Lightscribe and Photoshop

So I couldn’t get my lightscribe drive to print labels. Couldn’t get it to burn faster than 4x either. The buzz on the web was that Lightscribe just won’t play nice with a 64-bit OS.

I’m here to tell ya, Lightscribe works just fine on Vista Ultimate 64. I’m pretty sure it still won’t burn faster than 4x (haven’t had occasion to test it yet), but at least I’m able to print labels now.

That being said, Lightscribe is pretty cool. I don’t say wicked awesome because it’s just pretty cool. Burning a DVD, flipping it over and using the same device to print the label is pretty cool. Doing it in color (lightscribe just burns grayscale: it’s the new wood-burning) would be wicked awesome.

So now that I’ve got that working, I pose to all ye a query. Anybody know of a free photoshop-like software so I can design cool monochrome labels without using my pixel editor (and without shelling out six hundred bones)? Don’t get me wrong. Every now and again I open up MSPaint and sexify all the characters from Final Fantasy, Super Mario Bros, Zelda, etc. But usually I want something that does all the work for me.

I think my Canon came with such a thing, but I can’t find the discs. Anybody got any ideas?