April wrote:chunkmoster, your first attempt is a lot better than my first attempt was.
I've been using Photoshop for all my artwork.

Ditto chunkmonster. My first manip was...yikesish. lol If I recall it was a manip of Max and Dick Tracey. lol
Anyway to answer your question, I use three programs. GIMP, Photoshop. and another free Image manipulation program called PhotoFiltre. I started out using photofiltre, then GIMP. then photofiltre and GIMP, then moved to CS2. But to tell you the truth, I only switched to photoshop because I got a student discount on it for taking a class. All of the banners I've done this year have been made using GIMP because I got a new computer and just never got around to putting CS2 on it.
GIMP is awesome. Almost everything you can do on photoshop can also be done on GIMP, it just may requirer an extra step or two.
PhotoFiltre is a very basic program that does not involve layers or anything fancy, but you can still do some awesome stuff with it. The main reason I still use it is because it was the first IMP I ever used and I'm pretty fine tuned with it and can do some stuff on it quicker and easier than I can do them on GIMP or CS2. Like manips for instance. For manips I use a Combo of Photofiltre and GIMP. Photo Flitre to do the actual manip and GIMP to clean it up.
If you're interested in some GIMP tutorials try here:
http://www.gimptalk.com/
Or try searching for tuts on Live Journal. There are a
ton of them, and lots of people that can use GIMP just as well as some can use photoshop. Also, some photoshop tuts translate pretty well to GIMP as well.
And if you want to check out Photo Filtre you can download it for free here.
http://photofiltre.free.fr/download_en.htm
And there are some basic tutorials and downloads on their main websight here:
http://photofiltre.free.fr/
Good luck. But I think you're already well on your way.
~Chad~