So,
some people have mentioned that they are interested in GIMP. (At the bottom of this post you can find another free program that's not so clever but easier to use). It's very similar to Photoshop but it's asbolutely free to download or to use. If you ask me it's a damn clever and foxy program.
You can download it here:
http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/stable.html
You can make amazing things with it.
Let me show you only one very simple example:
From this picture:
This one:
It took 5 minutes or even less.
Or my banner (from two pictures plus text):
An ex banner (from many pictures):
I used this one for long it might be familiar, it's very close to my heart I am sure I will use it sometime:
* You can see it's from 3 pictures. An island. On it there is a rose with the colours of the island and on the right there is another little black rose figure. Plus a text.
Or Storyslinger's:
To tell you the truth I am not too good at it but I'll help any of you with pleasure.
I am sure if you like it you are patient enough you will enjoy it and you will be able to create some great stuff.
Here you can download amazing fonts (handwritten, celtic... and so on and so on):
http://www.dafont.com/
And anyway let me show you another free program.
It's called Picasa. I strated to work on pictures with it, too.
You can download it here:
http://picasa.google.com/
It's not as clever as GIMP or Photoshop but that's way it can be very good and useful. It doesn't know much but it is very handy and it's damn easy to use it. It's a free program for those users who wouldn't like to do much with their pictures but resize them or colour them a little bit (for example to make Sepia or Black and White style) cut out something from their picture or to vanish red eyes... stuff like that.
When I have no time for GIMP or I am just lazy I use Pisaca.