PaintShop Pro is also inexpensive but isn't half bad as a PhotoShop clone. Best of all, it comes without a obnoxious non-standard "oooh, lets make it look like a MP3 player" skinned GUI (which looking at the Adobe's page, Elements seems to fall victim to).

Really to me nothing cripples an application worse than giving it some toy-like playskool interface. Yeah, it's great fun trying to figure out which useless widget to click and having half the screen area wasted so the GUI designer can show off his mad skillz with the Alien Effects bevel plugin!