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"Are there any good free alternatives to Photoshop? I want something I can easily edit my photos with so I can do color corrections and retouch images, but I don't have a large budget"
This is one area I routinely spend money on because I find free alternatives to be less intuitive. For that reason, I use the "lite" version of Photoshop aka Photoshop Elements. If budget is a concern, there are plenty of photo editing apps capable of getting the job done. Based on a reader poll of best free photo editing software, GIMP and Paint.NET are the two most popular choices.
In my own experience, Paint.NET is the easier of those two to get the hang of, although GIMP is far more powerful with a rich feature set and large plug-in library. Both applications list more features than I could possibly list here, including color correction, filter effects, multiple brushes, red-eye removal, cropping, and numerous output formats.
Your best bet is to try both applications and see which one makes more sense for the way you want to work with your photos.
