What should I use for ease of use to design my own images?

[great gig in the sky]

(.jpg. images) Is there a free photoshop program? Is there an easier way?

 

[Winston]

Yes The GIMP

http://gimp.org

It has plugins and scripts too.

 

[Sam]

Use GIMP.

It's free and you can do "almost" anything you can do with Photoshop.

Here you can download it:

http://www.gimp.org/downloads/