Originally posted by Marc Sabatella I'd suggest continuing to browse these forums - the one on PP, and also the beginner's forum. There are dozens of existing threads with lots of great suggestions. I'm moving this thread to the beginner's forum.
I personally use ACDSee Pro, which is a lot cheaper than Photoshop, but more than Elements. It is kind of like Lightroom in that it combines image management with image processing. As Wheatfield says, these are not full featured editors like Photohop (or even Elements) in that you can't do things like cut portions out of one picture and paste them into another, nor do they have sophisticate tools for doing things like removing skin blemishes, or other "retouching" types of facilities. But a *lot* of photographers find they don't need those types of facilities, and find that Lightroom and ACDSee Pro and similar programs really can handle 99% of what they do - exposure and color adjustments, sharpening and noise reduction, cropping and rotation and distortion correction, etc.
Photoshop kinda moves your image editing ability to the next level. Some people can live without image editing, they take their card from the camera, stick it into a kiosk and 10 seconds later have a print they are happy with.
At some point they become educated to the fact that there is a whole 'nother world out there and they, and their photography grows up a bit.