Posts: 106
Thanks: 1215 in 15 Posts
9 Achievements
If you're looking to create skins you'll probably want TS4 Skininator (links and a detailed tutorial for how to use it are
here). For image editing software, personally I'm a fan of Clip Studio Paint, which has (imo) better brush options for painting than Photoshop, has a pay once option, and will generally cost you a lot less than any of Adobe's products. For free software you can try GIMP, which still has most of the functionality of Photoshop and usually works well for these kind of projects (and there are plugins for creating normals etc. which is why I have it).
Hopefully that's a decent starting point, good luck with the project!