Good free or cheap Photoshop alternatives?

The problem with Gimpshop is that it hasn’t been updated in a long time. The next version of the Gimp will have a better interface (including a single window variety), but, for right now, that’s the most annoying part of it.

Although I’m generally against pirated software, I’m getting close to reinstalling a pirated copy Photoshop CS2 that I unwittingly bought from eBay for my Photoshop class.

Oh, and the Gimp doesn’t have shape tools or any vector abilities, but I find I can use Inkscape, the open source answer to Adobe Illustrator. Other than a deficient bitmap trace tool, it’s pretty good.

I’ve never been able to get GIMP to do stuff I did in Photoshop all the time, like copy one layer to part of another. It’s superficially similar, but I miss Photoshop.