The GIMP is free and nearly as powerful as Photoshop Pro, with most of the same tools available. I use it pretty often, but its got a different learning curve than regular old Photoshop. But there are a bunch of tutorials out there.
http://www.gimp.org/Photoshop Elements is under $100 and can do about 90% of what its bigger brother can do. I use this for just about everything, especially retouching. The differences being a couple tools and printing options, which professionals might needing more. Elements lacks layer masks, but there is an easy workaround for making layer masks.
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop ... moid=BPDEMDownload a free trial if you think you might be interested.
Not sure if you're into video editing, but Premiere Elements is absolutely fantastic and under $100. You can't have concurrent timelines like in Premiere Pro, but there aren't too many times I've found needing that. DVD authoring isn't as refined as Pro since Pro is packaged with Encore, but it does its own authoring quite well. I liked versions 3 and 8 more than version 7. Ver 8 just came out in September.
Slash