Check out Krita, maybe its feature set will be enough for your use case.

Use GIMP, they are not that far behind in functionality. Image magick and FFMPEG are great for batch processing.

I never personally met anyone installing a non cracked version of photoshop in windows.

But if you definitely need photoshop (case: you are a real comercial designer/photographer)is best to get a Mac, you can get 5 years out of it if you tweak it a bit. I just find mac is going the wrong way just to make more money and that is the world we live in!

That's what you use VM for