There is PHotoshop Elements which is an under built version of the real thing & as a trial version http://www.download.com/Adobe-Photos...ml?tag=lst-0-3
It couldn't be any more basic than Photoshop version 1 which is what I started off with.
There are alternatives, but I suspect that the real thing is what you'll truelly drewl over. It can be easy to learn the basics, but you'll find you're continually learning new things about it all the time. There's more than one way to achieve the one result. Plus its applications are varied from print to web to animation to combined multimedia use. Learning about colour management is probaby the hardest aspect. But then again it depends about your intended output. For print it's extremely important, for web, just default web colours.

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