Best Answer is Photoline, although it is little hard to get use to but if you are a professional user you get use to it within 2-3 days and they have great tutorial on their site.
I am also a graphic designer from India and Photoshop is too expensive somewhere around 1000USD or 50,000 India Rupees but photoline is Only 60USD or 3,000 India Rupees after using this software for around 1 month I found it can do all the work of photoshop and biggest thing is it support full CMYK and LAB color model and can export JPEG, TIFF in CMYK. One more thing it is very fast in opening of huge files It will take 5-8 Seconds for opening 150MB CMYK Tiff file (Dual Core + 4GB RAM, 64bit OS)
So give this a try
Now about your requirement
- Yes it is able to crop.
- JPEG Compression - Yes, and it can also save and open CMYK JPEG.
- You can work with layers.
- It can open PSD files with layers.
- Yes it can export PDF.
PRICE - Somewhere around 60USD and you can download a 30 day limitation free trial from their website www.pl32.com