Artweaver

Artweaver is a free painting and drawing program for Windows that will look very familiar to anyone who has used Photoshop or Painter in the past. Artweaver features a number of natural media brushes and tools such as chalk, pencils, charcoal, oil paint, felt markers, crayons, airbrushes, acrylic, sponges, pastels, and cloners. Each brush has a number of attributes that can be adjusted for even more variety.

In addition, Artweaver offers a solid set of general image manipulation and enhancement tools. It features a text tool, layers, layer groups, blending modes, selections, image adjustments for tweaking colour and tone, as well as a number of filters such as blur, sharpen, noise, distort, texture, and so on. For free you get a very comprehensive program for touching up photos and creating your own drawings.

There's a huge user base and following for this and the software gets regular updates and improvements. In this case, the best things in life really are free..!!

MemoriesOnWeb

MemoriesOnWeb is a powerful yet simple to use slideshow freeware (yes, put your wallet away). It's designed for folks who want to create photo/video slideshows easily and upload to free video hosts* (eg. YouTube) to share it with friends and family...

MemoriesOnWeb offers a host of advanced controls that allow you to blend your photos & video with almost unlimited creativity. You can apply pan/zoom motion effects to individual slides, or mix multiple audio tracks and synchronize them to your slides.

post a video slide show of photos on the Web. Just select the photos you want to use from the built-in browser, adjust a few settings, and click Publish.

When you click Publish, you can choose to generate a new video and save it to your computer, generate a new video and upload to YouTube, or upload an existing video to YouTube. You'll need an account with YouTube for the automatic uploading

GIMP for windows..
Supper graphics power for the real techie types.. Also available for linux: Ubuntu .. Open suse .. Gentoo .. RedHat

GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.

GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.