The short answer is, there’s lots that you can do with a scanned image. There isn’t a single thing that your two correspondents want to do that couldn’t be done with free software, and usually without any great degree of difficulty. The real question is, how do they learn how to do it?

Consider this analogy. Somebody comes to you with a pile of wood and says, “I want to make a chair out of this - is there a simple way to do it?” There is a simple way to make a chair, but you’ll have to learn how to use all the woodworking tools you need to make the chair. If you’re really lucky, someone might have made a chair-building machine, where you dump the wood in and get a chair out the other end. But any such specialized solution is likely to be expensive, difficult to use, and unlikely to produce exactly what you want. And you can find someone else to do it, but that makes you reliant on that person every time you want a chair made.

As nice as it would be to have a push-button solution for everything you want to do with a computer, it’s just not practical. If you want to work with maps, you have to learn what tools are appropriate for the job, and how to use them. And that means looking into books, websites, classes, etc., that cover these topics.

Illustrator CS2 has a marvellous ‘Live Trace’ feature which does a surprisingly good job of tracing vectors from bitmaps, so that you can edit them in a traditional vector format. Haven’t yet tried it with maps, though.

The best approach for me has always been a combination of both Photoshop AND Illustrator. Scan the map in to Photoshop. Do whatever raster editing work you need to do, save, and then pull it into Illustrator. You can use the File > Place command to pull it in, and then use CS2 (or Adobe Streamline, if you’re oldschool!) to vectorize it. Place the map on the bottom layer and work from there.

I’m not a graphic artist, but I do photo-retouching.

The requests seem like they are for simple editing (without looking at the maps they want to edit and hearing the specfic edits, I’m not making promises).

They can download GIMP 2 (it’s free and multi-platform) and do basic erasing and cut and pasting.

Editing the contour lines will probably be more involved, depending on specficially what the questioner intends. If they just want to replace the contour lines with solid colors, this is almost trivial. If they have some other goal, the process is more complicated. But if the former, just select the color desired (perhaps by using the eye-dropper or color sampler from a different part of the image) and then brushing that color onto the area desired. There are a vast number of tutorials for graphic arts processes. Most for photoshop, then a very large number for Paint Shop Pro (about $100, and as powerful as much more expensive software), and some for GIMP. But since GIMP can do pretty much all that the other programs can do, some careful reading and figuring out will let them apply the tutorial to other programs.

There are good ideas expressed in the answers so far, and here is my idea.
simple(ish) editing can be done with Irfanview. There are simple rotation and scaling features that are very intuitive.

It was not mentioned if Chris Ellison is using a PC or Mac. If he uses a Mac, then the simple choice is GraphicConverter.

I hope he can get the school to buy him a copy Adobe Creative Suite. Photoshop can do simple things but it has the power to match Chris’ abilities as he becomes more experienced with the tools.

Good luck Chris! Have fun!