high im new!

I've seen a couple of programs out there that are free but haven't tried them.  I'm gessing they are similar to ToonBoom but are kind of like gif creation types of apps.  Photoshop might be pretty good.  The CS3 has a buncha new stuff for animation, although I haven't seen onion skinning done decently from Adobe outside of Flash.  Painter is pretty good.

 luck

whole bit 

First off, I love the "High" part and not Hi lol, nice typo - I love it. Go to www.bauhaussoftware.com and get a demo of mirage, it's a great peice of software. Check it out.

check out PAP4

and Creatoon

and Bryce is free

and Truespace too

i personally like toon boom. they have a new personal learning edition for toon boom pro, and they also have tutorials to help you get used to the interface. it seems a bit complicated at first, but after watching the tutorials a few times it begins to make sense, and i think they way they have the onion skinning set up in it now is great, as well as being able to do almost 3d animation--if you want to take the time and do all the keyposing...but once all of the keyposes are done, you can use and reuse your character, scene, etc...its like 2 1/2d, you can do a complete 360 turn if you want to draw all those extra poses for it. so far the only drawback i have found to the personal learning edition of toonboom digital pro is the file size is restricted, but that is fine considering it is a learning tool....i'd check it out...closest you will get to a full animation studio without spending the money for the full version....