Adobe Photoshop is the industry standard for Photo Editing however not everyone can afford a £400 piece of software. But did you know that you can get the same image editing power for absolutely nothing. In this article I’m going to cover some free alternatives which will give you the same features for free.
Paint.Net – Download
Paint.Net features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials and plugins.
Gimp – Download
Gimp is a very powerful, advanced image editing program. It’s a lot more advanced than Paint.Net but the user interface is a lot more complicated than that of Paint.Net.
Both of these photo editing programs are completely free and Gimp is open source. If your using Linux or Mac then Gimp is available on all platforms, whereas Paint.Net is Windows only and requires the .Net Framework to be installed.
They will give you the same features for no cost and are a great addition to anyones software collection.
Thanks to Pochp who reccomened Pixlr, which is a free online photo editor very similar to Paint.Net and it doesn’t require you to install a thing so give it a shot and head over to Pixlr.
Sam's Blog 
Try Pixlr too. Best for beginners.
As a journalist with a BA Degree in Photography, I cannot recommend Gimp enough! It is superb … and free!