What Program Do You Use for Your PYO Photo Collages?

I saw a question like this on Prezaurian’s thread and thought it was a good topic; please forgive me if it’s been done before (it didn’t look like anyone had previously addressed this!) If you’re unfamiliar, a photo collage is used for showing your PYO (or other creative stuff!) from all angles but rather than making people flip between images to get a 3D sense of the piece, a collage shows it all at once, in one larger image. Very useful, especially for records and if you want to sell your piece! Here’s an example of one of mine:

Lots of people make them better than me, mainly because I have trouble picking out favourite photographs and usually end up using way too many haha.

I always create my collages in Adobe Photoshop, a program of which there are many different versions; I use CS4. It’s also what I use for pretty much all of my digital artwork and making collages in particular is an absolute snap with this program. Unfortunately, while it’s famous for being a go-to graphics tool for scores of creative professionals, Photoshop is also famous for being ridiculously expensive! I believe that any creative software that has layers and can import images will probably work for making a collage; layers make it far easier to tweak things, especially if you want to move your photos around or add text or change the colour of the background. 🙂

I’ve personally only used Photoshop for this but I’m sure there are other programs that you can use, so what’s your go to PYO collage creating program? I believe that GIMP would probably make great freebie art software program for those that just want a casual program just for this purpose since lots of artists out there use it instead of Photoshop. I haven’t tried it for this though.