I would hope you mean Photo Shop Elements 7, because neither one of them can be obtain legally for free, but the only difference is that one is extremely out dated, and probably is worse then the newest version of GIMP. Seriously I would not suggest you download any Adobe software illegally, because if you get caught illegally downloading a $700 program, then that is a lot of money coming out of your pocket.
Anyways The Gimp is the most well known free art program(or at least it seems to be by how much more people talk about on this site then any other free graphic arts program). The only other I can think of is paint.net, but I have never used it of course.Seriously though if you ever do have the money I would suggest you go for Photo Shop CS4, or PhotoShop Elements 7 at least. If you want later down the road I can give you a link to a place where you can get some great discounts on tons of Adobe products including PhotoShop and there is even one deal of theirs where they offer a tablet with PhotoShop CS4 extended. As for now I would still suggest the GIMP, and if you need help understanding what some of the tools do or anything just go to the tutorials thread, or just send me a message. A lot of the tools in there go by the same name as they do in PhotoShop,so you may even be able to get help through a PhotoShop tutorial on what they do.All I can say at this point though is good luck with it.
