When life gives you lemons...

Make something out of them.  I may not be able to afford Photoshop, or any other name brand software, but Paint.Net is similar enough to work on most things.  For being a free program, it has a ton of tools to work with, as well as having the ability to work in layers.  I downloaded it for that reason alone.  It's a lot of fun to use, but I still hope to be able to afford Adobe Photoshop soon.  Photoshop has probably double the tools, and many of them are for professional grade editing and design.