Greetings, all you creative souls!

I have recently found myself deeply engrossed in the work of creating banners, taunts etc for my kingdom. Now im completely new to this, I have little to no creative skills and an even worse imagination. What I do have however, is too much time on my hands and stamina!

So im gonna ask the community for help in improving the banners I create:

What programs do you use, or would you use to create your own backgrounds. It does not have to be a free program, but it would help if we avoided the most expensive and complicated programs. Obviously these might be better, but remember that im a complete beginner :P

I often find myself using finished backgrounds cause, well lets face it, there are some awesome backgrounds out there. I do find myself wanna add text to the pictures tho. And then I often wanna add effects to that text. This is where I struggle to find a quality program :P Do you know of any decent programs where you can open a background, resize it and add effects/overlays and also add text and in addition have the ability to add effects to that text?

Share any knowledge, tips, guides, walkthroughs or anything you might have found useful in your path to creating awesome backgrounds.

Any advice or help will be greatly appreciated.