I am new to FCP. I am importing stills and need to set image scaling preferences, set the grayscale, crop to 1800x1350x72, sharpen, save as Tiff and set my byte order. I realize that some of these can be done in iPhoto but not all. Is there a freeware or a less expensive alternative to Photoshop for these procedures?
Thanks

Check this out:

GIMP - for Mac OS X (http://www.gimp.org/macintosh/)

Adobe Photoshop Elements is also something to concider.

Adobe Photoshop Elements for Macintosh (http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopelmac/)

I'll second PhotoShop Elements. Have not used the latest Mac version, but previous ones had a surprisingly rich feature set and behaved pretty much the same as the full version. I just got a free copy of the Windows version when I bought an Epson printer. Have played with it a little, and it looks good too.

Has anyone used PhotoShop Elements 6 to accomplish what I outlined in my opening? Let me further explain that the purpose of the workflow is to include still pictures into a video and have the option of pan, zoom and other motion effects without creating Moire flickering or other artifacts.

Photoshop functionality without the price:

Pixelmator (http://www.pixelmator.com/)

Photoshop functionality without the price:

Pixelmator (http://www.pixelmator.com/)
I second that!

Photoshop functionality without the price:

Pixelmator (http://www.pixelmator.com/)

Wow, I never saw that one! Looks great. And only $60. Hard to beat.