In reply to Pyreneenemec:
I have used both, and liked them. I reckon elements has a better raw converter, but I always preferred the psp editing tools. I think newer versions of elements are less "cut down" than 4, which is the one I had.
For free options, GIMP has a reasonable feature set but is weak when it comes to handling high precision images (i.e. more than 8 bit/channel) & the UI is a bad joke.
paint.net is fairly nice to use & is quite quick. Not 100% sure about colour depth, but I think it is another fairly weak one. Raw import isn't in the version I run, but there are plugins for that.