Try Paint.net... It looks to be a good Photoshop replacement. Someone who uses Photoshop tell me if it's good.
Tried it for the first time... they have made many of the same keyboard shortcuts do the same thing as the Photoshop counterpart and it seems like a very good (infinitely cheaper helps!) photoshop alternative. There seem to be quite a number of shortcomings when it comes to layer options though... if you're used to using 10^12 layers in PS like me, you'll probably go nuts. But, I did this with it in about a minute and a half. Not too shabby at all for a free editor.
I took the SPAM(B) text from an image as well, but here's a quick technique to make cut-out text (if you can't get the font itself) to look better in the end, and should work with most any image editing program. Since we'll all undoubtedly start using a fairly small image with text as the base, first blow it up. Increase the image size by a ton... and I mean something like, 5000x5000 pixels or more. Then increase contrast while decreasing brightness. Don't go TOO far, but increase it enough to separate it a good bit from the background. Then blur it, again be careful to keep the font intact (watch out for the holes in 'e's 'o's and 'a's), and repeat those two steps a few times. Finally select the text with the 'magic wand' or equivalent. When you paste and size it to acceptable proportions, you should end up with the text appearing much cleaner. Then hue/colorize/etc. Here's an example, using my welcome message at the top of the page:
