Depends how you define "expensive" I guess. I bought Corel Draw and Photo Paint for $250 bucks about 25 years ago, used it until the new extended file and folder name format made it a pain (originally file and folder names were limited to a max of 11 characters so old DOS programs often don't recognize newer files). I bought Jasc Paint Shop Pro 7 for $100 about 10 years ago and am still using that. I tried free programs like Gimp and Paint.NET to see how the layers worked in those, but both have problems merely opening and displaying TGA files, and I gave up trying to figure out why. Whatever image editor you use you should spend some time learning all the tools, nobody becomes a graphic artist overnight.