Is there any free alternative to this program? AND how effective is the "bump" it creates that primarily works in Blender? If no alternatives, is there any good tutorials for making bump/displacement/specular maps from diffuse? Say in Photoshop/PaintshopPro/Gimp etc.?

 try one of these

http://www.xnormal.net/

or
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?317041-Insane-Bump-2-0-overhauled-Crazy-bump-alternative&highlight=insane+bump

You can try NDO2. Quixel's old version of NDO. There's a new version which is part of the Quixel Suite (I use it now for texturing - it's brilliant) but the old NDO2, I believe, is available from them for free now.

Go here http://quixel.se/ndo and grab the NDO Legacy zip at the bottom of the page. 

Thanks guys I will look into these!

i second ndo using this at school...it's fabulous!!

You can try NDO2. Quixel's old version of NDO. There's a new version which is part of the Quixel Suite (I use it now for texturing - it's brilliant) but the old NDO2, I believe, is available from them for free now.

Go here http://quixel.se/ndo and grab the NDO Legacy zip at the bottom of the page. 

Free trial, not free - it wants an activation code. Also, I had to jump through severe compatibility hoops (it wants directx from 2005 that wouldn't install in Windows 8) and then it just crashed anyway. Piece of ancient crap. Don't waste your time.

One nice alternative to crazybump is AwesomeBump:

https://github.com/kmkolasinski/AwesomeBump

It's open source, GPU based (so it's fast) supports PBR and extracts all major maps with lots of control over the result. The only thing it doesn't do is high rez/low rez detail extraction but you can use xNormal for that.

Wow you guys rule! I'm going to have an adventure this week.

I use NormalMappr, works great. It's a free Mac application. Very simple but probably outdated now, that's OK... it does exactly what it's made to do.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/?thread_id=2749761

For those following this thread, having a great add-on for the Mac users is a real plus!  Thank you.

You can try NDO2. Quixel's old version of NDO. There's a new version which is part of the Quixel Suite (I use it now for texturing - it's brilliant) but the old NDO2, I believe, is available from them for free now.

Go here http://quixel.se/ndo and grab the NDO Legacy zip at the bottom of the page. 

Free trial, not free - it wants an activation code. Also, I had to jump through severe compatibility hoops (it wants directx from 2005 that wouldn't install in Windows 8) and then it just crashed anyway. Piece of ancient crap. Don't waste your time.

Sorry about that. They used to give it away for free (this was during the beta phase of the new suite).  Not sure why they'd still have it for download on the site if they're not still doing that. They don't sell NDO2 licenses anymore, so not sure what the point is there. Hmm.