BleepingComputer.com: Anyone Using Serif Photoplus?

Hi all,

I learnt Photoshop sometimes ago and now I decided to use Serif PhotoPlus 6 (because it is free) to do some photos editing activities. The reviews said it is as good as PS 4 and after trying it for a while, I realised its features are quite enough for me. I'm not an artist or art people, basically I just need it to do some digital scrapbooking plus preparing some images for user manual kind of things. Now my problem is, how do I draw a square or circle border using PP6? I don't want it to be filled. I just want to have the border. Been trying to do it for 2 days, seaching the net plus read up the help file. I give up. I just want a simple square border.

Other than this, I welcome any suggestions of free photo editing software that can fulfill my needs such as:

Able to add layers
Able to add self-drawn lines or boxes
Have the Clone feature (always need this to touch up on my kids photos)
Able to draw arrows, or some simple symbols
Able to add texts
Able to save transparent GIFs images
Equipped with basic image adjusting options such as Blur, Sharpen, Rotate, Resize, Crop and etc

go back to photoshop, or try gimp, if you already know you way around photoshop you should be able to figure out gimp, eventualy, it has all the features you are looking for