshop but the other programs allowed me to do it faster.
~cXc~
EDIT: Tell me what you are wanting/needing in a Private Message GT and I'll see what I can do for you
