Students at Washington State University, in conjunction with Microsoft, have created a FREE photo editing program called Paint.NET that is intended as a replacement for the Micorosft Paint application that comes with Windows. The current hot rumor is that Paint.NET will replace MS Paint in the next version of Windows, Windows Vista.

Paint.NET is as good a free photo program gets -- it's like Photoshop-lite. I highly recommend it.

Caveats: This program will not run on Windows 95, 98 or ME. You'll need at least Windows 2000 or Windows XP.

You will also need to download the Microsoft .NET framework version 2, which is available for free via Windows Update. Just start up Windows Update, click Custom, click on Software, Optional, then choose the .NET framework.

Once you have downloaded and installed the .NET framework, go ahead and download Paint.NET directly from Washington State University. 

Once you download it, just double-click on the file to install.

Paint.NET Tutorials:

Resize a Photograph
Crop a Photograph