Greetings program!
If you're just looking to recreate visual effects similar to what was seen in TRON, I recommend studying the film itself first.
If you don't yet have it, go out and get the 20th anniversary DVD edition of TRON. It's an excellent, digitally remastered, true to the original film quality version of the film. It also has some good behind the scenes special features that will explain a lot about the effects in the film and how they were accomplished back when it was in production.
I would say your best bet in recreating the visuals of TRON on a low budget would be to look around the net for some free image and video editing applications. If you look hard enough - they are out there, and some pretty good ones too.
If you can afford it, Adobe PhotoShop is a very powerful image editing application. You can easily recreate the glowing effects of TRON in PhotoShop. They also offer something similar for video called AfterEffects, which is like PhotoShop but for moving imagery. These two applications combined can allow you to do some really amazing effects like the TRON glow, and image compositing, and other cool things they did in the film TRON, and it's a LOT easier then what they had to do to accomplish it back in the day.
But if those apps are not available to you, you can get some cheaper applications that will allow you to do similar things.
Check this out:
http://fxhome.com/
They offer some pretty good FX and compositing tools and for a very affordable price. They're easy to learn and offer some cool features. I think there's a place on the site where you can also view the work of people who have used the tools available through this site.
Good luck in your visual effects endeavors. Be sure to post a link to your work if you do anything TRON like!