Between my student discount and my father's discount (he gets software discounts since he's higher-up in a large company, I guess), I actually can buy software like photoshop since it's relatively cheap. I use photoshop (and quite a few other Adobe programs) so much that it is indeed worth the money for me.
I know some people can't afford it, or just don't want to pay for it, but still... they should just use paint.net, gimp, or some other free program.